by Sazi Jali 

It is said that there is no manual to raise a child yet there has always been a culture of imposing heteronormative norms and ideas on children. Society is full of toxic and harmful notions about gender that are passed on to generations of children, such as hypermasculinity – which has led to high numbers of gender-based violence (GBV) and hate crimes. Many of these issues are linked to the heteronormative and hypermasculine cultures which in turn impact the children that grow up in these societies. 

I, and many of my peers who identify differently from the gender they were assigned at birth, have been robbed of the opportunity to access affirming information about our lived experience. We have also been denied the opportunity to learn certain life skills, that all children should be exposed to, because they do not align with how society perceives us, and this is due to being raised through a heteronormative lens. Growing up, we have been indoctrinated with the notion that a man shall do this, a womxn shall not sit like that, and basic life skills are assigned and taught to children according to a person’s assigned sex at birth, rather than shared responsibilities in a household.  

The gender binary is imposed on children before they are even born. Doctors assign babies a gender at birth, and they violate the human rights of intersex people and their families by performing harmful medical procedures on them, known as Intersex Genital Mutilation, to make their bodies conform to these binary social norms. The Department of Social Development’s immunization system requires parents to use immunisation cards that only accommodate two genders – blue if you have a child assigned male at birth and pink if you have a child assigned female at birth. My question is, what colour is the one for a child who is intersex??  

These are just some examples of the heteronormative parenting that is a norm and considered to be “the right way”, while they say, “there is no manual”. And yet they tell you what to do to raise a boy child or a girl child, but forget to understand that gender identity, sexual orientation, expression can be different from sexual characteristics. No parenting class or tool that is widely available speaks to this diversity. 

In 2021, I attended the SA EU Policy Dialogues on the ‘Rights of Transgender and Intersex Persons’, co-organised by Iranti, where representatives of the South African government came up with potential solutions to raising children in response to what Legal Gender Recognition (LGR) can look like in the country. The conclusion was: we should refrain from assigning gender markers to everyone at birth because this would promote raising a child without boxing them into the binary, and it would end the trend of raising children to conform to particular gender roles.  This will allow each child to determine their own gender expression and gender identity as an individual, not the parents, legal nor medical personnel.   

For many years, society has been implementing these heteronormative societal norms and because of this, transgender and gender non-conforming individuals have not been able to express themselves. This also shows that if we raise children without boxing them into the binary sexes they were assigned at birth, it won’t change their sexual orientation nor gender identity but rather give them an opportunity to express themselves, and it will contribute to ending heteronormative norms and promote self-determination. 

 In his book “Becoming Him”, Landa Mabenga writes about the oppression he has faced because of the heteronormative societal standard. “You are a girl, not a boy” – these were the words uttered to him when he expressed himself as his correct gender. Many do not survive those words.  

We must go back to the drawing board and reconsider the traditional ‘manual’ that is often used to raise children. We ought to change it in order to build a better generation of people who are empowered to determine and grow into their own identity and a world where social roles and life skills are not pre- determined because of one’s sex. Recognizing ourselves outside of binary sexes, will also go a long way towards ending the current inequality between men and womxn Gender should never be assigned or imposed by someone other than the person experiencing it, because only we know our true selves.