The truth about Sasha, the ‘gender-neutral’ five-year-old

Here's what I'm telling everyone now I've had a chance to write something down:

The truth about Sasha, the ‘gender-neutral’ five-year-old

When Sasha was born, we'd asked the midwives not to tell us whether the baby was a boy or a girl. For about half an hour, we just held the baby and got to know it. When we announced Sasha's birth by email to all our friends, we just said "It's a baby!"

I tried not saying what sex Sasha was when I went to local postnatal classes, but quickly realised that people only ask because they're trying to be nice and because there's nothing else you can ask about a baby except its weight. Sasha had been a November baby and as soon as the weather got warm enough was frolicking around the garden with no clothes on anyway. So everyone in our village who knows us knows what sex Sasha is.

But I did write a blog about my experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and parenting (and lots of other things). Because I am a writer and editor by trade, with accessibility as a key criterion, and because writing non-sexist language is part of making copy accessible, I decided to see if it was possible to write about Sasha without using sex-specific terms. To date, I have never revealed Sasha's sex online, in my blog. Some people have got the Internet muddled up with Real Life.

We can't think of any way we could have "brought up little Sasha as gender-neutral" - what would that mean? What we have done is try to give our child a gender-rich environment, with toys some people might say are girls' toys alongside those they might call boy's toys. We've also tried to make sure that dolls, for example, have different skin tones so Sasha doesn't think the world is white (Nana (grandmother) being Anglo-Indian probably helps with that too!). Kieran has a son and daughter from a previous relationship who live with us some of the time, and we have a dressing-up basket with magic wands and cutlasses, capes and and shawls, fairy wings and tiger suits, and tutus for everyone.

We also try not to assume that Sasha will be just like us, so we try not to assume that our child will be musical (as we are) or will go to university (as we did) - we don't want to set expectations that Sash might not be able to fulfil.

All we're doing is what most parents do - trying to do our very best for our child.

Beck and A

Is your child musical? Is mine?

Gosh, it's all happening today. I got my flute out a while ago meaning to see if I could still produce any sound at all, and while we were waiting for cakes to bake (a subconscious impulse as I'd completely forgotten that I need them for I Fagiolini tomorrow!) Anyway, there's a tuning fork in the case and Sasha was playing with it, so I played an A and asked if Sash could sing it. Sash didn't want to. (I wonder if the pitch was too high? When we were singing this morning, I was asking for higher notes but Sash seemed only able to use chest voice.)

Anyway, then I played an A on the flute, asked Sasha which note was higher and which lower, thinking as I did that I've never had a very acute ear and I couldn't actually tell myself. But small confident person said without hesitation "That one", pointing to either the flute or the fork, I can't remember which - anyway we tried a few more times and Sash did the same each time, giving the answer as though it was *really* easy. And you'll have spotted, of course, that I had no way of I telling whether the answers were right or wrong as I didn't know! When I went from zero to grade eight flute in eighteen months in 1979 to 1981, tuning it was the only bit I was rubbish at. You can imagine what my violin playing sounded like.

Anyway, it's a funny little miniature tuning fork I bought in Switzerland, and Sash was having trouble getting it to sound, so I went and got the full-size one. That was bought in the same shop, and I'd always wondered whether the titchy one might be a bit gimmicky and not actually in tune, so I sounded them both at once and asked Sash which was higher and which was lower. And lo... Sash said something about silly mummies - "They're both the same sound."

Then pointing at the smaller one - "I can't hear that one." I think that meant the two notes were so blended you couldn't tell the difference. So maybe that interference thingy you're meant to be able to hear when two notes are different (and that's the thing I've never been able to hear, so no wonder I can sing so flat without noticing) wasn't there and so there was no way of distinguishing the two sounds.

I'd love to hear what other musicians think. Have you tried this on your kids? Have you found any other fun things to try?

