The Big Reveal: What’s the big deal?
I learned recently about baby “gender reveal” parties. Up front, I’m not in favor of them. But now let me back up and set the stage.
A friend of mine on Facebook recently posted a photo, saying something like, “The baby’s gender is in this bag,” which amused me a bit because gender isn’t something that can be contained in a brown paper sandwich bag. But I knew what was intended. At the time I just rolled my eyes and forgot about it.
But then I saw a video from this friend where they lit said bag on fire, revealing *gasp* colored smoke! While my mind was drifting, wondering idly what materials you burn to get such a pleasant shade of smoke, or pondering the physical mechanics of where they lit the bag to ensure that the package was ignited properly to let off so much of it.
But then I realized that people in the background were, like… really excited. And the couple who had lit the bag were also bizarrely excited.
“That’s weird,” I said, alerting my wife to something potentially interesting happening on my screen.
“What’s going on?”
I explained what I’d seen, and how weird it was that these people had put this whole elaborate scene together. I further explained that it felt disingenuous to hold the information hostage like that so your friends don’t know and are forced to guess while you gloat over it or whatever.
She then expounded to me the depth of the “big reveal” parties. It turns out, people force their doctors not to show them the ultrasounds. They then take these images to someone — a trusted friend, skilled in pyrotechnics, perhaps, or a cake maker — and that person then puts together some kind of package to reveal to everyone the baby’s gender. Using color, I guess. Blue for boys and red for girls, which… no, never mind, that’s a different blog post.
And this whole practice blew my mind. Why was it such a big deal? I mean, when my wife was pregnant with our first child, I certainly had some hopes about what gender I felt I would be better at raising and guiding through the twisted land of gender expectations that is our modern society, but when we found out for sure how our baby’s genitals would present themselves, there wasn’t really a change in my level of excitement or interest. It was still our baby that we had made together and who we would be teaching how to be as awesome as we can, no matter what.
So when all these voices in the video suddenly got so excited about the color of smoke, I started to worry.
This Isn’t Benign
Setting aside how actually quite disturbing it is that many people are so preoccupied with babies’ genitals… how much expectation have you already laid upon your child — just based on their assigned gender — when the color of smoke or frosting on a cake becomes an event worth celebrating? Or even a secret which contains value worth withholding, like it gives you some kind of (even playful) power over others?
Look, I love surprises. I love getting an unexpected bonus. I love when my family randomly show up to hang out. I love when my wife makes me an awesome sculpture in Minecraft that I had no idea she was working on. I love finding out that someone came in and did a bunch of work for me over the weekend so when I arrive at the office on Monday, I don’t have to do all the tedious things I thought. All of these things enrich my life. They make things easier for me, or contribute to the value of my existence on some level. They show that people care and that I’m valued. They can sometimes even change the course of my life for the better.
But the sex of my children doesn’t — like, either side of the spectrum —it doesn’t really change anything for me. I was planning on loving them, caring for them, and teaching them how to be awesome and happy in a world where it’s depressingly easy to be lazy and miserable. The content of my fatherhood doesn’t change because of their biological makeup or expression. Sure, the framing about how I help teach them to navigate the world’s expectations will be slightly different, but… like, I just don’t see the value in making such a big deal about an unborn baby’s gender.
And I worry that the societal tendency to make such a big deal out of it betrays the weight that we put upon something as arbitrary as gender. And I wonder, has the damage already begun and the baby hasn’t even been born yet?
Alternatives?
I feel like it’s pretty pointless to criticize common cultural practices without offering some kind of alternative or replacement. People want (and shouldn’t be ashamed) to have celebrations around their coming baby’s birth. And people want to talk about how your child’s development is, which isn’t necessarily wrong, either. So here (with a bit of smug irony about the last half of my article becoming a freaking listicle) are like 5 things you can do instead of focusing on the arbitrarily-assigned genitalia of your fetus.
- Celebrate size milestones. There are tons of websites which will compare your baby’s size at different stages of development. Many of them use various fruit, but you can also find a number of nerdier ones, too if that’s your thing (which it’s totally my thing). So pick a few interesting ones, and throw a party where like… everyone eats grapefruit because that’s how big your fetus is. Feel free to talk about how creepy it is that you’re eating something solely because it’s the same size as your fetus — and rest secure in the knowledge that it’s still less creepy than revealing the shape of your baby’s genitals to the world.
