A Canadian couple have touched off a firestorm of controversy by revealing that they have 
decided to keep the gender of their child a secret, even keeping it from the child.
The couple, Kathy Witterick and David Stocker, say they want to allow the child to develop itsown gender identity.
Critics, however have accused the couple of imposing their ideology on four-month-old Storm.
Child development experts have questioned the impact on the infant later in life and suggest that the parents have gone too far in their quest for gender neutrality.
“This is not a secret without consequences,” said Mike Brody, a child psychiatrist in Washington, D.C., and instructor at the University of Maryland. “This seems more controlling than the helicopter parents.”
The family were the subject of a recent profile in the Toronto Star newspaper.
A follow-up article in The Star published earlier this week showed that readers of the paper had heavily criticised the parents for turning child-rearing into a social science exercise.
In an e-mail, Ms Witterick wrote that the idea that “the whole world must know what is between the baby’s legs is unhealthy, unsafe, and voyeuristic”.
Ms Witterick, 38, and Mr Stocker, 39, have also been criticised over the manner in which they are raising their two sons Jazz, five, and Kio, two.
The boys are encouraged to choose their own clothing and hairstyles – even if that means wearing girls’ clothes. Jazz wears his hair in long braids, and the boys are “almost exclusively assumed to be girls,” Mr Stocker told the Toronto Star.
The child’s grandparents do not know Storm’s sex, the Toronto Star reported, and have grown weary of explaining the situation, but are supportive.
The case is similar to that of a Swedish couple reported two years ago had a child aged two-and-a-half at the time. The couple refused to say whether the child – called ‘Pop’ – was a boy or a girl.
The couple fervently believed that ‘gender’ is a social construct, in other words, that it is society, our upbringing, rather than biology that turns us into boys and girls.
The mother told a Swedish newspaper: “We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset. It’s cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.”