Friends, even Grandparents, don't know if baby 'Storm' is a boy or a girl.

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Parents keep child’s gender under wraps
By 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?"



The whole "unschooled" thing kind of made me go 'wait a minute.' Since the kids won't be in a structured environment, where they can socialize and gain a better understanding of what it's like to be with peers of their own age, how much will they be at a disadvantaged later on in life? Also, the whole allowing the boys to choose whether or not to wear pink or have their hair cut, made me think that this whole nature vs. nurture thing maybe going out of hand. Will they be able to recognize what is socially acceptable in society?

Another thing is will they be able to grasp what their gender and sexual identity is be down the road? Man this is fascinating, in a what will happen later on, and a what were the parents thinking??!! kind of way.

I think that it's wrong that the parents didn't even tell the grandparents what the baby's sex is. Finally, who names their children 'Storm' and 'Jazz'????

What do you guys think of this?
 
well instead of making gender a non-issue, the parents have pretty much turned it into a big issue for their kids it seems... sounds distressing and isolating for the children...
 
I read this and my first thought was they basically have the same hangup as homophobes, they don't seem to get that you don't CHOOSE your gender or sexual orientation, you just ARE. The problem is not NOT allowing someone to choose but not accepting what just is.
 
There are stupid people, and then there are people like this.

Trying so hard to be PC that it's become wrong again.

Procreation is a privilege, not a right...
 
And here I was thinking that the couple who posted the online poll about whether they should keep or abort their baby were the stupidest people alive. But they've got competition now...
 
i'm all for challenging sex-role stereotypes and letting little boys paint their toenails, if this is what the child wants and expresses interest in. it seems hideous to deny a child access to their interests on the basis of gender, and to deny, say, your son a doll or your daughter football equipment because of their gender seems particularly cruel and a great way to begin to inflict some psychic damage. and i can also take the point that people react to a male baby differently than a female baby and we can wonder what the world would be like if people were treated just as people first and not their gender, but i really don't think a child is a social experiment.
 
I agree 110% with Indy on this.

I guess there IS a first time for everything. :wink:

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Hope I didn't tarnish your FYM cred.
 
I don't see anything wrong with this. It doesn't seem coercive and the problems that people have with it are more a reflection upon them than the family.
 
Gender is gender, why try to be so psychoanalytical about it? Do they just want their names in the paper? I'm sure we're all for parents letting their kids discover their own identity but these people are clearly idiots. In my opinion anyway.
 
I don't see anything wrong with this. It doesn't seem coercive and the problems that people have with it are more a reflection upon them than the family.



eh ... one can only intellectualize child rearing so far. there is the real world the child will have to be equipped to deal with, and this doesn't strike me as a particularly healthy way to begin. we could argue this intellectually, but things like gender are felt rather than merely understood, and the big media to-do over this strikes me as a bit media whorish.
 
Making their other kids keep the baby's sex a secret isn't coercive?

I think there's an unrealistically extreme view of the strength of the individual relative to society implicit in this discover-your-own-gender philosophy, as if all we started out life as these self-contained, autonomous little monads who can critically survey social customs from a distance and strategically pick and choose what benefits us most. That just doesn't seem to be how identity formation works. It's not that it's the opposite of that either--obviously we're all on a continuum, and some people never fit comfortably into their birth-assigned genders no matter how forcibly we socialize them--but this seems like the opposite extreme. Whether the gender expectations we do explicitly and implicitly impose on our children will serve them well in the society we're raising them for, and how as parents we should handle those children who do experience serious problems fitting in by gender...those to me are more urgent questions than what might happen if you keep your baby's sex a secret, or which clothing items and hairstyles your child might choose if you offered him/her no direction whatsoever.

This couple's children are all still very young, though. At least from what I've read, children up to around 5 or so have a much more fluid concept of gender than do older children anyway. Not in the sense that they won't readily identify as boy/girl if asked, or display certain stereotypical preferences, but in the sense that they don't really grasp how illogical it is to imagine yourself growing up to be a ballerina one day, then a professional baseball player the next, and basically regard both as actual possibilities in the moment.
 
This was mentioned in another article: the reason the kids are 'unschooled'? Because they got picked on at regular school and didn't want to go back. Really healthy
 
I don't see anything wrong with this. It doesn't seem coercive and the problems that people have with it are more a reflection upon them than the family.

Now you're just being contrarian. I don't believe for a second you really think that
 
They ARE making choices for their child-and yes, a child is not a social experiment. They seem to have that whole we're so much more enlightened and superior in our parenting skills thing going on. It's like a flip side of Tiger Mom-or a different, laid back hippie version.

Gender and gender roles and stereotypes, those are all very important issues. They could clearly state whether Storm is a boy or a girl and still allow for so many freedoms regarding gender. I agree that boys and girls should not have to conform to any and all gender stereotypes.
 
This was mentioned in another article: the reason the kids are 'unschooled'? Because they got picked on at regular school and didn't want to go back. Really healthy

That just doesn't make a lot of sense given that the other children are 5 and 2. :shrug:
 
^ I was puzzled by that too. At what age do children usually start kindergarten in Canada (or is kindergarten even required)?
 
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Pre-school is becoming compulsory in my area, so, no a five year old in school is not shocking.


Wasn't there a thread a while back for a couple that was raising their daughter as a boy?
 
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