Contributed by Emi Webb
I am all for celebrating gender. I am a cis woman who is in a heterosexual marriage. I am the mother of two rascals who as far as they have expressed thus far are also cis, but only time will tell.
What I am not for is celebrating gender before the individual has had the ability to fully come to terms with their gender as they understand it. I am not for imposing gender on young children, using the sex that they are born as to determine a very personal part of their gender identity before it has even had a chance to bloom.
I believe every parent has a right to make essential parenting determinations and celebrations as they will. Some parents wish to celebrate their pregnancy via a gender reveal party. However, I, in my not so humble opinion, think that gender reveal parties for infants are misleading and utterly ridiculous. Instead, why can't we just celebrate the pregnancy? I am totally okay with celebrating the pregnancy every single day of it, but why are we using this sort of thing to impose and reinforce gender stereotypes? The kid hasn’t even been born yet, much less come to terms with the idea of gender!
I believe that most gender reveal parties, especially alongside other baby showers, are honestly just a backwards way to ask for gifts. I mean, we are in an age where we love gift giving. Look at how commercialized our gift giving process has become? It isn't by accident. We are in an age where many people go into debt to finance their holidays. I believe we need to fix this, of course, because it isn't economically sustainable, but I am not going to pretend that the behavioral economics of it aren't that we don’t eat that stuff up. We love getting and giving gifts. That is okay to admit.
What I think is important is that we be honest about our intentions. If we want gifts, we can just ask. If we want to party, why can't we just celebrate? Life is amazing, and life is short and fleeting. If we want to celebrate our gender, our love, our friendships, we just can.
To prove this point, my friends and I set up a gag gender reveal party for one of my adult friends. His name is Mike and he is a really strong character, very intelligent and open minded, a great sport, honest and confident. He is also my husband's friend and the husband of one of my wildly fantastic friends. Facebook had put up a memory that my friend Mike and I had been friends on Facebook for exactly one year. I posted the memory and teased that I demand gifts for this celebration of friendship. In reality, I had friended him a year ago because I wanted to stalk and see who my friend had fallen for, and he turned out to be a good guy.
On the thread, we had a bit of cultural criticism that we can ask for gifts for anything, and further teased using the example of a gender reveal party for adults.
Then it clicked. Why not? Why not celebrate? What is holding us back from celebrating the gender of adults? Why do we assign gender to young children so viciously, but we don’t celebrate adults for who they have defined themselves to be? I am all for transgender reveal parties. I am all for celebrating who you are. Why not throw a party?
So, we did. I made a gender reveal cake with Mike and Ikes inside (a play on his name). We had gifts. Some genuine, some playful. Our kids all played through the house like crazy. We ended up eating cake, watched his wife and our friends spin poi, we played with the cats and played Red Dragon Inn (a board game of fantasy and drinking – which was a bit funny because many of us don’t actually drink). We had a fun celebration of friends. Why? Because we can.
I think that we as a society need to embrace that a little more. We are so sucked into our jobs and online relationships that we forget to get together and celebrate. It is especially difficult to remember that essential self-care as adults. I think just celebrating ourselves and each other is incredibly vital to the health of our society. Why don’t we just call it what it is? Celebrating people for who they are and our friendships we have built.