Why is it important for your kids to declare their own gender?
Another article on the problem with gender reveal parties and the fact they are literally causing California to burn down
Why is it important for kids to declare their own gender?
I’m so glad you asked because as we speak California is on fire due to a ‘gender reveal’ having gone wrong. And because this is not the first time that one of these reveals caused a fire, I apologize in advance if I get a little snippy.
I assume you are asking this question about kids declaring their own gender because you do not understand why so many people are taking this apocalyptic moment to make you feel bad about having a party with your family and friends to celebrate the birth of your baby and announce — to the world — their sexual organs. And even though your party did not end in a disaster, you are annoyed with sense of guilt you have towards your own Instagram and Facebook posts that are covered in either pink or blue powder.
So let’s start from the basics. At these parties you are not revealing the gender of your baby, you are revealing their sex — a set of biological attributes. Gender is different from sex in that it is a social construct and has nothing to do with a persons sexual organs. When people use the phrase ‘social construct’ they are saying that this is something that has to be learned. Gender is an idea that we learn and then perform. In other words, I can never complete the idea of woman but I can perform some of its characteristics.
But let’s get back to these parties and the reality of why you are not throwing fetus genitalia parties. You are not going to throw a sexual category reveal party or a sexual organ celebration — maybe one day when we are collectively more comfortable with images of the vagina but even then, I suspect you will still think it is weird because running around talking about a fetus’ sex sounds either inappropriate or too science-y, or it sounds not-interesting, or maybe it even sounds a bit like an invasion of this new person and their right to privacy.
The refusal to use the word ‘sex’ properly goes much deeper than a general lack of knowledge between gender and sex or the willingness to knowingly conflate the two words because everyone else does (either way, it’s not okay). Generally, there seems to be a shared fear and anxiety around the word ‘sex’ so much so that we even decline opportunities to use it correctly. This is strange because sex is beautiful, good, fun, and a basic part of life but in our very oppressive culture we of course have produced fear and anxiety around sex because, well, it’s easier to control people who are without passion, empathy, desire, and love — all things we can learn from healthy sex. So in that way it is really not surprising that we shy away from the word and that we’d rather be technically wrong than just say, “sex”.
Sex. Sex. Sex.
Now that we have that under our belts, let’s talk about why it is important for your child to declare their own gender. Your child is a human being who has the right to choice and freedom of expression and thought. Assigning a person their gender is controlling and manipulative. For example, if you are not okay with your partner telling you that you have to cook because you are a woman or you have to take the trash out because you are a man, then why would we suspend this logic for children and tell them they have to like dolls and wear pink if they are female or be aggressive in blue pants if they are a male? We don’t have to do this is the correct answer. Let males feel like they can grow their hair out, let young females feel comfortable with having short hair (especially if they are on swim team and their hair is prone to knots).
Letting a person decide who they are and what they like and how they like it outside of the gender binaries can be really liberating for a person. Do you really want your male child to wake up at the age of 40 and suddenly realize that they love cooking? My guess is no, you don’t want that.
Oh, you’re concerned that if you don’t force your male child to wear blue and play with soldier dolls that he will not be straight. Okay well while most people in my circles would just say — “so what if they are not heterosexual, who cares, I want my child to be happy “— I will try to answer this as best as I can. How a person chooses to express their love or who a person chooses to love is, again, not anyones business.
So really we need to understand why we think we have the right to cotnrol what other people do with their their bodies (and hearts). You pro-choice people who are also out here throwing around pink and blue powder like we are stuck in a binary Holi, I am looking at you. It is important to keep the logic of choice consistently present throughout our culture because once we drop the ball in one area, then we have indirectly dropped the ball in another.
Oh, what’s that, you’re not pro-choice either? Well then my suggestion to you is to consider how disciplined and controlled you have become to think that another person has no right over their own body and take a moment to think about when that control started and where it came from. Yeah, exactly, it was when they told you to be an abstract idea of a boy (or girl) and they told you to wear blue (or pink) for no logical reason. Maybe now, after all these years, you can undo all that work. Good luck. It’s not easy, but hey, at least your parents got to consume blue (or red) food coloring which I am fairly certain is really unhealthy.
