Storm Brewing Over 'Genderless' Child

That which we call a boy or girl or something else altogether would still smell like diapers and pablum.

Seemingly everyone with an internet connection has weighed in on Storm, the “genderless” child of Toronto parents Kathy Witterick and David Stocker, and whether its parents are unnecessarily burdening their offspring with complexes before it can walk or if they've freed it of societal gender constructs. Kate Heartfield of the Ottawa Citizen pens one of the more reasonable columns on the subject: “I applaud their energy and willingness to challenge a huge bundle of norms and beliefs that are often pointless and occasionally harmful,” she writes. But she notes that this is a child's well-being at stake, not that of a lab rat. “I hope they also have the wisdom to stop or alter their experiment if it gets too hard on Storm.”

Over at Jezebel, Anna North praises Storm's parents for pursing a parenting approach that “is almost certainly better than the strict gender essentialism they're fighting against,” but worries that they might have “made gender nonconformity the centre of their kids' lives in a way that may actually make gender more of an issue than it would've been if they'd taken a more laissez-faire approach.” There's a certain irony in the parents' proclamations about letting their children be as free as they want to be, while basically binding their progeny to discussions about gender for the rest of their lives.

The National Post's Barbara Kay terms the couple “Ouija board parents” who “insist that their children's lives are unfolding spontaneously. But these animated planchettes are merely responding to parental guiding hands virtually pushing them into what some of us might recognize as heterophobia.” The horror! When will someone save those poor heterosexuals from the looming torrent of derision and discrimination bound to emanate from the family Witterick?

Heather Mallick of the Toronto Star, on the other hand, uses the family to trash nameless, suburban white folk whom she believes must be enraged over the experiment: “I would love to live next door to Kathy, David, Jazz, Storm and Kio. I live in an all-white neighbourhood where people openly make anti-Semitic remarks, pasta is considered foreign food and alcoholism soaks up the despair.” We're sure Mallick's neighbours would love for her to live there as well.