Paloma Faith says she was ‘misunderstood’ and isn’t raising her child as gender neutral

Paloma Faith has dismissed reports that she is raising her child as gender neutral, explaining she was “misunderstood” when she previously refused to share her daughter’s identity.

The singer welcomed her first child, now three-years-old, in December 2016, but didn’t reveal her name or gender until a week ago when she said she was raising a daughter.

Faith had previously said she wanted her child “to be who they want to be”, explaining that she wouldn’t force her child to sign up to gender stereotypes.

“I’m loving being a mum,” she said at the Q Awards in 2017. “I want two or three kids in all and they’ll be gender neutral.”

Paloma Faith didn’t want the world to decide what her daughter was.

Now Faith has clarified that she didn’t mean she would be raising her child to identify as gender neutral.

“I was misunderstood – the media reported that I wasn’t dictating gender stereotypes,” she told Radio Times.

Rather, she said, she simply meant that she didn’t want to limit her child’s expression by imposing “rigidity”, and didn’t disclose her child’s gender to maintain the family’s privacy.

“True, I don’t encourage gender rigidity with toys, but really, I was traumatised by the birth and protective of our privacy.”

“I wanted her to develop into herself before the world decided who she was. I felt like a lioness.

“She makes me look at the world in a way I’ve neglected for a long time.”

She had previously touched on the subject in 2018, when she dismissed the idea that she was imposing an identity on her child.

“There were a lot of people who misunderstood that I thought I would make someone who was gender neutral for the rest of their life,” she told the Mirror.

“What a weird concept anyway because you can’t create that.”

Trolls called Paloma Faith ‘child abuser’ for not believing in rigid gender roles.

Faith recently opened up about her parenting journey on Giovanna Fletcher’s Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast.

She said that after opening up about not believing in gender stereotypes, “I had people calling me a child abuser online for saying that, which was weird”.

“And I think that’s sort of part and parcel of why I didn’t want that information out, and I still sort of withhold that,” she added.