Gender-reveal parties: a growing tradition in today’s modern scene. No longer is the question of “boy or girl” one that can be answered casually over lunch, but, rather, a question that demands pink balloons in a box, gender-revealing cakes with hidden blue filling, and other elaborate surprises that amp-up the announcement of your baby’s sex. While many find the idea of a gender-reveal party to be an exciting part of a woman’s pregnancy, I find the whole concept to be a rather strange one.
When we strip such a party to its bare fundamentals, these events are, essentially, celebrations of your soon-to-be child’s genitalia—these party guests crossing their fingers for penises or vaginas. Now you may be thinking, “learning the sex of your baby is an exciting part of a pregnancy, shut up and stop perverting it.” While I obviously understand that the excitement behind the pink or blue balloons is not because of private parts, I can’t help but wonder—what is the excitement really all about? After all, what does learning that your child is a girl really tell you about them? It surely doesn’t tell you what their interests will be, what personality they’ll have, nor what their hopes and dreams will be, all it really tells you is that your child has a vagina.
Quite honestly, when I see the excitement of gender-reveal parties plastered over social medias, I can’t help but the think all the commotion, all the screams, and all the smiles, are due to the gender stereotypes we project. Future dads cheer at the sight of a male sonogram because they firmly believe that someday that baby will grow up to be football star, the ladies’ man, the one he can share his knowledge of tools and fishing with, someday—as if these moments are guaranteed. Sadly, however, just because the balloons that pop out of the box are blue, does not mean that your baby will grow up to be the next sports all-star, video game champion, or workout junkie. And similarly, just because the filling in the middle of the cake is pink, does not mean that you are carrying a person that will love dresses, Barbies, boys and makeup. In my opinion, these gender-reveal parties do a lot more than reveal the sex of a baby, but also seem to reveal how truly sacred gender norms are to us. It appears that we are so obsessed with gender, in fact, that we are willing to project our restricting gendered beliefs upon our helpless, unborn fetuses—simply for the sake that men be men and women be women.
Sadly, however, the damaging gendering of our unique and complex children does not stop when the gender-reveal party is over. From the very moment a soon-to-be parent learns of their child’s sex, they begin to construct their baby’s gender identity. They buy frilly dresses, paint baby rooms blue, collect gendered toys, and await the day they can take their sons to t-ball, and teach their daughters how to put on makeup—again, as if those moments are guaranteed. Just because you deck out your gender-reveal party pink balloons and flowery cupcakes, does not mean you will raise a daughter who squeals at the sight of a tutu, or plasters her walls with posters of Disney princesses. In fact, you may just find yourself laughing at the very thought that you celebrated your daughter with pink and frills, when she grew up loathing anything and everything feminine and girly.
So might I ask, what are we really celebrating when we celebrate a gender-reveal? Are we simply celebrating the fact that their parents will take this new baby boy, dress them in sports-themed onesies, and force them to join the football team in hopes that he will be the hyper-masculine, cis-gendered, heterosexual boy they always wanted? What happens if these parents dance and cheer over their new baby boy, and later find that he never really wanted to be a boy in the first place? With this in mind, aren’t these gender-reveal parties simply a waste of time and money? And more importantly—aren’t these events a projection of unhealthy gender expectations, and unreliable predications of our future children’s identities?
At the end of the day, I believe these titles of “boys” and “girls” to be completely arbitrary—and certainly not titles not that deserve a celebration. My title as a “girl” and a “female” does not define me, and it surely does not define the newborns of the world. And while the learning the sex of the baby may be way for a mother to bond her soon-to-be child, maybe, just maybe, we’ve all gone overboard. Must we ask ourselves if these gender-reveal parties simply another excuse to throw an extravagant party; or do these events really have a hidden political agenda?