You know that gender reveal parties are a terrible human invention when even their creator regrets ever having done one in the first place. Although highly debated and contested, there is still a large number of parents who host these sorts of “parties.” A quick search on social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest, shows hundreds of thousands of posts and content related to gender reveal parties. Gender reveal parties carry with them a set of ideologies related to a binary gender, stereotypes, and conditioning of bodies that are being reproduced every time expecting parents host another.The fact that they have become such a trend raises the question: why are we placing so much importance on the sex of an unborn child?
Gender reveals and their digital nature
The experience of finding out the genitals of a baby goes from being inside a hospital room to a communal spectacle, with social media playing a key role. There is a transition from the intimate moment towards a performance. The assumption that the unborn child will identify with the gender that is being imposed on them no longer involves just the parents and their close circle, but now expands to all different kinds of viewers. This expansion through social media becomes a channel to reproduce binary gender ideologies and stereotypical beliefs. For example, Kourtney Kardashian’s gender reveal party video has 37.8 million views and 2.8 million likes on her Instagram, with the effect being that a baby isn’t even out of the womb yet before all of these people are involved in their social conditioning.
Looking back on the origins of these events, the digital expansion of gender reveal parties began in 2008 when a blogger named Jenna Karvunidis threw a party in which she and her close friends found out the sex assigned to her child while cutting a cake that was pink inside. After posting the event on her blog, the practice became extremely popular. Nowadays, she has asked parents to stop doing gender reveal parties, claiming she doesn’t align with the ideologies they promote and emphasizing that such events are also often dangerous in terms of safety.
Blue for boys, pink for girls
Let’s analyze what “gender reveals” imply: a third party, that isn’t the parents, knows the sex assigned to their child. An event is held where guests come to communally find out this piece of information. An act is performed, like popping a balloon that will release confetti, exploding a colored smoke bomb, releasing a bucket of paint, or any kind of act where pink or blue will appear as a result. These two colors are the main characters of the performance. Relating colors to babies and children is just one of the many practices society does to start conditioning them through stereotypes from an early age. This is a practice that began last century as a strategy to get expecting parents to buy more products and has evolved as conditioning tool. Really? Are we still doing the pink for girls and blue for boys thing?
Gender reveal? More like genital reveal parties
First of all, the name is wrong. Gender is related to characteristics that are socially c A person has the right to determine what gender they identify with, and we cannot assume that an unborn child will identify with their assigned gender. So on the one hand, there’s an assumption that there will be gender conformity. On the other hand, gender reveals reproduce the idea that gender is binary in the sense that there are only two options: man and woman. This completely ignores all of the other possibilities that exist in the wide spectrum that is gender. If parents are not informed enough or open to the possibility of this, what happens if their offspring identifies as a non-binary person, gender fluid, trans, or any other category that isn’t man or woman? Will they have enough information and capacity to support them or will they reject it? It is important to ask these questions because this is very much a possibility. Gender reveal parties can reflect the little or non-existent consideration that parents have towards the possibility of gender nonconformity of their offspring. All of the commotion is because of an unborn child’s genitals, so shouldn’t they be called genital reveal parties?
Gender isn’t binary, but sex isn’t either
It’s common to hear that when speaking about sex, there are only two options: men or female because genitals are either a penis or a vulva. But the thing is, sex isn’t binary either. Although the majority of people are born with genitals that conform to the male and female reproductive system, a large number of our population are born with a different structure. Around 1.7% of the population worldwide is intersexl, which is around 119 million people. Being intersex doesn’t mean there is anything wrong, unnatural, or unhealthy. As Emily Nagoski says, “We’re all made of the same parts as everyone else, organized in a unique way. No two alike.”
Gender reveal parties as a conditioning tool
Let’s imagine that some parents host a gender reveal party and find out they’re having a child who will likely be assigned female at birth. What’s going to happen next? The parents and everyone else around them are going to start engaging in behavior related to the baby based on stereotypes. There is a conditioning of the body that involves many more people than it used to. The body is a result of a long history of indoctrination that falls into categories that conform to our society. Concerning gender reveal parties, the role of the unborn child’s body is of immense importance since the conditioning of a person begins when the body is still inside of the womb. There is a strong emphasis on the genitals that is based on them to assign the roles the person will come to perform in society once they are born. After birth and all this preparation, pressure, and categorization, the conditioning of the offspring’s body will manifest in a more intense manner.
Gender nonconformity isn’t a bad thing. Our society, especially expecting parents, need to acknowledge and be prepared to deal with this. How are we going to stop engaging in discriminatory acts and become a more accepting society where we embrace diversity as part of our nature, if we are still doing things like gender reveal parties?
Written by Natalia Lozano.
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