I was reading the (albeit not very historical) Chatelaine article "Can You Actually Raise A Baby Free From Gender?" and came across the statement:
The notion that a boy should have short hair doesn’t hold in many Indigenous communities, where boys and men follow their tradition of wearing long braids. Boys in Victorian England were clothed in dresses and hair ribbons; middle- and upper-class parents of the era deliberately kept their children sexless throughout toddlerhood to extend what they viewed as a period of innocence.
Taking this statement literally, this would mean Victorian parents treated infant boys and girls exactly the same under the impression they would remain innocent longer.
Attempting to research this, I came across many articles [links below] about boys fashions in the Victorian era, specifically about how young boys wore dresses to facilitate easy diaper-changing. I also found out about the process of "breeching", where a young boy would graduate to wearing breeches for the first time at a certain age, as a rite of passage. The closest thing to "sexless" child-raising I found was a Wikipedia quote, saying after breeching, " the father became more involved with the raising of a boy".
I couldn't find anything saying that male and female children were truly raised the same, though, or anything about innocence relating to this process, or even anything about how lower class families enforced gender differences whereas other socioeconomic levels wouldn't. Is the statement bolded above historically accurate or merely a hyperbolic comment regarding how both boys and girls wore dresses?
Links: http://www.victoriana.com/Fashion/boysclothing1860s.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeching_(boys)
https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gender-roles-in-the-19th-century#
https://medium.com/@NewAgeNews/why-is-president-franklin-d-roosevelt-wearing-a-dress-83fba3549523