OPINION:
Toronto couple Kathy Witterick and David Stocker are raising - for the time being - their youngest child ‘genderless’ (“Toronto couple leave their baby’s gender a mystery,” Culture, May 30). They may as well hack off this child’s hands and feet, for that is the kind of disability with which they are saddling this baby.
Identity is informed in large measure by other people’s expectations. The parents’ discarding of this most basic of expectations will inhibit this child’s assimilation into society. I’m among the first to call out imperfections in society, but I don’t share Ms. Witterick’s utopian delusions. One of her other children, 5-year-old son Jazz, apparently knows he is a boy but is encouraged to dress and act without regard to ideas about “typical” roles for the sexes.
He may, as his mother says, be “fulfilled” now, but because of his parents’ lax attitude, he won’t know who or what he is when he leaves the nest and enters the real world.
Kids like these are defined by their concern almost exclusively with self-satisfaction. Ms. Witterick abhors submission to external standards and she surely rejects absolute morality, which has no basis outside God.
Her “self-identifying” boy braids his hair, wears dresses and paints his nails. He is old enough to go to school but so far has chosen not to - in large part because of reaction to his feminine clothing and hairstyles. He admits the reactions upset him.
Thus does the fruit of unsexed child rearing ripen.
JOSEPH DOOLEY
Glen Burnie, Md.
