Theybies: the newest term for parents who aim to raise gender-neutral children in the United States. The term is sweeping the nation as more parents embark on the journey of avoiding gender amorphousness. Instead of referring to their children as a baby “girl” or a baby “boy,” parents can now identify their child as a “theybie.”
“A theyby is, I think, different things to different people,” theyby dad Nate Sharpe told NBC News in a report published last week. “For us, it means raising our kids with gender-neutral pronouns — so, ‘they,’ ‘them,’ ‘their,’ rather than assigning ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘him,’ ‘her’ from birth based on their anatomy.”
The parents of theybies avoid revealing the biological sex of their children to anyone: family, friends or associates. They raise their children by educating them not to associate their sexual body parts with being a boy or a girl. “If no one knows a child’s sex, these parents theorize, the child can’t be pigeonholed into gender stereotypes,” NBC reports.
The Sharpes Chose to Raise Their Twins as Theybies Because They Don’t Agree With Gender Restrictions or Stereotypes
There’s only one problem: Reality.
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Sharpe’s 3-year-old twins Zyler and Kadyn are theybies, as Sharpe and his wife Julia want to raise their children with the right to choose whichever sex they feel they most identify with. The Sharpe’s told NBC that only the twins can decide what gender they are, and they will not impose any gender-restrictive stereotypes on their children.
The Sharpes told NBC that they decided to raise their children without designated genders after a mixture of research and personal experiences. Both Sharpes are engineers, and Julie told NBC that she “understood the constraints of gender expectations firsthand” while working in a male-dominated field.
Experts Say That Children Begin to Identify as “Masculine” or “Feminine” Around Age 4
A growing number of families have begun raising their children as ‘theybies’:
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“Their parents want to foster an environment of openness where the twins feel loved whether they grow up to identify as LGBTQ or not. That means learning to see their children simply as ‘kids’ rather than as ‘boys’ or ‘girls,’ and encouraging others to do the same,” NBC reports.
NBC further cited experts as saying that at birth, “reproductive organs reveal a baby’s assigned sex,” whereas gender “comes later, around age 4, when children begin to identify as masculine, feminine or somewhere along that spectrum.”
Cathy Areu, publisher of Catalina Magazine said Friday on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that she supports the rise of theybies. “It’s about allowing the baby to decide what gender that baby wants to be when that baby can decide, which is around four years old,” she said.
The Sharpes believe their twins will know their gender preferences by the time they reach elementary school. “No matter how they identify or what pronouns they prefer, their parents are ready to embrace their wishes.”