Just in time for Christmas, you can buy your three-year-old a book that teaches him that doctors “guessed” his gender when he was born!
For just $18.95, “Who Are You?: The Kid’s Guide to Gender Identity” will teach your kids ages three and up about how people “experience gender.” According to the book description, the book by Berkeley public school educator Brook Pessin-Whedbee will tell children “the difference between our body, how we express ourselves through our clothes and hobbies, and our gender identity.”
The available preview pages on Amazon claim, “The is a story about you. The important thing to remember is that you are the one who knows you best.”
“When babies are born, people ask... ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ Babies can’t talk, so grown-ups make a guess by looking at their bodies,” the book continues. “This is the sex assigned to you at birth, male or female. Sometimes people get this confused with gender, but gender is much more than the body you were born with.”
To help kids learn about different gender identities (which are different from sex and gender expression), the book includes a Gender Wheel and a guide for parents and educators to appropriately answer questions from children on the book they chose to express their ideology.
Under the “identity” section of the wheel, the wheel allows children to choose whether they’re “a boy,” “a girl,” or “both.” The “I have BODY” section allows children to say, “I have a body that made adults guess ‘girl.’” The website claims there are “so many possibilities!”
(Image source: kidsguidetogender.com)
According to the website for the book, the Gender Identity Wheel is incomplete because it has “just some of the many words we can use to describe ourselves—the list goes on and is constantly changing.” For those who have more opinions on gender, “there is also a blank space for your own words!”
The guide for parents comes with a way to address “some people” who state there are only two genders. The guide suggests discussing “believing people when they say who they are and calling them what they prefer to be called. People use all kinds of pronouns, like she/her/hers, he/him/his, they/them/theirs, ze/hir/hirs, and more. Sometimes, people prefer no pronoun at all. If you’re not sure what name or pronoun someone prefers, just ask!”
Yes, the book expects a young toddler to ask people for their pronouns and if they want to go by “ze.”
The website for the book includes a testimonial from an eight-year-old, Moss, who says, “Everyone should read it! They’ll feel good about themselves and be nice to other people.”
Teachers are apparently fawning over the book as well, according to reviews on the kidsguidetogender website:
This isn’t the first book geared towards children to address gender identities. The audience for gender-related books appears to be getting younger and younger. Last year, “The Gender Fairy” came out to teach four-year-olds about choosing their own genders.