Guest post: Creative Gender-Reveal
Guest post by Josh Spokes.
Look at this.
Are you under 40? Let me blow your mind. This never happened in the 70s and 80s. Until recently I had never heard of a “gender reveal party” for baby. This is only possible because of the backwards regression into rigid sex roles that has taken over our discourse since my childhood in the late 70s and early 80s.
This is connected to the complete pink/blue divide enforced in toy stores. It’s connected to the fact that almost all children’s clothing is now soaking in disgusting misogyny and stultifying sex-role stereotypes.
There really was a world, very recently, in which we did these things better. Where we recognized the damage that “gendering” every consumer item, especially children’s wares, did to them and to society.
Does this surprise you? Well, OK. Now you know it’s possible to do the world differently. Now you know that what you think is “normal” is really quite specific to the tiny slice of time that you have been a conscious person in the world.
Now you know you can change it.
I was reminded of this when a coworker recently made a reference to wanting to know the gender of her then-unborn baby, saying she wanted to know whether to buy pink or not. I kept my mouth shut, but internally rolled my eyes.
I swear people think the color-coding is mandatory.
When I was pregnant with my son (1982), a lot of people were just starting to get into the “what’s the sex” testing prior to birth. I chose not to do this. I didn’t care. When people would ask what the sex of my baby was, I’d just shrug. They’d say “How are you going to prepare? How do you know what to buy?” I rolled my eyes, pointed out that I wasn’t planning on the pink/blue thing, and the child’s room was a neutral tan, since I really don’t like pink myself, and blue would be fine, but we were doing the room in Winnie the Pooh, so what did it matter? Then, they wanted to know how I would know whether to emphasize Kanga or Rabbit!?
This has been around for a long time. I lived in a world where gendering and color coordinating was always the norm (Oklahoma – conservative Eden). Even then, it was never like this…I honestly think you’d be put into some sort of social time-out, high level shunning, or something else, if you declined to have the tests that told you the baby’s sex in advance. My husband and I had a ball trying out different names, decorating the room, buying baby clothes, etc, without ever knowing for sure what the baby’s sex would be. Neither of us cared. It was our baby, and that was all.
When my son was born, the first information I was given? It’s a boy! As if that summed up his whole future in three words. My parents breathed a sigh of relief. The first grandchild was, properly, a boy. For the first time, I’d done something right. (I think my mother had worried I’d be sterile, since I was smart and educated. She read that in a magazine somewhere).
FFS. Should we just arrange to have all women genetically altered so that they turn a (pretty – of course) shade of pastel either blue or pink when pregnant to publicly display the sex of the lump of cells growing in her? While we’re at it the modifications should probably disable her ability to do all sorts of normal stuff, like thinking, working, having needs or desires that are not baby related etc. I mean, it would be only right. Right? /s
How is it even possible to “reveal” the “gender” of a newborn baby if “gender” is all about how the person thinks or feels about “themselves”? Telepathy? It’s almost as if those who insist that biology has nothing to do with it didn’t practice what they preach…
To be fair Bjarte, I suspect trans-activists are not big throwers of these baby gender reveal parties. In fact, I suspect most throwers of these parties wouldn’t know what to do when confronted with a trans-activist. Could be wrong of course.
Fair enough, Rob. I have seen plenty of examples of people – whether trans activists or not – who on the one hand bash feminists as “TERFs” while on the other hand saying things that only make sense if they themselves think being a “man”/”woman” has something to do with physical traits (e.g. talking about the Bechdel Test and how this or that movie only has X “women” in it, when the movie in question doesn’t reveal anything about how these people think or feel about themselves). But yeah, this might not be an example of that. Still ridiculous though..
Bjarte, from my experience, trans activists think that assigning gender at birth is wrong because from their point of view, you can’t tell what someone’s gender is by looking at their genitals. You have to wait until an individual informs you of their gender, which only they know because it is only them that has access to their innate, internal states. My point of view, however, is that gender is constituted by its assignment: in a world in which gender was never assigned, gender would not exist. So I agree with trans activists that gender should not be assigned at birth, but disagree with them that this is because gender is an innate, internal state. To my mind, the assignment of gender at birth is a crucial step in the construction of an individual’s gender identity, and is an act of participation in and reinforcement of gender as a social system.
Sorry, I went a bit soap-boxy there, and probably didn’t add anything new to the discussion.
But nicely laid out
Emily, I agree that “gender” should never be assigned, and in fact “gender” isn’t even a thing, if “gender” says anything about what’s going on inside the person’s head. If, on the other hand, a statement like “It’s a boy” or “It’s a girl” is just a convenient short-hand for “This child seems to have a strong preponderance of physical traits from set F rather than set M” (or vice versa), one is not actually “assigning” anything at all, and I strongly suspect that that’s all that most parents do in fact mean by such a statement.
As I said, I was probably wrong to tie this particular issue directly to trans identity politics. On a deeper level though is still see both as part of the cultural apparatus that has developed to reinforce the idea that “gender” is a thing and really does say something vastly important about who you are on the inside.
Doctors don’t assign gender, they note biological sex. This has real-world medical implications, for example UTIs have different symptoms and implications depending on what type of genitals you have. It is unfortunate that society heaps a lot of stupid gender-based expectations on top, but biological sex is still an important thing to know.
Some years ago I saw a trailer for a program called “8 boys and wanting a girl”. The mother was upset that her latest child was male and therefore she couldn’t dress him up pretty and go to ballets. Never occurred to her that a boy might like to dress up or go to shows, or that a daughter wouldn’t. It was tragic how much she was putting her family through in pursuit of this pink-tinged dream.
#8
Actually waiting for the child to have its own feelings is MUCH too slow for the trans police. The day The Baby turns away from the six-guns and GI Joes, you schedule immediate ‘assignment’ surgery and announce a party.