Looking to dehumanize an innocent newborn? Feeling an urge to challenge its status as a sentient being? Simply refer to the bouncy baby as ‘it’; with a pronoun so all-encompassing attached to its character, bystanders will hardly be able to differentiate between the family dog and a precious little human addition to the family.
Their idiosyncratic approach to child rearing leads Canadian parents Kathy Witterick ,38, and David Stocker, 39, to see no crime in the absurd scenario above. The Toronto based couple plans to trap their 4-month old blonde bomebshell in neither a pink princess dress nor a pair of blue overalls; Storm Stocker will mature as a genderless and thus free-spirited being.
The only people currently aware of the child’s sex are parents David and Kathy, Storm’s two older brothers, a close friend, and the two midwives who delivered the infant in the couple’s home birthing pool on NewYear’s Day. Swearing their other two sons to secrecy, parents intend for the mystery of what’s contained inside Storm’s diaper to stay concealed within this close circle.
The Stocker’s uber-liberal and flexible philosophy on parenting is not unique or exclusive to raising Storm. While the family’s two other sons Kio, 2, and five-year-old Jazz are entirely cognizant of their biological sexes, their understanding of gender identity seems quite fluid and subjectively created. Controversy surrounds the parents’ allowance of Jazz’s transgender expression; the rule-breaking boy sabatoges conventions as he regularly sports his hair in pigtails (see image on left). Of course a mother with such interest in avoiding the confines of normality would keep her children out of the public education sphere as well. Homeschooling even too standard and restrictive for Witterick, the mother practices ‘unschooling’, educating the children in the home but without textbooks, report cards, or books. The only standard set for the Stocker children is one of tolerant, impartial, broad-minded and totally avant-garde criteria that society is not at all involved in establishing.
The subject of his family’s social experiment, and in the name of “choice and freedom in the place of limitation”, innocent baby Storm will become the modern face of androgony. Parents claim that the 1978 children’s book ,”X: A Fabulous Children’s Story” inspired this brilliant idea of sexual neutrality or secrecy. According to Stocker and Witterick, the book’s author Lois Gould stressed gender ‘creativity’ through his use of symbolism and allegory. Witterick defends her choice to raise a genderless child with an emphasis on this same sense of creativity, and in hopes that the world may become a more receptive and lenient arena for such ‘creative’ individuals. The couple expressed these sentiments in their e-mail announcing the genderless rearing of Storm, “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.”
Witterick also acknowledged that while gender provides a immense sense of identity, it can inhibit a child’s ability to develop additional , more personalized identities. The mother voiced this concern to to the Toronto Star, “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?'” Stocker piggybacks, adding this gender neutral suggestion,”If you really want to get to know someone, you don’t ask what’s between their legs.”
Those closest to the couple including grandparents and friends are reportedly warming up to David and Kathy’s radical child-raising methods. Storm’s parents are unable to fully escape public scrutiny however, especially in a world which many claim has already become more innovative in adopting a more impressionable and dynamic view of gender identity; many claim that the sexual revolution of the 1970s created a domain in which a boy who sheds the occasional tear is no longer an anomaly, and there is nothing particularly suggestive about a little girl who trades her Barbie for a toy truck. If gender has truly acquired so much elasticity in modern society, revealing Storm’s sex wouldn’t rob the individual of its freedom. Instead, the release of this information would allow the person to flourish in its own unique character in a very ‘gaga-esque’ manner, shouting shamelessly that he or she was “born this way “.