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Culture & Living
At once a viral sensation and condemned for causing wildfires and being plain outdated, events for expecting parents to reveal their baby’s gender have divided opinions more than ever this year
In 1975, a well-known experiment was conducted, known as ‘Baby X’, where a baby was dressed alternately in blue and pink and given a boy’s or girl’s name before being handed to an adult to look after. The study found that, for babies dressed in pink, adults gave them a doll to play with, treated the baby more gently, and assumed the baby was ‘upset’ if it cried. Babies dressed in blue were treated more roughly, given trucks to play with, and assumed to be ‘angry’ if they cried.
The study showed that, from the moment a child is born—perhaps even before—the perceived gender of that child affects how they’re treated. In the years since, research has proven that this discrepancy can impact a child’s physiology. Why then, in 2020, do we continuously place so much importance on a baby’s gender?
Enter gender-reveal parties: events thrown during pregnancy to reveal the sex of the baby to the expecting parents, family and friends. Los Angeles-based blogger Jenna Karvunidis claims to be the pioneer of this global trend. In 2008, she threw a party revealing her child to be a girl by cutting open a cake with pink icing and wrote about it on her blog High Gloss And Sauce. Throughout the 2010s, the popularity of reveal parties steadily grew with the help of celebrities such as Jessica Simpson and Jessica Alba, before the trend peaked in our collective consciousness in 2020.
In September, a Saudi-Arabian influencer couple known as the Anasala family posted a video titled ‘Biggest Gender Reveal Ever’ on YouTube, which has had more than 30m views. In it we see the couple travel to Dubai with their family where a dramatic light display on the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, reveals their baby’s gender in blue. There have been pop culture representations in recent years too, such as Maya Vander’s gender-reveal cake in Netflix’s Selling Sunset, or the blue confetti at Bow and Dre’s gender reveal in the third series of Black-ish. These examples, along with hundreds of others on YouTube, demonstrate how—partly thanks to social media—gender-reveal parties have turned into increasingly all-out spectacles.
There’s also been negative attention, though. In June, Karvunidis wrote in The Guardian that she regretted starting the trend because the events perpetuate gender norms. Things only got worse when, in September, authorities announced that The El Dorado fire in California was started by a pyrotechnic device at a gender-reveal party, its coloured smoke intended to indicate the baby’s gender. The New York Times reported that this wasn’t the first reveal to cause such an accident; the events have been linked to other fires and explosions, and even a plane crash. Criticism flowed on social media, asking whether these parties are relevant and what they say about the undue importance we continue to place on 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,” explains Dr Meg-John Barker, a psychologist and author who specialises in the subject of gender. “Here are three main points: 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, so they're either a boy or a girl.”
Dr Barker explains that these ideas are damaging to kids who don't end up conforming to sex and gender norms, including intersex, trans, and non-binary kids because it makes their battle to be recognised in their genders even greater. “The idea is also bad for all kids because it sets them up to believe that the division between girls and boys, women and men, is a really important one,” Dr Barker continues, “and that they need to conform to rigid ideas of what it means to be a feminine woman or a masculine man.” Just like Baby X.
When you look at the statistics for how people identify today, the rigid ideas perpetuated by gender reveals feels outdated. According to the Pew Research Centre, one in five American adults say they know someone who uses gender-neutral pronouns, while another study found that 41 per cent of gen-Z respondents identified as gender neutral. Meanwhile, Dr Barker points to research that has found more than a third of people have experienced their gender as ‘the other’ gender or neither gender, and the fact that between one and two per cent of babies are born with some variation of sex characteristics.
All this research indicates that we should be wary of anything that puts people in a box that it can be hard to move out of later because the reality is that we live in a world where many people do not identify with the gender they’re assigned at birth.
Lex, a 28-year-old lead product designer living in Los Angeles, threw a gender-reveal party as part of her baby shower in 2016, but later realised her child didn’t conform to the gender that was announced at the party. Now that her child is four, Lex finds herself actively trying to be more neutral towards gender so that her son can express himself freely. “Lately, that's been a lot of rainbows and unicorns, and his favourite colour is pink,” she says. “A big part of me regrets any decisions I've made that uphold the gender norms or constructs, especially on children, and especially on one who seems to not be interested in that type of generalisation.”
With hindsight, Lex wouldn’t have had a gender-reveal party, but her opinion on other people’s is “each to their own”. Meg, however, takes a stronger stance: “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 life course.”
For people who are just throwing gender-reveal parties because they want to celebrate their child, there are alternatives: an ‘I’m pregnant’ reveal, a name reveal, zodiac sign reveal, or as one parenting site suggests, a ‘chosen family’ party. Or you could just have a regular baby shower.
“Some parents are going as far as raising all kids gender-free until they're old enough to make a decision about what gender they experience themselves as being—if any,” says Dr Barker. There are increasing numbers of couples in the public eye who have chosen to take this route, from Grimes and Elon Musk to Emily Ratajkowski, who wrote about her decision for Vogue. But even if we don't take this route, we can clue ourselves up about the impact of rigid gender stereotypes on all kids. As Dr Barker says: “It's important that schools and families move towards raising human beings who have all the choices available to them, rather than restricting their future possibilities, and mental health, with rigid gender stereotypes.”
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