Oh, and the other big question: now that we know (unless that's changed?) that it's caused by early proximity to a keyboard instrument and isn't inherent, are you going to make an effort to give your child, or an effort to not give your child, perfect pitch?

Magazine in a muddle

Well, that seemed to go well. Celia Back was very nice though of course, like policemen, she was much younger than I expected. (Which only really means that I'm much older than I expected. Golly, I *love* being middle-aged and confident and clever - I must tell you later about explaining the physics of frost and snow to Sasha this morning on the way to school.) It really helped being an ex-journalist and an amateur magazine editor now: when she said things like "So, did Sasha ever go round with a [can't tell you what the anti-stereotype toy is or I'll give away whether Sash is a boy or a girl which though known elsewhere is still a secret on this blog]?" I was able to say "No, I'm afraid not - ooh! But we did once have a great game with something else..." and know why she'd asked, because she needed some strong things to build the story around, and what might do instead. I hope. She seemed very interested in the principles behind it all, and that was very encouraging.

So now I'm off to the supermarket to buy a magazine to see what that column is about and check what Woman is actually like these days. (That really is them, btw - very strange URL but I suppose the obvious one was always going to have been taken.) Now and again I pull a Good Housekeeping or YOU or Elle magazine out of a skip (or someone else's recycling - is that a social faux pas? It's much more meaningful recycling than having them pulped and made into new magazines) and have a look to see what nonsense is being peddled to my sisters. Things have got a lot worse, though possibly still not as bad as the copy of US Cosmo that Mike brought back from a visit to the States for me in the early 1990s. The message of that was "You're a strong smart glamorous working woman who needs to buy buy buy a lot of make-up and perfume and things to stop you smelling nasty because you feel so utterly shit about yourself". Let's see whether Woman has got it a bit better than that.

My life in magazines

So, I'm pretty excited that I'm going to be talking to Woman magazine at midday - I might nip down to Budgens and buy a copy so I can check that they're with the good guys: their journalist certainly sounds nice but as I keep telling Sasha, you can't always tell the ones that are EVIL just by their spooky red eyes.

One of A's many endearing characteristics when he first moved in with me was that he'd often turn up carrying a copy of Woman that he'd bought to read on the train. Loved that he as secure enough in his own skin not to feel he had to mind other people's daft stereotypes or prejudices. That's what both of us want for our children.

I was thinking about how you can map your life through magazines. I was born in 1965, so mine went   something like...

Pippin... Bunty... Jackie...  Punch... Cosmopolitan... Spare Rib... The Socialist Standard....

the I went to Cambridge and even the Alternative bookshop in Gwydir Street didn't get the SS. I expect I just read Stop Press, which had been Varsity and later switched back.... Punch was an odd one - my dad bought me a subscription as birthday presents, in my early teens, I think. I started by reading quite a lot of it, but by the end it was just the cartoons and that Hunter Davies column called 'Father's Day' which must have been quite groundbreaking at the time.

Then I subscribed to Private Eye for years until I realised it was actually making me a bit depressed. Oh lord - just remembered I moved to Sawston and subscribed to Country Living. I'd forgotten the incidental ones. I subscribed to Uncut for ages but never got round to reading it - oh, and I read Q for a while because I worked in music magazines. And I used to look out for launch issues - I still have the pile upstairs if anyone would like them for posterity. Does anyone remember Minx magazine? It was really, really, good - got the content and the tone spot on: sensible info given in a cheeky tone.

