What Gender Reveal Parties Actually Reveal About Gender
Why are parents (literally) dying to know their kid’s gender?
Last week yet another “gender reveal party” disaster crossed my news feed causing me to ask (yet again) “Why are parents *literally* dying to know their kid’s gender?” This time it was a 29-year-old father-to-be from Upstate New York killed by explosives from some device he was rigging for a gender reveal party. But he’s not alone.
In September 2020, sparks from a smoke device started the 22,000-acre “El Dorado Fire” in Southern California that burned for 23 days and killed a fireman. In April 2020, a gender reveal party in Florida sparked a 110-acre brush fire that caused $8 million in damage.
In October 2019, an Iowa grandmother was struck and killed by shrapnel from a homemade “pipe bomb” during a gender reveal party. In April 2017, an off-duty U.S. Border Patrol agent ignited the 45,000-acre Sawmill Fire in Arizona by firing his gun at a gender reveal device that threw off sparks into the surrounding brush (video here).
Jenna Karvunidis is credited as the originator of the new way for couples to announce the gender of their (as yet unborn) child. But what started with a cake with pink icing has turned into a dangerous game of one-up-man ship.
To understand why, we need to consider what gender reveal parties actually reveal and who’s most responsible for turning (what should be) a moment of celebration into one of tragedy.
Gender reveal parties purport to make known hitherto-unknown information about a fetus, specifically its “gender.” But is that what they actually do?
Some might be surprised to learn that gender reveal parties don’t actually reveal the gender of an unborn child. What they make known is fetal sex, specifically the presence or absence of a visible penis. That information is usually gathered during a prenatal ultrasound (aka sonogram) occurring mid-way through a pregnancy.
Though theoretically able to detect both female- and male-typical fetal genitalia, the presence of a penis — sometimes even erect — is the central criterion for predicting the sex of the fetus using a prenatal ultrasound. If a penis is visible, fetal sex is predicted to be male. If it is not visible, fetal sex is predicted to be female.
The centrality of the penis to prenatal sonography — its phallocentrism — is a clue to why gender reveal parties take the form they do (and why they so often turn deadly).
It’s important to clarify here that sex and gender aren’t the same things. “Sex” typically refers to biological, anatomical, or physiological traits used to categorize a person to be characterized as (most commonly) female or male. A small percentage of the population — intersex people — possesses some combination of genetic, hormonal, or anatomical sex traits that do not allow them to be easily categorized as female or male.
By contrast, “gender” typically refers to the social, cultural, or psychological aspects of (most commonly) women or men, but also includes transgender, gender non-binary, and genderqueer people. It involves things like gender identity and how we present our sense of ourselves as gendered to the world, as well as the social and cultural expectations (or “norms”) for a person of a particular sex.
Gender reveal parties don’t reveal gender. They reveal fetal sex, specifically the visible presence/absence of a penis.
Yet, the terms “sex” and “gender” are used interchangeably by the prenatal ultrasound industry (a good example). Other components of human sex, such as genetics/DNA/chromosomes, hormones, and brain anatomy/function, are not detectable using ultrasound technology (though they can be with other, less common/more risky prenatal sex-prediction procedures).
In other words, prenatal ultrasounds anchor an as-yet-unborn child’s gender in their biological sex, specifically their genital sex: whether the visible shape of the external genitalia appears phallic. The train of thought seems to be: genital shape = sex and sex → gender therefore genitals = gender. That logic — that genitals are the sole determinant of sex and that sex determines a person’s gender — is a deeply conservative way of thinking about sex and gender.
It’s called biological determinism and it’s been used for centuries to deny women, homosexuals, and transgender people social equality (by claiming their “inferior” biology, anatomy, or physiology justifies their relegation to second-class status). The scurrilous fiction that menstruation causes women to be too “emotionally unstable” to fully participate in civil society — by voting, serving on juries, holding elected office, etc. — is a classic example of biological determinism. Similar arguments have been used to justify institutionalization and medical experimentation on homosexuals and to deny transgender people access to necessary healthcare.
