At a recent Tim McGraw concert, a man in the crowd held up a sign that read “Tim Mcgraw will you do our gender reveal?!” McGraw took an envelope from the fan and his pregnant wife, opening it on stage.
“It’s a Tim!” joked the country music star and 57-year-old father of three, revealing that the couple was expecting a boy.
Although they usually don’t involve celebrity guests, gender reveals — a trend in which a couple learns the sex of their unborn child in a public way — are more popular than ever. In 2019, a company called “Poof there it is!” which sells gender reveal party products, including confetti, streamers and balloons, told The Atlantic that it was participating in about 200 gender reveals a day. If Instagram and TikTok video clips are any indication, the trend has only grown since then.
Paradoxically, it has at the same time become trendy to believe that sex itself is a social construct.
Today, those who see themselves at the forefront of social and political progressivism believe that the “gender” being “revealed” at these parties indicates only a sex “assigned at birth” — onethat could change based on the baby in question’s eventual self-understanding. For them, blue balloons today represent no barrier to membership on a women’s swim team in 18 years, because sex is mutable, based on feelings and preferences.
Of course, this notion contradicts basic biology. The reality that most people still accept is that sex is chromosomal and dimorphic, and that changing one’s sex is biologically impossible.
However, broad acceptance of the word “gender,” especially in these unveilings of pink or blue confetti, unintentionally perpetuates progressive ideas of gender ideology, in which biological sex as such is considered not to exist.
Most people who use the phrase “gender reveal” conceive of “gender” as just a synonym for “sex” — one that they’re more comfortable putting on a party invitation. Fair enough.
But when progressives who believe sex itself to be a mere suggestion — one that can be “assigned” —use the word “gender,” they are referring to the set of preferences, pastimes and behaviors traditionally correlated with each sex. That is, blue and superheroes for boys, and pink and princesses for girls. Today’s gender ideologues insist that such preferences, pastimes and behaviors supersede biological reality. To be a girl, for example, is not necessarily to have two X-chromosomes, but rather to like dresses.
If the pastimes and behaviors deemed typically “feminine” are engaged in by more “people assigned female at birth” than “people assigned male at birth,” gender ideologues allege, it is because we have encouraged them to identify with these pastimes and behaviors, not because they gravitate naturally toward playing “house” as opposed to playing “war.” The reverse is also true: To the extent that “people assigned male at birth” overwhelmingly prefer Batman to Frozen, it is because we have socialized them that way, not because most little boys naturally prefer fighting games to fairy tales.
This is nonsense, of course. Biology, not socialization, is at the heart of the reality that most boys are different from most girls, not just physically but emotionally. On average, boys are more aggressive and less agreeable than girls. This is not a debate; it is a scientific fact — one reliant not on social norms, but on evolutionary reality.
Yet, the phrase “on average” still matters.
These traits that separate the sexes by personality — and even by physiognomy — exist on overlapping bell curves. Yes, the modal girl is more agreeable, less aggressive, and physically smaller and weaker than the average boy. Nevertheless, some girls are less agreeable, more aggressive, larger, and stronger than some boys. Some girls do prefer Batman, and some boys do prefer Frozen.
By virtue of both the phrase “gender reveal” and the common reliance of such celebrations on stereotypically “boy” or “girl” décor and preferences, gender reveal ceremonies give gender ideologues a veneer of gender essentialism on which to hang their hats. If the dominant culture still assumes that “girl” is synonymous with pink confetti and princess décor, the minority of those “assigned female at birth” who do not like those things may not be girls after all. By the same token, if a person “assigned male at birth” likes princesses, too, then voila, they can claim he’s probably a girl!
Most parents who do gender reveals, like most American adults generally, likely know that the minority of boys who prefer dolls to trucks are no less male than the majority of boys who prefer trucks to dolls. Nevertheless, the overlay of traditional “gendered” expectations onto what is ultimately knowledge only of a baby’s sex — which is correlated with but does not absolutely determine her or his personality or preferences — seems to reinforce the alleged need for transgender identities.
In other words, if being “assigned male at birth” remains so constraining as to consign all boys to a life of monster trucks and superheroes, regardless of their preferences, then boys who feel most at home playing house would indeed require a way to escape boyhood itself.
Fortunately, in today’s mainstream America, neither boyhood nor girlhood are constrained in that way. There are still norms for girls and norms for boys, mostly because nature will have its way, even without our help.
But the gender reveal trend does make it seem as though the heteronormative, “gendered” constraints are reliably predictive of something beyond a baby’s sex. And that plays straight into the strangely regressive hands of allegedly progressive gender ideologues.
This is why it’s time to cancel the “gender reveal” — not the celebration, necessarily, but the name.
“Gender” as both a word and a concept, obscures far more than it reveals. It has got to go.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about education, culture and politics.
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