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I agree Ibby. It oversimplifies something incredibly complex and individual.
I can see what they were trying. Brave move, but a risk. There are definite differences in the way people treat male and female babies in general. Right down to how they are held (boy babies tend to be held facing outwards, girl babies facing inwards, i think i have that the right way around :P) and there is a good amount of evidence to suggest that it is this difference in how babies experience the world from the start that leads to gender distinct brain development in some areas.
That said: first off, no matter how much they try to keep it a secret, they cannot keep it secret from themselves. The parents are as much a product of their environment as anybody else, and will almost certainly have acted differently in subtle ways around the girl and boy babies. They may not realise it, they may be consciously treating them alike; but unless they are 100% conscious and aware of every verbal and non-verbal cue they give off, they will have given gender clues along the way.
It's a nice idea, that we could somehow remove the social constructs of gender entirely from a child's development and allow them to form their own anew. But the reality is that we live in a gendered world. And we seek gender confirmations from our parents, siblings and peers. Little girls want to know what big girls are supposed to do, and little boys want to know what big boys are supposed to do. Whether the child then feels that relates to them is another question entirely. But they need to know.
And as Ibs points out: gender is more complex than a simple set of male and female binary poles. Kids growing up intersex face confusion and a kind of hostility towards their uncertainty is woven into the fabric of our culture. Anything that eases that confusion and allows them to find themselves without the negative connotations society would place on them if it could, is a good thing. But actually instituting gender confusion and ambiguity in your child's life seems cruel to me.
The truth is, despite the evidence I spoke of for the elasticity of 'brain gender' at the start of life, and the likely impact of culturally agreed gender norms on brain development, we don't fully know. This sort of thing can only be experimental. We have no way to kmnow for sure that we haven;t been barking up the wrong tree for the past 30 years of neuro-science when it comes to gender. For the very simple reason that it is all but impossible to test.
These kids weren't raised in a vacuum. The rest of the world exists and they interacted with it. Even if the people they interacted with weren't told the kids' gender. Even if that gender was disguised. The other people in the equation have a gendered understanding of the world and will have arbitrarily assigned a gender to the child in question and interacted according to how they would with a child of that gender. Even if they, like the parents, made a concerted effort not to. This stuff happens at too deep and fundamental level to just think it away like that.
I'm sure they had very laudable reasons, but it seems far too much of a child-development experiment to me.
To me, a better idea is to just not foist too much social baggage onto concepts of gender and make a conscious effort to minimise the extent to which interaction is gendered.
I was raised with clear notions of gender. But those clear notions allowed for girls to play with guns and boys to dress up the family dog.
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