My first magazine job was on Home & Studio Recording, whose wonderful editor Dan Goldstein taught me everything I know about compound hyphenation. Then a great time with Sam Molineaux (now called Graham, tut tut) on Keyboard Review, her editor and me production editor then deputy editor. I did some great interviews - bought a floppy disk reader specially to upload them here but it's still the box five years later.... When Music Maker got taken over by Future I got made redundant and spent rather a sad year as a sub on Sound on Sound, out in the wasteland that was Bar Hill then. Then I got made redundant from there... I'll have to check my professional blog... Oh, I'd forgotten my first job, on BBC English magazine in Saffron Walden. I Facebooked about the horrors of superscripted ordinals and Microsoft's hideous predilection for them recently and an old colleague from there, Donna Sharp, found me, which was lovely. That lasted three months, mostly spent struggling with Ventura, a user-hostile early DTP programme - just as I was getting the hang of the bloody thing the bailiffs arrived to tell us the company had gone bankrupt. So I got made - no! the suspense! - redundant.

After Sound on Sound I moved back into information design. Applied for dozens of magazine jobs but just didn't get anywhere - I remember going to Hanover house for a sub job on House and Garden, and meeting some Voguey girl in the lift who was wearing a miniskirt and black tights who looked me up and down, and I knew I wasn't going to get it. Then the editor said she was working on an anniversary issue and someone had mentioned that the magazine was in a song - had I ever heard of it? I was so gobsmacked that she didn't know the Flanders & Swann number (on YouTube at 6.00 in) that I expect it may have shown. I was right, didn't get near it. Which magazine, that was a bugger - hours and hours of research, interviews and writing tests, it was more work than a bloody O level, then I got a standard rejection letter that didn't even get the facts right – "We regret that you have not been selected for interview" – oh do you, best hold those tears just for a moment; and they appointed an internal candidate so that was a week of my life wasted. I think it was after that I just gave up. I got a job as a freelance sub on Internet magazine, which was fun, then as freelance production ed on some business telecomms titles whose names were so odd I can't even remember them - bet there are copies in the attic. But the staff were lovely - always have been, everywhere I've worked. Do people who care about words by definition care about people?

Boys and girls and Lego and Barbie

Great to see the Lego magazine debacle provoking so much comment - and so much of it witty and well argued: I feel no real need to contribute anything more than this.

Our three (11, 9 and 5, mixed sexes) were playing some kind of mash-up of Star Wars, Ninjago, Pirates of the Caribbean and Creator which often seems to involve everyone being in a classroom where the teacher keeps swearing but this is represented by saying "BLEEP!". Anyway, the catchphrase for this is uttered in a sort of sinister slightly lecherous tone and goes:

"Hi... I'm Anakin Deweddawend... Nice to [sniff] *smell* you..."

The sniff is a real sniff and you have to sniff the other person at that point - Sasha tells me. I'm not sure whether it's a skit on the fact that I like to take deep breaths inhaling Sasha's scent (back of the neck is lovely) - Sash has got used to it but we're all rightly treating it as a bit of parental eccentricity - or just a fart joke.

The older kids are one of each sex and so got both copies of the magazine and saw immediately what had happened. I'm told there were shrieks of outrage. In our house there are all sorts of toys for all sorts of children to play with. (Barbie is banned, but when someone brought back a few from a jumble sale recently, I didn't make much fuss. The eldest used to make a big thing of chasing me with a pretend Barbie -"Grrr.... I've got a Barbie! Beck doesn't like Barbie! Watch out, Beck, here comes Barbie!" which was a cute way of subverting the whole thing. With not much encouragement, the kids are extremely good at subverting such things as dubious marketing tropes, and songs you get taught at Sunday School.) In fact, I'm being interviewed for Woman magazine tomorrow about it all, and it sounds as though they've got a positive and sensible take on things, so fingers crossed that we can make some progress here! (And that I do make it into print.)

