“Lately, that's been a lot of rainbows and unicorns, and his favourite colour is pink,” she says. 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. 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.
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.Īll 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. 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. When you look at the statistics for how people identify today, the rigid ideas perpetuated by gender reveals feels outdated. Do gender reveals reflect the world we live in now?
“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. 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.ĭr 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.
GENDER REVEAL PARTY SERIES
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. 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. 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. Why have gender-reveal parties divided opinion? 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 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. Los Angeles-based blogger Jenna Karvunidis claims to be the pioneer of this global trend. Enter gender-reveal parties: events thrown during pregnancy to reveal the sex of the baby to the expecting parents, family and friends.
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