Canadian Couple Raising Gender-Free Child

It's funny, I don't think I have ever heard of anyone doing this. A Canadian couple had a baby and decided to keep its sex a secret. When this reporter visits, the baby is dressed in red. Why would it matter if a tiny person is male or female? The situation is unsettling in a way that makes you think.

Each week the woman asks the same question about the baby with the squishy cheeks and feathery blond hair.

Witterick smiles, opens her arms wide, comments on the sunny spring day, and keeps walking.

She’s used to it. The neighbours know Witterick and her husband, David Stocker, are raising a genderless baby. But they don’t pretend to understand it.

While there’s nothing ambiguous about Storm’s genitalia, they aren’t telling anyone whether their third child is a boy or a girl. Parents keep child's gender secret

Our language requires us to refer to persons as "him" or "her," "he" or "she." People seem to take offense when you refer to their baby as it -- "So, how often do you change its diapers?" But this couple is encouraging that.

“When the baby comes out, even the people who love you the most and know you so intimately, the first question they ask is, ‘Is it a girl or a boy?’” says Witterick, bouncing Storm, dressed in a red-fleece jumper, on her lap at the kitchen table.

“If you really want to get to know someone, you don’t ask what’s between their legs,” says Stocker.

Let's see you argue with that!

If there is any squeamishness here it has to do with the idea of using your kid as a social experiment. It's the way we feel about Skinner raising his baby in a box, it just isn't the way we do things. We have some idea that it is super-easy to screw up a kid's head, but in reality they're pretty durable little buggers. You know kids with two sets of moms and dads, for instance, after a divorce; you know kids with siblings that have different fathers from them, kids with one parent, they manage to survive and grow up to be happy, healthy adults. What matters is whether the child is loved. I have the feeling this kid is going to turn out fine.

When Storm was born, the couple sent an email to friends and family: “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? ...).”

Their announcement was met with stony silence. Then the deluge of criticisms began. Not just about Storm, but about how they were parenting their other two children.

The grandparents were supportive, but resented explaining the gender-free baby to friends and co-workers. They worried the children would be ridiculed. Friends said they were imposing their political and ideological values on a newborn. Most of all, people said they were setting their kids up for a life of bullying in a world that can be cruel to outsiders.

Witterick and Stocker believe they are giving their children the freedom to choose who they want to be, unconstrained by social norms about males and females. Some say their choice is alienating.

It will definitely be interesting. The other kids on the playground might ask, "Are you a boy or a girl?" and Storm might answer, "I don't know." And then what? And then you fight over who's going down the slide next, or you tag the other kid and run away from them, whatever, it doesn't matter if Storm is a boy or a girl.

I just remembered when my kids were little, there was a girl at school with a gender-neutral name, her parents kept her hair short, she wore jeans and t-shirts, played baseball. She was one of my son's best friends, but he wasn't sure if she was a girl or a boy until about fourth or fifth grade. It just didn't matter.

In an age where helicopter parents hover nervously over their kids micromanaging their lives, and tiger moms ferociously push their progeny to get into Harvard, Stocker, 39, and Witterick, 38, believe kids can make meaningful decisions for themselves from a very early age.

“What we noticed is that parents make so many choices for their children. It’s obnoxious,” says Stocker.

Man, you don't hear enough of that any more! We used to "go out to play" when I was a kid, your parents kicked you out and you ran around with other kids until they called you in for dinner. Now everything is organized, I don't know if kids would even know how to put together a pickup baseball game without grownups telling them what to do, where to stand, what kind of attitude to have.

Skipping down ...

This past winter, the family took a vacation to Cuba with Witterick’s parents. Since they weren’t fluent in Spanish, they flipped a coin at the airport to decide what to tell people. It landed on heads, so for the next week, everyone who asked was told Storm was a boy. The language changed immediately. “What a big, strong boy,” people said.

This article goes on and on, I suggest you follow the link and see what happens.

Like everybody, I have two minds about this. I think it is all right for people to have a secure social structure with norms, roles, scripts we can follow in uncertain situations. At the same time, the social structure has a tendency to tighten around individuals until they feel forced to behave in ways that are unfulfilling, unrewarding, frustrating, hypocritical, false. The daily routine is simplified through a social framework that makes it unnecessary to profoundly contemplate the implications of every little thing you do. It's all right with me if there is something called "normal," life would be chaotic without it.

On the other hand, it is senseless to force people who do not fit the norm to conform to it anyway. And that would be all of us, at some point in our lives, everybody has some unique characteristics that distinguish them from everybody else -- you don't want to discourage that, it's what makes life fun, it's the source of innovation and creativity, it's cool that people are all different. The norms of a society should act as guidelines, not laws. By definition most people will naturally fall in line with a social norm most of the time, and that's how it ought to be. You don't have to force people to be normal.