The baby who is neither boy nor girl: As gender experiment provokes outrage, what about the poor child's future?



Chubby-cheeked and fair-haired, Storm Stocker has the expression of permanent puzzlement familiar to parents of four-month-old babies.



But then this child has a lot to think about: such as whether he or she is a boy or a girl.



It won’t be much help turning for guidance to Storm’s brothers: Jazz, five, with long pigtails, a pink ear stud and sparkly pink dresses, and two-year-old Kio, with collar-length hair and a penchant for leggings.



Everyone who meets them thinks they are girls.



Boy or girl? Storm, in red, gets a cuddle from his - or her - older brother Jazz

Still, even if they do sound as if they were named after family hatchbacks, Jazz and Kio got off lightly. Their parents David Stocker and Kathy Witterick have something more extreme for their third child.



In a move that has earned the Toronto couple the dubious title of the world’s most politically correct family, they are raising Storm as ‘genderless’.



The midwives who delivered the child had no uncertainty about Storm’s sex — the baby isn’t a hermaphrodite. It’s just that the parents will be keeping it a secret until the child is old enough to ‘choose’ which gender he or she is most comfortable living with. Apart from the two siblings, a family friend and the two midwives, no one knows if Storm is biologically a girl or a boy.



Storm could be condemned to a life of bullying

The rest of the couple’s friends and family — even the grandparents — were sent an email that announced: ‘We’ve decided not to share Storm’s sex for now — a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation.’



The couple admitted their wonderfully po-faced missive was initially met with silence. One can only imagine the emails and phone calls that passed between their loved ones as they digested this bizarre plan.



The couple say no one they told had a kind word to say about their decision. The grandparents were annoyed that they had to explain to friends that their grandchild was more of an ‘it’ than a ‘he’ or a ‘she’.



Some friends accused the couple of imposing their ideology on the child; others chided that they had condemned Storm to a life of bullying.



But, naturally, the parents weren’t dismayed. Repulsed by a world of what they see as pushy parents, they believe very young children can — and should — choose who they want to be, free from social norms about being male or female.



‘I am saying to the world: ‘‘Please can you just let Storm discover for him/herself what s(he) wants to be?’’ ’ says Witterick.



Or, as her husband puts it: ‘What we noticed is that parents make so many choices for their children. It’s obnoxious.’

Maybe baby: Storm Stocker with his or her father David

Those who know them insist Stocker, 39, and Witterick, 38, are well-meaning and devoted to their children. But in the interview they gave before the thunderclap of outrage sent them scurrying to close the curtains on their bizarre household, they emerge as beyond parody.

Stocker, a progressive teacher, wrote a textbook, Math That Matters, which urges teachers to stop using everyday objects in maths questions and instead work with issues such as homophobia, poverty, child abuse and racial profiling to ‘spark discussion’ and increase students’ interest in ‘social justice advocacy’.



(Sample question: A Chinese worker who makes my shoes earns what percentage of the price I paid for them?)



Their last family holiday was two weeks in Cuba staying with local families to learn about the wonders of Marxist revolution.



In their cluttered family home, Witterick says she was put out when, after the birth, the first question from ‘even the people you love the most’ was to ask if she’d had a girl or a boy. Well, yes, people do tend to ask that, but as Stocker adds, charmingly: ‘That the whole world must know what is between the baby’s legs is unhealthy, unsafe and voyeuristic. We know — and we’re keeping it clean, safe, healthy and private (not secret!)’

Indeed, you don’t usually have to pry about gender, but that’s because you can work it out from other evidence.



But Storm’s parents are offering no clues. The child is dressed in gender-neutral red and the couple are so determined to fight the ‘tyranny of pronouns’ that, after considering ‘Z’ (pronounced ‘zee’), mum refers to Storm as ‘she’ — but ‘imagining the ‘‘s’’ in brackets’.



It’s hard to believe Storm’s brothers will not blurt out the secret. Having said that, they don’t seem to have a packed social life. Jazz is home-schooled (his mother uses a system called ‘unschooling’ in which the child is taught something only when he asks about it).



Given that he loves his pink dress because ‘it really poofs out at the bottom’, you can understand why he finds the idea of going to school ‘upsetting’.

Unconventional: Kathy Witterick, right, with two-year-old son Kio. Behind her is husband David Stocker, holding Storm as Jazz looks on

There are already signs of trouble ahead. At the local playground, two little girls refused to play with the ‘girl boy’, and a shopping trip ended in humiliating retreat when an assistant balked at the idea of selling a feather boa to a little boy.

Revealing not a jot of self-doubt, Jazz’s parents insist their decision to go the whole gender-neutral hog with Storm came after Stocker found a book in his school library called X: A Fabulous Child’s Story.



It’s about a child with ‘no gender’ who plays football and weaves baskets.



The child ignores bullying and ends up stunning experts with how well-adjusted he/she is.



The story will strike many as naive, but Storm’s parents found it ‘compelling’.





'To raise a child like this is creating a freak'

The great irony, of course, about this family’s scorn for gender is that they’re obsessed with it. Even before he was weighed down with Storm’s secret, Jazz was showing signs of confusion.



One of his favourite books is 10,000 Dresses, the tale of a boy who likes to dress up. And in a birthday card to his father, he wrote: ‘I love to do laundry with Dad.’



Granted, not all little boys want to play with toy cars, but are fashion and washing clothes normal enthusiasms for a five-year-old?



The parents insist they are giving their children freedom to express themselves. Critics tend to see a pair of crackpot liberals indulging in crude social engineering. When they went public with their decision, Stocker and Witterick may have assumed readers of the liberal Canadian newspaper the Toronto Star, would applaud, but instead hundreds emailed to express their horror.



‘This is a perfect example of why you should have a licence to have children,’ erupted one reader.



And the shockwaves have moved across Canada and beyond.



Perhaps this outlandish world of gender-free parenting would be comical if it weren’t for the fact that experts fear it could be damaging.

'I am saying to the world: "Please can you just let Storm discover for him/herself what s(he) wants to be?"' says mother Kathy Witterick

‘To raise a child not as a boy or a girl is creating, in some sense, a freak. It sets them up for not knowing who they are,’ says Dr Eugene Beresin, a child psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Dr Harold Koplewicz, a leading U.S. child psychiatrist, said he was ‘disturbed’ that well-meaning parents could be so misguided.



‘When children are born, they’re not a blank slate. We do have male brains and female brains,’ he says. ‘There’s a reason why boys do more rough and tumble play; there’s a reason why girls have better language development skills.’



For him, ‘the worst part of the story’ is that the two older boys have to keep Storm’s gender a secret — an act that other experts say will make them ashamed.



Intriguingly, this experiment may not be unique. In 2009, a Swedish couple announced, to a blaze of publicity, that they were raising their two-year-old child, Pop, as gender-neutral. Even now, we don’t know if Pop is a boy or a girl.



A more tragic case suggests the biological facts are difficult to suppress. In 1966, David Reimer, a six-month-old boy from Winnipeg, Canada, lost his penis in a botched circumcision.



A psychologist persuaded David’s mother he could be raised as a girl, so his genitals were partially converted to female ones. David became Brenda, but complained he never felt female. In 2004, he committed suicide, aged 38.



As for the Toronto experiment, experts doubt the parents can keep up the charade, particularly as studies show we cannot help but treat boys and girls differently.