By treating sex revelation as gender revelation, prenatal ultrasounds (and the gender reveal parties on which they’re based) perpetuate the fiction that a person’s gender is determined by their sex. In this, they actively perpetuate a way of thinking about gender used historically to elevate cisgender heterosexual men above women, lesbians and gays, and transgender people.
This partly helps explain the jubilant reaction of so many fathers-to-be at the gender reveal parties when they learn that “it’s a boy” and their comparatively tepid response, even visible disappointment, when “it’s a girl” (some examples).
They’re not just celebrating the birth of a male child. They're celebrating the reproduction of a social order that privileges (cisgender heterosexual) men and promises to privilege their (cisgender heterosexual) sons. And that social order is called patriarchy.
When I teach Intro to Women’s Studies classes, I always have to pause at the beginning of the unit on reproductive health to remind students that, although feminists typically promote social equality of the sexes, biological differences in male-typical and female-typical bodies means that human reproduction is never going to be “socially equal.”
Female bodies typically possess the reproductive anatomy that allows them to gestate to another human being and male bodies typically do not. In almost all human societies, women, girls, and mothers are given the majority of responsibility for the care and raising of children. That work is feminized and, even when recognized, typically goes un- or under-rewarded.
By contrast, during pregnancy, the sperm donor (aka Dad) plays little more than a supporting role. After a human egg absorbs a human sperm his job, assuming he hangs around, is to support the pregnant woman until childbirth. I don’t want to minimize the importance of partner support during pregnancy but it’s orders of magnitude different than growing another person inside you for nine months then expelling them via your genitals.
I don’t have a uterus but those who’ve carried a pregnancy to term and given birth tell me you don’t know what it’s like unless you’ve done it. When it comes to reproduction, human females and human males are not “equal.” And it’s understandable why some fathers-to-be might feel left out during their partner’s pregnancy.
If only because of biological differences, human reproduction is never going to be “socially equal.”
That might help explain the self-conscious performativity of so many gender reveal parties, especially those that result in injury and death. Their oversized visual and aural elements, including masculine-coded ‘props’ like smoke, fire, explosives, guns, bows-and-arrows, low-flying planes, bombs, and cannons, seem more suited to the theater of war than a celebratory backyard party.
Also common: devices that explode with colored powder; clubbing of large balloons or pinatas; use of sharp needles, scissors, or knives; hot-rods burning rubber to ignite pink or blue smoke; and, boxes that fall from ceilings, often hitting pregnant women and small children. (The number of small children who end up crying at a gender reveal party is both astonishing and telling of their real priorities.)
These theatrical productions seem to be solely the product of the menfolk. It’s exuberant fathers-to-be, their brothers, or male best friends who conceive and produce the homemade gender reveal technologies that result in so much injury and death. And their little boys, who are so often enlisted to swing the golf club or baseball bat that strikes a device that emits some kind of gender-coded pink or blue smoke, powder, or confetti.
All of which feels compensatory, like a muscular assertion of masculine relevance to a lifecycle event in which men are mostly side-lined. Though most gender reveal parties seem more modestly conceived, the ones that make the news seem designed to conspicuously and violently re-center men in what is largely women’s work: pregnancy and childbirth.
It reminds me of that old theory by anthropologists that the mysteries of men’s cults and conception of masculinity as a difficult, ritual accomplishment is a cultural response to the awesome power that is female reproduction.
Along with flash mob proposals and engagement photos, gender reveal parties are probably now a permanent part of the repertoire of heterosexual reproduction.
Like all cultural rituals, a close reading reveals truths their participants might not be willing to openly admit: that, as a society, we still esteem men more highly than women and that pregnancy and childbirth are so threatening, some men will risk injury and death to displace women from the center of human reproduction.
Gender reveal parties do tell us something about gender. Just not that of any gestating fetus.
Michael J. Murphy, PhD, is Associate Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield. He is the author of many book chapters, and encyclopedia and journal articles. Most recently, he edited Living Out Loud: An Introduction to LGBTQ History, Society, and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2019). He tweets @emjaymurphee.
