Gender reveal parties have been called problematic because they’ve started wildfires, but why are they problematic when it comes to how we think about gender

Wildfires aside, the main problem is that gender reveal parties reinforce several ideas about gender which are pretty bad for kids, and for society in general. Three main ones are: 

• That gender is the most important thing we can know about a person, 
• That we can know what gender somebody is going to be by knowing what their genitals are like, and 
• That gender is binary (they’re either a boy or they’re a girl).

These ideas are bad for all kids.

These ideas bad for any kids who don’t end up conforming to sex and gender norms, like intersex, trans, and non-binary kids, because they mean that those kids will have a far greater battle to be recognised in their sex/genders than they would have done if we didn’t make such a big thing of sex/gender at the start of their life.

These ideas are also bad for all kids because they set them up to believe that the division between girls and boys, women and men, is a really important one, and that they need to conform to rigid ideas of what it means to be a girly girl or a ‘big brave boy’, a feminine woman or a masculine man.

They take place before the child is born, so do they actually affect the child?  

We know that from birth onwards, and perhaps even before birth, the gender attitudes of the people around a child have a huge impact on the kid. The famous ‘Baby X’ studies found that adults who were given the same baby to look after behaved very differently towards them depending on whether they were dressed in pink or blue. Babies dressed in pink were treated more gently, given dolls to play with, and assumed to be ‘upset’ if they cried. Babies dressed in blue were treated more roughly, given trucks, and assumed to be ‘angry’ if they cried.

Scientists like Cordelia Fine and Sari Van Anders have found that such different treatment has a big impact on our physiology, including the ways our brains wire up, and our levels of circulating hormones. We’re literally shaping kids’ bodies and brains when we treat them differently according to their gender. 

The BBC documentary No More Boys and Girls showed that, by primary school, kids raised like this all believed that boys were better than girls and that girls should aspire to be ‘pretty’ rather than having career goals. Boys found it difficult to ask for support when they were struggling, and couldn’t come up for words for emotions other than anger. We can see the toll that all of this takes in later life when we consider gender pay inequalities, toxic low self esteem and body dissatisfaction in women, and the high rates of suicide and aggression in men, for example. 

It all starts with the idea that the gender of a kid is the most important thing about them.

Why do you believe that gender reveal parties no longer have a place in 2020? Did they ever have a place?

 
I don’t believe they ever had a place. Looking back in time, and around the world today, we find that this idea that people can be divided into two ‘opposite’ genders is actually a pretty new, western thing. Many places and times have celebrated gender diversity as something sacred, have had more than two gender categories, and have regarded gender as only one feature of a person among many, not something to determine their whole lifecourses.

Another reason to leave gender reveal parties in 2020 is the increasing awareness, in our culture, of intersex, trans and non-binary people. Between one and two percent of babies are born with some variation of sex characteristics. In the past, such babies often received surgical interventions to make their genitals conform to norms of what we think male or female genitals should look like. Such surgeries can be risky, can deaden sexual sensation in later life, and can lead to later struggles if the decision is made in a different direction from the way that person ends up experiencing their gender. The need to ‘reveal’ the gender of a baby is part of a cultural pressure which makes parents more likely to believe that they should ask for such surgical interventions, rather than waiting until the child themselves is able to make that choice consensually – unless there’s actually a good medical reason for surgery.

Also, now that we know that over a third of adults experience their gender as to some extent the other gender, neither gender, or both gender, and that many people identify as trans and non-binary, we should be wary of anything that puts people in a box regarding gender that it’s hard to move out of later. 

What would a better approach be?

Some parents are now raising all kids gender-free until they’re old enough to make a decision about what gender they experience themselves as being – if any. Even if we don’t go that far, we can clue ourselves up about the strong impact of rigid gender stereotypes on all kids, and work to challenge these in our own childrearing. 

For example, on the No More Boys and Girls documentary they tried providing all kids with gender diverse toys and clothes and allowing them to make their own choices, they deliberately exposed kids to people who worked in non-stereotypical occupations like a male ballet dancer and a female mechanic, and they did activities that showed the kids how equal boys and girls were on physical strength and all kinds of activities at that age. 

It’s important that schools and families move in this direction, towards raising human beings who have all the choices available to them, rather than restricting their future possibilities, and later mental health, with rigid gender stereotypes.

Trans author and educator S. Bear Bergman also suggests that, while things remain so tough for gender diverse people, we could consider having gender reveal parties for people when they come out as trans or non-binary. What might it be like – for everyone – if we saw gender creativity as something to celebrate, rather than something to commiserate? What if we regarded trans, intersex, and non-binary people as a gift – as artist Travis Alabanza puts it – who have something vital to teach everybody about the beautiful, unique, complexity of all of our genders.

Find out more

There’s more on these topics in my books Gender: A Graphic Guide, How to Understand Your Gender, and Life Isn’t Binary. There’s also a free zine for exploring gender here.

If you enjoyed this, please consider supporting my Patreon here.

The post Letting go of gender reveal parties appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

One is not born, but rather one becomes, a woman.

Perhaps the most famous quote from de Beauvoir’s writing on gender, The Second Sex, is this one. Here she is arguing, from autobiographical experience and from the available evidence at the time, that the things associated with womenhood (such as being passive, concerned with appearance, childlike and in need of protection, and wanting to care for others) are imposed upon women by society rather than being innate characteristics they are born with.

