“Avengers: Endgame” star Zoe Saldana has three sons whom she is now raising in a “gender-neutral environment,” according to a glowing profile of the actress in Us Weekly.
Saldana operates a highly non-traditional household. Not only did her husband, Marco Perego, take on her last name when they got married in 2013, she also has her sons play with both “female toys and male toys.” Recently, while celebrating the Planet Oat Oatmilk National Launch, with which she partnered, Saldana confessed to the magazine how she handles their boys when they utter biologically justified observations like “boys are stronger than girls.”
“I’m always gonna be honest and that is always the best way to welcome healthy and truthful discourse, especially around parenthood,” she told Us Weekly. “[The twins] made a comment two weeks ago like, ‘Boys are stronger than girls,’ because they’re in that stage of comparisons. And you have to take a moment and kind of put together an answer that they will understand.”
Saldana said her goal is to try to “not bring all this charge that you have as an adult and as a woman into their lives. They’re a blank slate.”
The “Avatar” actresses told Us Weekly in June 2018 about how she and her husband participate in this gender-neutral environment by flipping many parental roles.
“We have a very gender-neutral environment where my husband participates in a lot of tasks that were normally given to women and vice versa,” she said. “I get to do a lot of male things, which is, I don’t know, put the TV together, fix things that break. We’re sort of a very gender-fluid household. I think it’s important to raise boys in that environment, and girls as well.”
As to why he took her last name, she said it was to “represent my father’s legacy.”
“He liked it,” she said. “He wanted to really represent being a part of my family and represent my father’s legacy. He respected the fact that he didn’t want me to have to give up my name just because that’s the norm.”
Saldana raising her three sons in a “gender-neutral environment” is relatively tame compared to the radicalism of some other current celebrities. Most recently, actress Charlize Theron confessed that she had been raising her seven-year-old adopted son as a girl ever since he was three.
“Yes, I thought she was a boy, too,” Charlize recently told The Daily Mail. “Until she looked at me when she was three years old and said: ‘I am not a boy!'”
“So there you go! I have two beautiful daughters who, just like any parent, I want to protect and I want to see thrive,” she continued. “They were born who they are and exactly where in the world both of them get to find themselves as they grow up, and who they want to be, is not for me to decide.”
Though initial reports were that royal couple Meghan Markle and Prince Harry were planning to raise their baby “gender-fluid” by avoiding common gender stereotypes, Kensington Palace later denounced the story as false.