When a family member or friend has a baby, one of the first questions most everyone wants to know is: is it a boy or a girl? But not so for one Canadian couple.
In an email to announce the arrival of their baby “Storm,” Kathy Witterick and David Stocker of Toronto purposely omitted one very important piece of information — the sex of the child. “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? …),” the email said. HUH???
Yes, folks, Kathy and David are absolutely refusing to say if their new baby is a boy or a girl. So far, only the parents, their 2 other children (both boys), a close friend, and the 2 midwives who helped deliver the now 4-month-old baby Storm know its gender. Even little Storm’s grandparents have been left in the dark. According to the baby’s father, “If you really want to get to know someone, you don’t ask what’s between their legs.”
Stocker and Witterick say the decision to withhold the sex of the baby 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,” said Stocker, who is a teacher at an alternative school. She added 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,” Witterick said. “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?!”
Child professionals are already weighing in on the parents’ controversial decision, saying that turning over key decisions to an infant is not only confusing and irresponsible, but may prove downright detrimental once the child reaches school age. Children do fit into male/female roles or “boxes” as kids, so not preparing the child for this passage of life might be akin to putting a bullseye on the child’s back and throwing them into target practice.
But the couple is not deterred, as the mother vows not to give 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?”