- Celebrate each trimester. Sure, it’s basically the same deal here, but honestly, what isn’t? Your fetus is now past some arbitrary point in its development, no matter how you slice it. But people are used to trimesters as a framework for fetus size, so they may not even notice that you’re bailing on the whole “now you can start forming ideas and expectations about what my baby will be like based on its sex organs, and it hasn’t even seen light yet” thing.
- Have a tender teaching moment rather than focusing on sex or gender. I mean, look, sometimes strangers be all “is it a boy or a girl” and if you just want them to buzz off, giving them an answer (doesn’t have to be an honest answer, by the way — like how will they know? Random old lady at Walgreen’s gonna check up on you to make sure you didn’t feed her lies in the checkout?) may be the best way to accomplish that. But for someone you care about, it might be worth pointing out that, regardless of the baby’s sex, you plan to teach it to be a good human being and encourage it to live an empowered life where it can feel comfortable and confident in following its passions to become its best self. Because honestly that’s what being “a person” is about far more than what’s between its legs and whether its boobies are wired to make milk. (Side note: I hear dude-boobs can sometimes secrete milk-like fluid under proper conditions, so… take that as another sign that the difference between sexes isn’t as clear-cut as we’d like to think.)
- Have a direct teaching moment. Like, call them out on it. In fact, make it a big deal. I’m totally stealing this idea and I can’t find the original source, but throw that gender reveal party, and then when they cut into the cake, it’s freaking just white inside. Then, while everyone is trying to figure out what that means, lock all the doors, dim the lights, and start up your PowerPoint presentation on how pushing our ideas of gender roles onto infants is dangerous and has caused a massive amount of psychological and emotional problems in our society throughout generations.
- Make people uncomfortable. Screw teaching. Make it a joke. Have that gender reveal party, but make that junk like super raunchy. Bring out the vagina cookies and dickerdoodles (links NSFW, in case that wasn’t obvious). Put up clinic posters about male or female anatomy. Take that PowerPoint idea from above and make it about how your fetus’s reproductive system will function in the future to make you grand-babies and perpetuate the species. Hire a stripper to show people what your baby’s genitals might look like in the future. The sky (or the gutter?) is the limit, so go spring-break wild. That’ll teach them how totally-not-weird it is to be preoccupied with your fetus’s nasty bits.
- [Bonus] While writing that last one, I came up with another idea: Make it a history lesson. Kind of like the “own it and make it awkward” idea, but more serious; you could for sure do some research and have the party focused on discussing historical gender roles, how they’ve changed over the centuries, how they’re completely arbitrary and unrealistic and not at all based on actual biology, and how pushing unhealthy gender stereotypes onto children begins a path that often leads to depression and violence and confusion and unhappiness. Explain all the kinds of things that people do when it comes to subconsciously forcing gender roles onto children, and how you are going to do everything in your power to avoid that, and then ask for their help and support in trying to raise a child into adulthood without the seemingly requisite damage of unnatural social programming.
So there you have it. A few ways to combat the problematic practice of the gender-reveal. I hope I’ve been informative and maybe a little entertaining. If you have your own ideas for ways that expecting parents and people close to them can celebrate in alternative ways, I’d love to hear them!
Cheers. :)
Some related links:
One researcher documented how a mother spoke to her baby in-utero both before and after discovering the sex of the child. It was found that the mother used harsher tones after learning that the child would be male.
Here is a paper I’d like to read on the Anticipatory Socialization of Pregnant Women. Sadly, it’s behind a pay wall and costs US$36 to unlock 24 hours where you can download the article. That’s a different article. But the abstract suggests that mothers do change how they refer to unborn children after discovering the sex.
Pink Brain, Blue Brain is a science-based analysis of how gender constructs are formed and what research shows is actually biological and what isn’t. Full disclosure, I only recently learned about this book and haven’t read it yet. But I’ve starting reading it.
Wikipedia: Gender role: Theories of gender as a social construct
Unicef: Early Gender Socialization
World Health Organization: What do we mean by “sex” and “gender”? (archive)
World Health Organization: Gender and Genetics
In Utero (Spotify link, sorry if you don’t Spoot) is a Nirvana album, BTW. Only barely tangentially related, but there you go. It has some of their classics, like “Heart Shaped Box”. But maybe you already knew that…

