Gender- Reveal Celebrations for Babies Can Be Cute. They Also Help Explain the Trans Bathroom Panic.
It’s accepted among progressives at this point that gender is a kind of performance within constraints—something we actively create from the limited cultural materials we encounter. As such, it matters enormously for older children and adults as a way of making sense of themselves in (and for) the world. But it’s also a type of performance that babies and toddlers lack the neural connections to deliver—they are genderless, and thus destabilizing, and so we steady ourselves by, for instance, affixing hair bows on people who might not even have much hair.
A gender reveal will tell a future baby’s loved ones precisely nothing about what is actually important about her first months and years on Earth: her temperament, her response to food, the ease with which she sleeps and self-soothes and explores her expanding world. Babies and toddlers are mysterious; you really have no idea who they are, but you get the sense that they know you inside-out. A fetus is even more mysterious; you don’t even know what she looks like, and yet there she is, closer to you than any person could ever be. It’s understandable, I suppose, why some parents want to grab onto an either-or marker of certainty in the fundamentally uncertain situation that is pre- and early parenthood. But gender isn’t really there for the grabbing.
H/T: Slate
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