Parents keep child’s gender under wraps

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Parents keep child’s gender under wrapsBy Zachary Roth

When many couples have a baby, they send out an email to family and friends that fills them in on the key details: name, gender, birth weight, that sort of thing. (You know the drill: "Both Mom and little Ethan are doing great!")

But the email sent recently by Kathy Witterick and David Stocker of Toronto, Canada to announce the birth of their baby, Storm, was missing one important piece of information. "We've decided not to share Storm's sex for now--a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime (a more progressive place? ...)," it said.

That's right. They're not saying whether Storm is a boy or a girl.

There's nothing ambiguous about the baby's genitals. But as Stocker puts it: "If you really want to get to know someone, you don't ask what's between their legs." So only the parents, their two other children (both boys), a close friend, and the two midwives who helped deliver the now 4-month-old baby know its gender. Even the grandparents have been left in the dark.

Stocker and Witterick say the decision gives Storm the freedom to choose who he or she wants to be. "What we noticed is that parents make so many choices for their children. It's obnoxious," adds Stocker, a teacher at an alternative school.

They say that kids receive messages from society that encourage them to fit into existing boxes, including with regard to gender. "We thought that if we delayed sharing that information, in this case hopefully, we might knock off a couple million of those messages by the time that Storm decides Storm would like to share," says Witterick.

"In fact, in not telling the gender of my precious baby, I am saying to the world, 'Please can you just let Storm discover for him/herself what s (he) wants to be?!." she wrote in an email.

How did Stocker and Witterick decide to keep Storm's gender under wraps? During Witterick's pregnancy, her son Jazz was having "intense" experiences with his own gender. "I was feeling like I needed some good parenting skills to support him through that," Witterick said.

Stocker came across a book from 1978, titled X: A Fabulous Child's Story by Lois Gould. X is raised as neither a boy or girl, and grows up to be a happy and well-adjusted child.

"It became so compelling it was almost like, How could we not?" Witterick said.

The couple's other two children, Jazz and Kio, haven't escaped their parents' unconventional approach to parenting. Though they're only 5 and 2, they're allowed to pick out their own clothes in the boys and girls sections of stores and decide whether to cut their hair or let it grow.

Both boys are "unschooled," a version of homeschooling, which promotes putting a child's curiosity at the center of his or her education. As Witterick puts it, it's "not something that happens by rote from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays in a building with a group of same-age people, planned, implemented and assessed by someone else."

Because Jazz and Kio wear pink and have long hair, they're frequently assumed to be girls, according to Stocker. He said he and Witterick don't correct people--they leave it to the kids to do it if they want to.

But Stocker and Witterick's choices haven't always made life easy for their kids. Though Jazz likes dressing as a girl, he doesn't seem to want to be mistaken for one. He recently asked his mother to let the leaders of a nature center know that he's a boy. And he chose not to attend a conventional school because of the questions about his gender. Asked whether that upsets him, Jazz nodded.

As for his mother, she's not giving up the crusade against the tyranny of assigned gender roles. "Everyone keeps asking us, 'When will this end?'" she said. "And we always turn the question back. Yeah, when will this end? When will we live in a world where people can make choices to be whoever they are?"

(Baby Storm: Steve Russell/The Toronto Star)

Thank you for sharing this article. I've found it to be very uplifting and liberating. I wish that my parents were that cool. I'm going to celebrate the positive vibes that this story has given me.

Thanks for sharing!

fascinating.

i hope one of these kids writes a memoir eventually.

I'm just curious about which pronoun Storm will use.

That sounds kind of nutty to me. I think those kids will need therapy.

Not for being allowed to wear what clothes they like,

but for their parents to be so against ideas of gender that that poor baby has an unknown gender even to their grandparents.

There are other ways to fight against gender stereotyping. The kids sound like they are being isolated from the world too.

It's reminds me of a story where one boy had his penis sinched during circumsition, so his parents decided to raise him as a girl. It brought a lot of problems, gender confusion and he ended up committing suicide. I understand if an adult was unhappy with their sex/gender their entire lives and they had surgery to change themselves, but having the parents let their young child decide the gender is ridiculous. The parents are not making decisions for Storm and have him (I assume it's a he) make decisions for himself. Kid is way to young for that.

there's nothing in the article indicating that.

On a similar note, how will the teachers and other children refer to Storm? You can't really call the child "it".

Could you? The protagonist in the film "Enemy Mine", in which the aliens were hermaphroditic, seemed to get away with it.

being called "it" would definitely do more damage to a child than being referred to by a gender pronoun he / she doesn't identify with, or being stifled by societal pressures to conform to gender specific norms.

for a person to really not be judged by gender, there'd have to really be no such thing. say someone wanted to apply for a job but didn't want someone to know their gender (to avoid bias). as soon as they were interviewed it would be obvious, or if not, new and worse judgments would be applied as most people don't tend to be comfortable with someone whose gender they can't readily identify.

i understand the motivation behind this but i think it will do more harm than good and actually attract more attention, not less, to the child's gender ultimately.

i still do hope it writes a memoir though.

Agreed! One day I would be fascinated to hear what Storm has to say.
Totally out of curiosity are there any gender neutral pronouns in circulation that indicate people, as opposed to indicating inanimate objects?

not in English, unless you are talking about a group of people. you could say "one" but it's really awkward and impersonal.

but interestingly, in French there is the subjective pronoun "on" which kind of means a neutral or hypothetical person (subject) and it really is the same as "one" but is less cumbersome - it is an actual pronoun and not a substitution for a gendered pronoun, like the word "one" would be. however if you have a third person plural subject ("il" or "elle") it defaults to the masculine version ("ils") if you have a mixed group of males and females (even one male in an otherwise completely female group). so there's gender bias inherent in that language.

my first thought was this was just another case of a mutant, why is it getting press attention?

then i realized the parents are just looking for attention.

nothing good can come of this.

they've declined any further media attention. i doubt it is an attention ploy.

Gender mender topic

Why is it assumed that having a gender is something unpleasant?

These two parents, Witterick and Stocker, seem to see gender as a negative thing, the sons so much that Little Storm is not to be told. Of course, Storm will compare the given genitals with those of Kio and Jazz (siblings), and find out then.

Unconsciously, these parents are rating masculine ahead of feminine, and consciously, their neutrality fails when ribbons and pink clothes (associated with being feminine) are offered as fashion options and encouraged to be worn.

I never dressed my daughters in traditionally feminine garb. It just made more sense to cut their hair, buy jeans, tee shirts and athletic shoes so they could play actively. The parents, who call themselves Mom and Dad (gendered words) might have just dismissed genders altogether from the get go for both their older boys by not making a big deal about it, but hiding it makes it seem somewhat illicit.

Raise your children to be assertive, decision makers who know that by working hard they do not have to conform to preconceived notions about who they are as individuals, regardless of what ever gender orientation (or not) they adopt.

I think thats awsome. Its not a matter of keeping the kids gender a secret... Its a matter of leaving it for the kid to decide. Why should kids be told to behave without a chance to learn on their own? Because we were brought up that way? Because 2000 years of "modern" education and societal beliefs have brought us here? Whats wrong in trying and seeing where it goes..... Instead of having to live up to other's expectations (And having to try to figure out what those expectations might be, lets say if s/he were aspergers for instance?), s/he can just figure out who they want to be. Sounds alot more wholesome IMHO then wrapping your child in a color coded blanket from minute 1, and knowing that you want him to be a football star or a Midwife when they grow up......