Ari Dennis

   Raising Them is an amazing memoir by Kyl Meyers does an impeccable job of demystifying gender-creative parenting. Rather than share only academic truth or facts Kyl Mers is vulnerable and honest. They open up to the reader about the mental and emotional process they went through deciding to not assign Zoomer a gender. Kyl takes the time to share with the reader their own childhood experiences. They share the influences that made them who they are. Traveling through their history helps set the context of their parenting choices; it also humanizes Kyl and the gender-creative parenting community. Raising Them is full of stories from Zoomer's babyhood and toddlerhood. From the art of navigating peers and parents at daycare to the intentional exposure to diverse community, Kyl Myers gives real-world examples of how one family navigates gender-creative parenting in the day-to-day. Raising Them shows perfectly the universal search for doing well by our children that all parents share.

  Going to the ER because your baby has a 104° fever is enough to worry about on its own. When you have a child without an assigned sex medical situations become even more stressful. Doctor's offices are some of the most strenuous  places for a gender-open parent due to aggressive gender assumptions involved needlessly in multiple steps of the process. When we first checked in at the ER the woman behind the desk asked us Sparrow's name and birthday. We answered. She then asked, "Boy or girl?" We stared at her for a moment, then she said insistently, "Is the baby a boy or a girl?" We looked at each other confused, then replied, "the baby doesn't have a gender." The woman began to raise her voice. She aggressively repeated her question over-and-over. She never made further clarifications or rephrased. I sputtered out different attempts to answer. I clarified that the baby did not have a gender marker on their birth certificate. I provided the ins