'Storm' in a Tea Cup Raises Larger Concerns

The Torontonians raising a "genderless" child should consider the ethics of experimenting on kids.

With same-sex marriage, we saw the advent of arguments for “genderless parenting” – the idea that all a child needs is love, and that it’s irrelevant whether the loving persons are male or female. Now we have “genderless kids.” Kathy Witterick and David Stocker, the parents of five-year-old Jazz, two-year-old Kio, and three-month old Storm, want to rear and love each of their children not as a daughter or son, not as a girl or a boy, but just as a child.

Now, at one level, that’s not a bad thing. It’s a statement of unconditional love for one’s child simply because he or she is one’s child, and it stands as a small counter-statement to the abomination of the millions of missing girls in India and China, where daughters are aborted or killed as infants because the parents want a son instead.

But, as the Supreme Court of Canada, citing the United States Supreme Court, once said, in distinguishing what parents were free to decide with respect to their own medical treatment as compared with what they could decide for their children, “Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children.”

So, are Witterick and Stocker making martyrs of their children? Is their conduct with respect to their children unethical? And, if it is, does society have any obligation to step in? These are difficult questions to answer, and ones that require us to consider some definitions and facts.

First, a person’s sex is a matter of biology: Women have two X sex chromosomes, and men have one X and one Y. (There are other combinations, such as XXY or XO, but these are not the norm, and the people who have them are usually infertile).

Gender, on the other hand, is the cultural expression of male and female. For most people, gender parallels their biological sex.

Media reports quote Witterick and Stocker as wanting their children to be “gender creative.” In trying to achieve this goal, they allow the two older boys “to make their own choices” with respect to clothing and hairstyles (they often wear pink feather boas, dresses, and braids). As a result, the boys are often mistaken for girls, and other children do not want to play with “that girl-boy.”

The sex of the baby, Storm, has not been disclosed to anyone other than the midwives who delivered it, a close family friend, the father, and the two siblings, who have been told to keep it secret (which also raises ethical issues). They refer to the baby as “Z,” not he or she. Even the grandparents don’t know Storm’s sex.

To analyze this situation, ethically and legally, the basic presumption from which we start is that the parents have a right to make decisions concerning their children, and have obligations to them in doing so. That right can be displaced, however, when the parents’ conduct constitutes neglect or abuse. My guess is that most people would be very reluctant to argue that that’s the case here, but, at the same time, many believe that these children are going to have a difficult path in life as a result of the nature of their upbringing. So what do we need to consider in trying to gain some insights as to whether the parents’ present approach is acceptable?

The parents seem to believe that children “can make choices to be whoever they want to be,” including regarding their gender, and they are giving them the opportunity to do this. Are the parents, however, conducting a social experiment on their children, or – as it’s been described – “a social experiment of nurture”? If so, the principles governing experimentation should be especially stringent when children are the subjects, because children are classified as “vulnerable persons.” Ethics requires that, when there is a conflict that prevents us from honouring everyone’s rights or claims, we must decide in a way that gives a preference to the most vulnerable people.