NBC published this video report yesterday about a family in Cambridge, Massachusetts which has decided to raise their 3-year-old twins as “theybies.” That’s a thing, apparently, albeit with a relatively small number of people thus far. The idea is to raise kids without ever referring to them as boys or girls, he or her, or any other binary gender language.

NBC reports only a few hundred parents nationwide are taking this path at present. Even if it’s really a few thousand, that not very significant in the scheme of things. As someone who believes there are innate differences between boys and girls, I can easily imagine both of these kids growing out of this phase on their own, if they’re allowed to do so by their obviously far-left parents.

It does worry me a bit that these parents plan to tell their kids that gender is fluid rather than to tell them that there’s more than one way to be a boy or a girl. Wouldn’t it make more sense to raise boys as boys and then try to avoid some of the stereotypes you think are harmful, i.e. telling them boys never cry?

So, for instance, I wouldn’t start discussing race with my three-year-old because it shouldn’t matter, but if he asks, I’d tell him he’s Caucasian or white and some people are different and that’s all good. I would not tell him race is fluid and that he can be whatever race he feels like he wants to be from year to year.

I’m also not sure it’s a great idea to tell kids gender is fluid at age six when you know 99.9% of the world doesn’t see it that way. Do kids in their elementary school have to call them “they” too? What if the parents of those other kids feel differently about the whole premise behind this? Refusing to assign these kids a gender may be protecting them in some small sense from stereotypes now, but it’s also inviting a lot of additional difficulties that most kids won’t face. It also denies the possibility that there might be some positive aspects of having a gender identity before you become an adult.

As strange as this parental approach seems to me, it also strikes me as inevitable. If you believe, and most people on the left already do, that gender is culturally constructed and that it has nothing necessarily to do with your sex at birth, then what matters is how you feel. It’s the logic of transgenderism applied to toddlers.