The Moon Mom: Raising a Genderless Child

You might have heard about the couple in Toronto who are hiding their months-old baby’s gender. They named the baby Storm and want people to get to know their child without transferring gender stereotypes onto him or her.

You know: pink for girls, blue for boys; a doll for you, and a truck for you.

They want Storm to grow up and decide what gender Storm wants to be. Storm has two brothers, ages 5 and 2, who are allowed to pick out their own clothes (boys or girls section optional) and decide If they want to cut their hair or let it grow long. Because they often wear pink and have long hair, they are often assumed to be girls. One of them likes to dress as a girl but does not like to be mistaken as one.

Color me crazy, but I think there’s a better way to fight for gender equality than to use your children as social experiments. I would never willingly place my child in a situation that would cause confusion to them.

I would much rather my child be proud of what he or she was born as and be the best boy or girl they know how to be. If, for example, my daughter came home and some gender-related situation happened to her or a friend, we would talk about how to handle it. If she decided she wanted to dress like a boy each day, we would talk about how we were going to handle that. If my son woke up and decided he wanted to be called Maria and wear princess costumes to school, we would have a conversation. But I’m not going to introduce any of those ideas to them.

Storm’s mother, Kathy Witterick, recently was asked when the secrecy surrounding her child’s gender will end.

She replied, “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?”

Seems to me she’s making a lot of choices for Storm.