Current understandings of gender view it – like so much of human behaviour – as a complex biopsychosocial interweaving rather than something that can be simplistically put down to ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’. Gender theory alerts us to the diversity of possible gendered identities and roles available, whilst emphasising the limited patterns of masculinity and femininity which we are pushed to repeat and repeat until they feel ‘natural’. Biological findings on neuroplasticity reveal that the likely underlying brain processes are neural pathways which are strengthened by such repetitions. So we could say that gendered identity is a process of narrowing down from the possibilities which are available at birth.

There are, of course, some biological limits on what is possible from the start, which differ from person to person, but de Beauvoir emphasises the social limits which constrain these. Her focus here is on freedom, the fact of humanity that her partner, Jean-Paul Sartre, emphasised in his work. Sartre highlighted the importance in life of becoming aware of the meanings which are imposed upon us by others (societal assumptions about what people like us should be like, or family expectations about what we are going to do) and breaking free of these. De Beauvoir pointed out that such breaking through of ‘the ceiling which is stretched over their heads’ is easier for some than for others. Embracing one’s freedom may be virtually impossible for those who are enslaved, and may be easier for some than others even in times and places where everyone is regarded as ‘free’.

The lie to which the adolescent girl is condemned is that she must pretend to be an object, and a fascinating one, when she senses herself as an uncertain, dissociated being, well aware of her blemishes.

De Beauvoir argues that, at the stage in life when boys are encouraged to become ‘little men’ and to become independent and to ‘dominate nature’ with their bodies. Girls are taught, through playing with dolls, through being complimented and critiqued on their appearance, and through being warned about various dangers of life, to be passive, that their body is something to beautify, and that the world is something to be scared of.

Focusing on this aspect of ‘being an object’ in particular, we can see that women are still regarded very much in terms of their appearance, although these days they are encouraged to beautify themselves for their own pleasure and ‘fun’ rather than explicitly for the pleasure of others. However, it is often difficult to disentangle the pleasure derived from feeling one looks good from the pleasure derived because someone else thinks you look good. Appearance is a key focus of women’s magazines, and the ideals of feminine beauty are so narrow that many are excluded from it, and even minor deviations from it are remarkable (as in the recent Guardian article about models who ‘break the mould’).

The other focus in women’s magazines, and in movies and TV shows aimed at women, are relationships with men. De Beauvoir comments that ‘a great many adolescent girls when asked about their plans for the future, reply . . . “I want to get married”. But no young man considers marriage as his fundamental project’. Miranda on Sex and The City echoed this concern several decades later when she stormed out of a café complaining that all that her (very successful) friends talked about was men, but it is revealed later in the episode that she was only upset because she wasn’t really over her ex-boyfriend.

The less she exercises her freedom to understand, to grasp and discover the world about her, the less resources will she find within herself, the less will she dare to affirm herself as a subject.

De Beauvoir argues that, in such ways, women are encouraged into ‘being for others’ rather than ‘being for themselves’. Many women struggle to tune into their own desires and needs due to seeing pleasure as something to be gained from pleasing others, and put themselves through unhappiness or pain feeling that this is what they are supposed to do.

Of course we can question the benefits of both the ‘for others’ and ‘for themselves’ sides of the binary. It is problematic to feel that our only identity is in the role that we have in other people’s lives (as many women find when they lose such roles), and troubling to have to constantly monitor their body and self to ensure that they are pleasing to others. On the other hand, as de Beauvoir pointed out, there are benefits to such a position: not having to feel responsible for your actions because you don’t believe that you have power to affect the world, and real pleasure when you are approved of or desired. Being ‘for themselves’ (as men are encouraged to be) involves the weight of responsibility which comes from being called upon to make autonomous choices and to be self-sufficient and protective of others, when we may well actually feel scared, incapable and vulnerable ourselves. Also, as de Beauvoir suggested, mutual relationships are very difficult indeed if one person needs to be constantly affirmed as a beautiful object, or one person is constantly denying the other the freedom and responsibility that they have themselves.

De Beauvoir further (and perhaps controversially) highlights the role of women in limiting other women. She points out what a threat it can be for a mother to see a daughter breaking through and embracing their freedom and resisting the roles being thrust upon them in ways they were unable to do themselves. Perhaps we can relate this to the women-produced magazines that still welcome women in to a self-scrutinising, appearance and relationship obsessed world; as well as the tendency to point to the lack of freedom of women in ‘other’ places as a way of obscuring our own situation.

Inspiring futures

If people become their gender rather than being born into them, and if we regard freedom to become, without limitations, as a vital part of the picture, perhaps the important thing to do is open up possibilities for becoming as much as we can.

We could link this to recent pressures from intersex activists who have argued for intersex people (the 1-2% of people who are born with anatomy or physiology which differs from contemporary ideals of ‘normal’ male and female) to be able to make their own choices about the gendering (or not) of their bodies later in life, rather than having this imposed upon them with surgeries in childhood which often have no medical necessity, as has previously been the case.

There has been a furore in the media recently about families who have made similar decisions about apparently non-intersex children, demanding their right to decide upon their own gender later on in life rather than having it imposed upon them from birth. Many commentators have seen this as deeply problematic or even abusive. However, we could – from de Beauvoir’s perspective – view it in another way: locating the problem in a society that enforces particular ideals of gender onto children; thus limiting what they are able to become.

Find out more:

All these ideas are explored further in my book How to Understand Your Gender.

The following books all raise interesting issues in these ongoing discussions:

Caitlin Moran: How to be a woman

Norah Vincent: Self made man

Kate Bornstein: My gender workbook

Cordelia Fine: Delusions of gender

The post Becoming a woman: The gender theories of Simone de Beauvoir appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.