Progressive Parents Raise Genderless Baby

What moonbattery has done to politics, art, music, and most every other facet of Western Civilization it is also doing to parenting. Kathy Witterick and her husband David Stocker are taking the next progressive step into our deconstructed postmodern future by raising a genderless child:

While there’s nothing ambiguous about Storm’s genitalia, they aren’t telling anyone whether their third child is a boy or a girl.

The only people who know are Storm’s brothers, Jazz, 5, and Kio, 2, a close family friend and the two midwives who helped deliver the baby in a birthing pool at their Toronto home on New Year’s Day.

According to Stocker, it’s “obnoxious” for parents to chose their children’s gender, as if the choice weren’t made at conception by biological reality.

Storm won’t be the first kid in the family to grow up with serious issues resulting from progressive parenting.

Jazz and Kio have picked out their own clothes in the boys and girls sections of stores since they were 18 months old. Just this week, Jazz unearthed a pink dress at Value Village, which he loves because it “really poofs out at the bottom. It feels so nice.” The boys decide whether to cut their hair or let it grow. …

The boys are encouraged to challenge how they’re expected to look and act based on their sex.

The Stocker/Witterick klan are true progressives, who spend their vacations “learning about the revolution” in Cuba and allegedly chatting with leftist Zapatistas in Mexico, although they don’t speak Spanish.

Guess what Stocker does for a living?

Stocker teaches at City View Alternative, a tiny school west of Dufferin Grove Park, with four teachers and about 60 Grade 7 and 8 students whose lessons are framed by social-justice issues around class, race and gender.

Witterick doesn’t work, but has given workshops to teachers in “violence prevention” — whatever that means in the context of outer-fringe moonbattery.

As for their own children’s education,

Witterick practices unschooling, an offshoot of home-schooling centred on the belief that learning should be driven by a child’s curiosity. There are no report cards, no textbooks and no tests. For unschoolers, learning is about exploring and asking questions, “not something that happens by rote from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays in a building with a group of same-age people, planned, implemented and assessed by someone else,” says Witterick.

Fortunately the kids won’t need to learn the three R’s to serve as props for their parents’ liberal ideology.

Jazz — soft-spoken, with a slight frame and curious brown eyes — keeps his hair long, preferring to wear it in three braids, two in the front and one in the back, even though both his parents have close-cropped hair. His favourite colour is pink, although his parents don’t own a piece of pink clothing between them. He loves to paint his fingernails and wears a sparkly pink stud in one ear, despite the fact his parents wear no nail polish or jewelry.

The wording above is meant to absolve the parents of turning the poor kid into a social engineering project. But Jazz seems to be aware that he has been made into a freak:

Jazz was old enough for school last September, but chose to stay home. “When we would go and visit programs, people — children and adults — would immediately react with Jazz over his gender,” says Witterick, adding the conversation would gravitate to his choice of pink or his hairstyle.

That’s mostly why he doesn’t want to go to school. When asked if it upsets him, he nods, but doesn’t say more.

Instead he grabs a handmade portfolio filled with his drawings and poems. In its pages is a booklet written under his pseudonym, the “Gender Explorer.” In purple and pink lettering, adorned with butterflies, it reads: “Help girls do boy things. Help boys do girl things. Let your kid be whoever they are!”

No wonder they let him decide whether he wants to go to school. The “Gender Explorer” is clearly a very precocious 5-year-old — unless we’ve got another Autum Ashante on our hands.

As for the moonbat mom and dad accepting any responsibility for the train wreck they are making of their children’s psyches:

“We spend more time than we should providing explanations for why we do things this way,” says Witterick. “I regret that (Jazz) has to discuss his gender before people ask him meaningful questions about what he does and sees in this world, but I don’t think I am responsible for that — the culture that narrowly defines what he should do, wear and look like is.”

That is, it’s all the fault of normal people for not being militant weirdos.

jazz-storm.jpg
The one in pigtails is a boy. The other, who knows?

On a tip from Unger. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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