It’s been more than two years since we first met a chubby-cheeked 4-month-old named Storm.

Back then, Storm’s parents weren’t saying whether their child was a boy or a girl. In an attempt to mitigate at least some of the gendered messages children are blitzed with, only a handful of people knew the baby’s sex. “A tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a standup to what the world could become in Storm’s lifetime (a more progressive place? ...),” parents Kathy Witterick and David Stocker wrote in an email to family and friends after their third child’s birth.

The Toronto couple wanted Storm to share his or her gender when the time felt right.

These days, they’re sticking with that plan.

Storm — who turns 3 in January — is a busy, chatty, toddler whose current infatuations include peanut butter and playing with sock puppets.

For Halloween, Storm wanted to be a monster, because it provided the best opportunity to roar as loudly as possible.

“When I made the decision around (not sharing Storm’s sex) it felt right for my family and to my heart,” Witterick tells the Star in an interview prompted by the launch of a book containing a chapter she contributed. (Click here for an excerpt from her chapter in that book, called Chasing Rainbows: Exploring Gender Fluid Parenting Practices.)

After the Star ran a May 2011 story about the family’s unconventional choice, it sparked an international debate. Critics accused Witterick and Stocker of conducting a social experiment on their child, more rabid ones went as far as calling what they were doing child abuse.

But the intense scrutiny and notoriety also connected the family with a community of like-minded activists and academics working on issues around gender and parenting.

“Now that I have that exposure I realize what a great choice we made. At the time, I didn’t know it was such a great choice,” she says.

For example, the argument made by California-based academic Jane Ward in Chasing Rainbows that every child has a right to not be “gender diagnosed,” resonates with Witterick more today than ever before.

“If a young person puts on a tutu, why are we saying they are behaving like a girl ... instead of just letting them be?” she asks, rhetorically.

Her eldest son, Jazz, now almost 8, always gravitated to dresses, the colour pink and opted for long hair often fixed into braids. Jazz’s questions about gender were, in part, what inspired the couple’s controversial decision about Storm.

Recently, Jazz requested to go by the pronoun “she.”

“And for now we honour that,” says Witterick.

As for Storm, “sometimes Storm says ‘I’m a girl,’ and sometimes Storm says ‘I’m a boy,’” says Witterick, emphasizing the point that, contrary to what one might think, the topic of gender doesn’t actually take up a lot of air time in her family.

“The rest of the world is still talking about it but actually we’re doing something else. We’re in the forest looking at bugs and finding salamanders and seeing turtles hatch out of eggs,” she says, referencing a recent four-month-long adventure where the family lived in tents in the forest and, with the help of extended family and friends, built themselves a straw-bale cabin.

“It was like a wedding. It was so wonderful,” she says of the rotating door of visitors.

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Witterick still “unschools” her children. The offshoot of home-schooling is centred on the belief that learning should be driven by a child’s curiosity.

Now living off the grid in the forest northeast of Parry Sound, Jazz, Kio (the couple’s middle child, now 5) and Storm, learned about different kinds of trees and how to cook for big groups with no electricity. Building a cabin out of bales of straw, a low-carbon, environmentally friendly option, taught the kids about measurement and math, says Witterick. This year, while Stocker is on sabbatical from his teaching job, they wanted to do something different, hence “Strawhaven,” as they call it.

Rolling out of the “media hoopla” that followed the Star story (the family received interview and reality TV show pitches from around the world, people would yell “boy” or “girl” at Storm on the street) there was a sense, says Witterick, that people felt sorry for her family because what they were trying to do seemed difficult, and particularly because it came with an onslaught of criticism.

“The world we live in, it’s a very joyful happy place of sort of celebrating who everybody is,” she says.

Because she was reticent about reopening the “media circus” around her family, Witterick almost pulled the chapter she wrote for Chasing Rainbows. She grapples with her decisions, in part because she thinks some of the criticisms are valid — most notably that Storm wasn’t old enough to give consent. “Some day will Storm say ‘No I didn’t want to be the centre of media attention,’ ” she asks.

On the other hand, Witterick believes diverse stories like her family’s will give people another way of thinking about gender.

“Until we tell this narrative others who are living this experience won’t understand they’re not alone,” she says.

And so, every word she wrote was read aloud to her three children and partner during family meetings. And her writing would focus on her own experiences as a mother. This would be a “love letter” to her children.

Plus, she really liked the idea of the book, which is rooted in feminism, and its editors, two university professors who were inspired to put together the collection because of the interest and debate that sprung from the Star’s 2011 story.

“I feel like this book has so much to offer in helping parents open up the world to their child,” she says, referencing another chapter, written by a trans-man who shares his successes and tribulations while trying to provide his toddler Stanley with gender choices.

“I know I have celebrity status and if that helps get the book out there ... but it’s not like my chapter is the best one!”