Parents keep child's gender secret

parentcentral.ca ^ | 05/22/2011 | n/a

[massmike]

“So it’s a boy, right?” a neighbour calls out as Kathy Witterick walks by, her four month old baby, Storm, strapped to her chest in a carrier.

Witterick smiles,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.

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.

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

The boys are encouraged to challenge how they’re expected to look and act based on their sex.

“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?!”

When asked what psychological harm, if any, could come from keeping the sex of a child secret, Zucker said: “One will find out.”

The couple plan to keep Storm’s sex a secret as long as Storm, Kio and Jazz are comfortable with it. In the meantime, philosophy and reality continue to collide.

There are questions about which bathroom Storm will use, but that is a couple of years off. Then there is the “tyranny of pronouns,” as they call it. They considered referring to Storm as “Z”. Witterick now calls the baby she, imagining the “s” in brackets.

For the moment, it feels right.

“Everyone keeps asking us, ‘When will this end?’” says Witterick. “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?”

[Lattero]

Before reading that article, I was hoping that this sort of madness was only confined to The Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/progressive-parents-refuse-to-tell-child-its-sex,18395/