We have all seen the videos. People dressed in pink and blue, the soon-to-be parents firing confetti cannons or cutting into a cake and revealing the gender of their unborn child. These videos are usually lighthearted, but deeply reinforce harmful gender stereotypes. I can already hear people arguing that these gender reveal parties are harmless fun, but the way that people project gendered stereotypes on children that are not even born yet keep gender boundaries strict.
When it’s revealed to be a little boy, they are automatically going to be a ladies man, star quarterback, who will hunt with his dad every weekend. If it’s a girl, while she may be a little ballerina, she is going to grow up to be a handful and generally unwanted. Of course these examples are a tad hyperbolic, but the second a color is revealed, assumptions are made about the unborn child based on their gender that they likely won’t live up to. Not every little boy is going to be the next Tom Brady and not every little girl is going to be some insufferable terror.
These reveals are even worse when the family has multiple children. If the family already has girls, then the poor dad is going to be stuck with a household of girls. The horror! Fathers are the victims of a 50/50 biological chance, and decisions they made with their wives. Of course not every father of multiple girls are upset with their daughters, but I’m sure they have been told that they will suffer living with girls that love glitter, have periods and will date boys and have anything feminine. For parents with multiple children, of course they have expectations of the family that they imagined for themselves. Some people dream of having a child of their same gender, or children of both. While it is valid to be disappointed, obviously they should not POST IT ON THE INTERNET! Their unborn child will have proof of how upset their parents were about their gender, or on the flipside, how aggressively excited over a gender they may not identify as. If a child grows up and identifies as a different gender or none at all, seeing their parents over the top excitement would likely be crushing.
I have two examples of TikToks with extreme reactions on both ends of the spectrum. This first video shows radical acceptance of a little boy, to the point that the mother, the woman that is carrying the child, is ignored- which I could write a whole other article about. The young father is celebrating the fact that he is having a little boy, and his army of clones, or his friends, are aggressively excited about him having a boy, putting all their stereotypes on a baby that has been a boy for ten seconds.
This next video shows a father being violently disappointed over having a third daughter. Given the fact that his pregnant wife, and two little girls are standing there and he still says “Ah f–k”. Then he repeats the swear two more times. While this is a super charming example of a father judging a child that is still forming, it also shows how normalized this type of disappointment is.
So in conclusion, gender reveals and their subsequent viral videos are simply reinforcing stereotypes by obsessing over chromosomes that no one can control, and emphasize the gendering of children. If people simply took the gender of their child as a loose guideline, not an explicit expectation of the human they created, they likely would not be as upset with their child’s gender or experience potential anger if that child does not end up being that gender later in life. So have gender reveal if you want, but when it becomes more about having an idealized child that won’t be the baby that pops out, it’s time to deconstruct some gender norms.