(They’re good people, eventually)

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It was almost 4am, and the maternity ward waiting room at Boston’s No Saints Allowed Hospital was empty, save for one stereotypically-pacing adult male. Andro Skrope pecked distractedly at a smart phone while waiting for the relationship’s spousal cohabitant to deliver their twins.

Awkward sentence structures, I know. “…while he waited for his wife…” would’ve been much clearer and more succinct. But you see, Andro and Martellin Skrope have officially rejected gender classifications, including the use of really handy pronouns like ‘he’ and ‘she,’ and ‘his’ and ‘her,’ and ‘sane’ and ‘reasonable.’

In fact, not only have these two soon-to-be orthodontist funders decided not to ask the sex of the fetuses; they’ve decided not to tell any of their hip friends the sex of the twins after the twins are born. Not for years. No, really. Andro and Martellin have managed to convince themselves that the hippest thing they can do as new, post-progressive parents is to ignore 300,000 years of biology. For example, the Skropes have elected not call Twin One a boy, even though he’s born with all the expected boy parts, like skinned knees, and a tendency to giggle over intestinal gas.

Suddenly, the doors leading to Labor & Delivery whoosh open, and an OB-GYN wearing a scrub gown over tennis togs bolts into the waiting room.

“Congratulations, Mr. or Mrs. Skrope, whichever you prefer, though we won’t judge you in the least for your evolving decision. It’s a they!”

For the first time in hours, Andro can breathe normally. He whips out his smart phone, scrolls to a pre-typed text message, and tweets the news to the world:

Good news lol. Martellin has given birth to two healthy theybies! We’ve gonna name them Zykor and Rydlin, assuming the children approve of us naming them without consulting them first. Needless to say, we’re ecstatic, in a measured, highly-enlightened sort of way lol. Now go plant a whale and kiss a tree!!!!!!!

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Goodbye, babies. Hello, theybies.

When it comes to gender, a small but growing segment of Americans are evolving beyond the binary choice that has served mankind since, well, since that discovery about J. Edgar Hoover. Boy and girl are now bad words. Limiting. Slavish. Pigeon-holing. Not to mention the financial hit this will lay on those companies that manufacture “It’s a boy!” cigars for new Dads to hand out at office poker games, even though everybody’s dead because they still smoke.

Get used to it. He and she are right out. Going forward, the politically correct gender-neutral pronoun for your toddler is they. Andro and Martellin, and their very hip friends, intend to let the children decide what gender they want to be. Experts (insert your own joke here) claim that the children will decide what gender’s best for them at around age four, and the experts say this with a straight face.

Please. When I was four, the pinnacle of my intellectual reasoning revolved around firing back metaphysical debating points like, “I know you are, but what am I?” I vividly remember the day I learned to inject a judicial pause between when my cheese toast came out of the oven and when I shoved it into my non-asbestos-protected mouth.

If my parents had counted on me to pick a gender at age four, it would’ve played out something like this.

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Mother: Happy Fourth Birthday, Barry!
Me: My brother hit me and he’s lying.
Mother: Barry, are you ready to pick a gender?
Me: Uh huh.
Mother: What gender do you want to be, they-thing?
Me: A pirate.
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Look, we all know that boys and girls are different. For untold millennia, boys have displayed the innate habit of uttering unbelievably stupid stuff. And centuries of literature tell us that girls are made of sugar and spice, and everything nice, plus, they possess the uncanny ability to never, ever, ever forget any of the stupid stuff guys say.

I once read about a tribe, somewhere in the South Pacific, who have an interesting tradition for newborns. For the first full year of the child’s life, they’re carried…toted…the child is not allowed to touch the Earth. Maybe it’s some obscure “farm income” accounting ploy for tax purposes. But at least the village elders went ahead and let the poor kid know whether to use the “hunter” or the “gatherer” public bathroom at Mango World.

But not Andro and Martellin. (By the way…yes, I made up their names, but not much. You should see the original article.) No, the uber-hip Skropes intend to let little Zykor and Rydlin self-psychoanalyze (at four years old) and decide if, decades from now in divorce court, they want to be the plaintiff or the defendant.

Of course, by then Judge Judy could be transitioning to Judge Joe.

Let’s hope they don’t tape that.