I agree that one cannot stop anyone else from having expectations.
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That’s probably not an accident. If children weren’t assigned a gender identity at birth, they would be able to choose more freely.
I’ve not suggested that parents be made to do anything. I only pointed out that if parents make the choice for children, it’s that much more of an uphill battle for a child to understand themselves and change other people’s opinions.
Parents are also allowed to not have expectations around gender, and by not pushing their children into box a or box b from birth, they are demonstrating that social pressures are just that, and neither permanent or compulsory.
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Fair enough.
This is interesting to me, because it’s another illustration of how much gender identity is impressed onto children. That a parent isn’t just excited to have a baby, but rather a boy or a girl. What does it mean to have a boy or a girl, and what are parents hoping to experience in having either one? Would they feel dissapointment if their child couldn’t give them those experiences? Would that have an effect on the child’s understanding of themselves?
No need to answer of course, it’s just that nothing exists in a vacuum, including “gender reveal” parties. 
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Asserting a “right” to have gender expectations is easy, but it’s also easy to demonstrate that it makes no practical difference, as well as that there is a risk of your kid(s) socializing to conform to the label that you have decided is needed.
When people asked me if mine were “a boy or a girl”, my response was typically to happily ask “What difference does it make?”. People reacted with outright horror that they might have so much invested in such baggage for no especially good reason. IMO it’s no better than deciding that the kid is going to be Lutheran, or a surgeon, or any number of other things that aren’t anybody’s business to decide for them.
I can tell you that I sort of hoped for another girl for my second child (because the first one was fantastic), but the moment he turned out to be a little boy that feeling vanished and I just wanted this one. The friends I mentioned with the 3 boys and one baby girl love all their boys just the same, even though they had really hoped for a girl with the 3d. Otoh there are parents ‘disappointed’ in their children for one reason or another and it’s nearly always a tragic situation for the child.
We try to raise our children quite gender neutral (as in I try not to force them one way or the other, but I also not try to prevent them from going one way or the other). But oh boy is there a difference. Not that the girl wanted to play with dolls and the boy wanted to play with cars, they both like both (and both are completely bored with dollhouses), but where my daughter likes every toy about the same, my son (who is only 3 years old now) loves trains and lego with a furious passion and talks of nothing else all day. My daughter went through a dinosaur phase (like all children in her school) but wasn’t nearly as obsessed about it. They boy regularly comes to school in ‘girls’ clothes (because he wears the stuff my daughter has grown out of when he likes it) and with pigtails on his head (because he wants to be the same as his elder sister) and still hardly ever gets mistaken for a girl by anybody looking longer than 5 minutes.
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And my answer would be “None, and which is it?”. Unless I had the feeling the subject was somehow touchy for you, then I wouldn’t ask any further of course 
Maybe the question is more socially meaningful where you’re from? In holland (well, in the leftist liberal parts of holland I live in) ‘Is it a boy or a girl’ has about the same weight as asking about the colour of the eyes (not completely true of course, because people tend to prefer having children of both sexes, whereas the eye colour is mostly unimportant to many people. But still it’s not really an important question, just making conversation.)
They sound like delightful happy children, well done.
As I was reading what you wrote about them it struck me that none of the diffrences seemed to be connected to their sex or gender, but instead to their wonderful, unique personalities- which is the case with all children, no matter their sex.
When children have real freedom and exposure around all things and experiences with the baggage of what group a or b “does”, the more likely they are to understand themselves and develop into whole, happy, successful people.
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At the doctors office this week, I was given an additional patient information sheet to fill out. It asked about depression & mental health, and near the bottom were two new questions: Do you identify as: male, female, other (with a line to fill in whatever) and How do you prefer to be addressed: She/her, he/him, they/them, by first name, Mr/Mrs/Ms
They’re trying, but that last question made me want to tell the staff that it needs to be two different questions.
The point I was trying to make here (before remembering my irritation) is that they/them is gaining ground as a gender neutral pronoun, and it irritates me more than clumsily worded questions.
Whatever happened to using zhe/zir as a gender neutral?
We really need a good gender neutral pronoun other than it.
A young person I know is lobbying for using thun, a portmanteau of that one.
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