We Check in on the Baby Being Raised Gender-Neutral

Remember Storm? We check in on the baby being raised gender-neutral | Toronto Star

        When people see a baby in the stroller who is carried by her/his parents, generally people don't really pay attention to or care about the gender of the baby for the first glimpse because they are only attracted by how cute and lovely the baby is in most of cases. But in reality, it's not true that babies' own parents would raise them as gender-neutral. While in this article, Kathy Witterick and David Stocker decided to raise Storm as a genderless baby to let him/her grow up without any restrictions and even without going to school to avoid bully and to keep the gender as secret. I like this idea that Storm's parents have - children to be raised as genderless will probably have a well-balanced development in all areas than the other common children. For example, Storm loves “peanut and playing with sock puppets” and meanwhile "would like to be a monster” in Halloween. Most of parents would think only girls love playing with sock puppets and boys should better love being a monster in Halloween. While Storm's parents don't think in this way instead they let Storm to choose and to select freely, I think this will definitely promote freedom, choice and a progressive future for Storm.

Using myself as an opposite example, when I was five year old I liked to wear coats that were full of colors and with strong contrast, so my parents then bought some girl's coats for me because I really liked those colors and styles. Until one day I found myself wearing exactly same coat with another girl in the kindergarten, I thought it was not a big deal but all other boys laughed at me being too girly. Then after that I started to refuse wearing any clothes with bright colors and didn't want to talk with my classmates in the kindergarten for a while. This is the way how people stick with the conventions by default even the kids. It's precious that thinking differently from a new perspective – just like the invention of the wheel was a miracle back in 3500BC as it was never already drawn out on a piece of paper before, the inventors had to imagine the masterpiece before it was a physical object and they had to think "Outside The box". In this case Storm is Kathy Witterick and David Stocker's 'masterpiece' and the parents are just like the inventors. That's the reason I like Storm's parents' creative and unconventional decision.

Another example is that based on research, in modern Japan, it's reported that more than 40% of 18-39 unmarried women want to be housewives, as in Japan, the traditional culture is heavily influenced by Chinese Confucianism, the strict gender roles based philosophical system, as a cornerstone of the family and society – while China has changed dramatically but Japan left almost unchanged - Japanese society thinks female should stay at home and take care of family so that male can focus on work to raise the family. It seems to be reasonable but the problem is the housewives must follow any orders from husbands based on the cultural rules and also because housewives do not earn any money at all which means they are at a 'lower class' than male. The imbalance of power between the male and females in Japan is obvious. In my opinion, raising children genderless would probably fix some of this problem in a society like Japan……