On that subject, I've also been interviewed by Emma Higginbotham for the Cambridge News about that thing I did of not telling anyone whether Sasha was a boy or a girl - and I completely forgot to tell her about this blog, where I tried to go on writing about Sash without ever mentioning it - a good chance to combine my political views with my writing and editing principles, which have always included gender-free writing. (The only time anyone has ever been annoyed was over my use of 'Chair' rather than Chairman or Chairwoman in Sawston Scene, but I've had some good discussions over the years.) This will be a feature but not online, so I'll post here when I know which issue it will be in - Emma reckons Thursday or Friday this week. Though I've just realised that this blog never revealed the secret, but if I say any more about the article it will, so I'll stop there. They should have some nice stereotype-subverting photographs of Sash and me too! (One thing that doesn't seem to have changed is that nobody's has expressed any interest in talking to Sasha's father - the kind of thing we were trying to fix at the Fatherhood Institute, where I worked for a year (before being made redundant, to continue that them! My sixth and most recent time.)_ And yes, as their web editor I did try to persuade them that you can't update a website once a month. Let me know (becklaxton, the at sign, gmail, a dot, com) if they say anything about this - I would so love them to run with it.

Peter Grimes as a paedophile

So I imagine you can tell that I've finally had a hiatus in the hurly-burly. I've properly started my new job, and the flipside is that I finally feel that I've got some real time off. I'm still learning the music for tomorrow's concert, but hey. The new I Fagiolini website is almost there, I'm done with NCT projects (wish I'd seen my Baby Show banners - I've never designed anything two metres wide before!), and at this very moment I can't remember anything else I'm meant to be doing.

So, then. I went to see Peter Grimes at English National Opera back in May - May! Good grief. There's a good review of it here to refresh your memory. My memories are that the sets were very ugly and some of the costumes ludicrous - Auntie and the nieces came off particularly badly - but that the music was just sublime (and at least First Niece was allowed to be standing when she sang her top C). There were moments in the score I'd never heard before, and my favourite parts - 'Mister Hobson, where's your cart? I'm ready'; 'What harbour shelters peace?'; 'Who can turn skies back and begin again?' - made me cry in a way that opera very rarely does (I'm normally dry-eyed while darling A sobs next to me). However, this is all digression as the point of this post was to discuss what seemed to be a throw-away remark by the director, David Alden, in his programme notes. He was discussing Grimes's character, and how dark he can be painted, I think.

"I'd like to see a production where he's played as a straight paedophile," he said (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "though I wouldn't want to direct it." And my question is - what the heck is he talking about? Is there some weird operatic convention that Grimes a paedeophilic? Because I can't see any evidence in the libretto or the action. As I understand it, paedophilia means literally 'liking for children' and is used to mean that you have a specifically sexual interest in them. It's not a term to bandy around lightly.

Firstly, then, I think you'd have to push it to show that Grimes is interested in sex at all. It's a rare production that shows him any closer to Ellen than the touch of hands that's required by the libretto. I should think even a clumsy hug might be pushing it. When Grimes sings about her, he focuses on the respectability that she's going to bring him. That's his goal: social acceptance. In this production I really noticed that passion with which he sings about money. When he dreams about fishing the seas dry, it's so that he can earn money, always money. "They listen to money, only to money!" so money can silence the gossip, he fantasises. I reckon a sexual analysis would get less out of all this than a Marxist one.

Secondly, you'd have to show that Grimes is interested in children, and there again I think you'd be struggling. His whole problem is that he's using the apprentices as orphans because they're cheap - money again - without considering that they're children. He's blind to their physical needs, continually demanding too much of them, refusing time off.

Yes, he's abusive - he's violent, he shouts, he pushes them around - but that has nothing to do with paedophilia that I can see, except for being another kind of child abuse. He's rough and unthinking. He seems in fact to be someone who's almost abnormally uninterested in children. He just wants to get the job done. He's a workaholic, if you like.

The use of the term seemed to me careless. And this isn't something to be careless about. I suspect the term is often bandied around when Britten is discussed, partly because there's an equally careless association of paedophilia with homosexuality which so far as I can see has no justification at all (if male homosexuals fancy little boys, shouldn't male heterosexuals fancy little girls?). There's an interesting flipside to the current paranoia about paedophilia, I think. If anyone (well, anyone male) who wants to be with children must be showing they have an unhealthy sexual interest in them, isn't that asking why on earth anyone would be interested in children otherwise? Isn't that saying there's nothing interesting about children? Do we really believe that?

