14 DAY TRIAL // Cases of parents who choose to raise their child as “gender neutral” are not few. Beck Laxton and Kieran Cooper are among the first couples in the UK to do so, having just recently unveiled that Sasha is actually a boy.
The revelation was made just a few days ago, as Sasha went to school and they could no longer refer to him as “gender neutral.”
However, in a video Miss Laxton posted online (and which you can see here in its entirety), she plans to convince critics that her unconventional method of child rearing is actually good.
The video is actually a discussion between mother and son on how the differences between boys and girls are “so silly.”
Miss Laxton is also pushing Sasha to speak up on stereotypes on the kind of colors one or the other should wear. It's clear that the boy believes it's stupid if only girls are allowed to wear pink.
“What do people sometimes say to you about colors?” Miss Laxton asks Sasha in the 90-second video.
“Pink and yellow are girls’ colors and blue and green are boys’ colors. I think that is really silly!” the boy replies grinning.
“What about dressing up in a tutu and being a fairy? Do you remember when you did that for Christmas and I sent it on the Christmas cards because you looked so beautiful?” his mom further asks.
“Do you think people would think that boys are meant to do that or girls are meant to do that?” she adds.
“Girls were. I think that is so silly,” the 5-year-old child replies.
While Laxton and Cooper insist Sasha is “gender neutral” only in the sense that he's allowed to wear whatever clothes he wants and play with whatever toys he fancies, experts point out to the disastrous effects of basically turning your child into a live experiment.
“Children aren’t experiments. Early child development is about finding an identity. Knowing and promoting whether you are a girl or a boy helps with forming one’s self-identity,” Lucie Russell of Young Minds mental health charity tells the Daily Mail.