How to be a freelance writer for the web

A work colleague asked if I'd help out a friend of hers who's looking for work as a freelance writer but hasn't been getting anywhere. She's got experience of writing for television, but that's all. I was trying to analyse what's worked for me, although my working life has now been so long and complicated that I'm not sure I'm a good eaxmple. But here's what I said - I'd be interested to hear your feedback, especially if you're a writer yourself (Ruth, Phil, Clare; Iona, Nadia?).

I think there a few things to consider. You need to demonstrate your ability; make sure you have the core skills; develop specialities; make professional connections; give it time; and keep your standards high.

One is simply how you show that you're any good. Do you have samples of work? Can you point to a website and say what bits you wrote? Have you got your own site? I set myself up with WordPress and it was dead easy and got into search rankings very quickly. (By the way, how are you at search optimisation for copy? Do you know your stuff there? You will need to.) It's here becklaxton.wordpress.com if you want to look - I didn't really get it finished, but got a few pieces of work up there.

Can you get involved in any projects that would give you a chance to show off? Again, I've done two quick and easy sites for friends; I can't code at all so used iWeb on the Mac. They're not great examples, as they wrote their copy and I just edited it, but I did help them work out what they wanted to say, and can be a part of the job too. These are robertrice.co.uk and tangotechnique.com.

And I also run a music festival and wrote the site for that:sawstonmusicfestival.co.uk - an interesting example (argh, it's so out of date) as it has lots of complicated info that needs to be put in sensible order: every concert has to have a time, a place, tickets prices, contact details. This is more about information design - is that an area you're interested in? Do you think you're better at writing instructional copy, or marketing material? Can you think of snappy headlines for banners? I think it's probably about defining your strengths, but also knowing the basics - search optimisation, or SEO, is vital, as is knowing how online copy is different from printed copy: have you read Jakob Nielsen? Steve Krug?

Think about subjects you know about, and companies who might need people to write about them. For example, I've done lots of stuff for financial services, and sometimes if I've applied for an ISA online or something similar, if there's a space to comment I'll tell the company how bad the copy was - if I was looking for work I'd take that further.

The other thing is to make connections. Use Facebook and tell all your friends what kind of work you're looking for. And join LinkedIn and fill in all your details there too. There are lots of people advertising work there. You could try signing up for mailing lists too - both lists of online writers and editors, and mailing lists of job vacancies. Researching all this is part of the kind of thing that writers often have to do - you'll often just get a bare description, say for a Microsoft site, and have to go and dig out enough info to be able to say something meaningful, so you need to be good at finding stuff online.

My other advice is to give it a bit of time. I got made redundant in March, did all the things I've described, and got my first freelance work though an ex-colleague in July. There's a definite timelag.

Lastly, I'd say, be really scrupulous all the time. All the writers and editors I know have hugely high standards, and I think freelances have to be really professional. Typos in emails - even just emails to someone like me - will be a real turn-off. (NOTE that this was of course a dangerous thing to say, as naturally there was a typo in my email to her - though of course she wasn't a potential referee or employer...) As a writer you're on duty all the time. For example, I went back and changed my first sentence to make it a summary of the content here, as it's such a long email. If I was really keen, I'd put in subheadings. You've got to show you know what you're doing.

Oh, and just a usability thing - it would be better to have an email address that matches your name, so if someone wants you they can find you really easily. Yours is a lot to type!

That was it. Having written it, I'm struck by how specialised online copy-writing has got - you need to know quite a lot about how websites work to write really good copy. In fact, I'm now working with a group of people who are immensely articulate and literate, but their writing is absolutely 'offline': copy for emails that runs to two or three pages. Not that brevity is *my* strong point, I hasten to add. But then I am writing this for fun. So there!