Throwing the perfect gender reveal party may seem like a daunting task at first, but — believe it or not — it’s actually pretty easy! There are just two steps:
- Wait until your child declares a gender identity.
- Throw a party!
Parents-to-be seem to just love cutting into a trendy pink or blue cake — but contrary to common belief, babies don’t develop a gender identity in the womb. In fact, children don’t even begin thinking of themselves as a boy or a girl until about age two or three, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. (Of course, some kids fall outside those two categories entirely.)
By age four, though, most kids have settled into a strong, consistent gender identity.
And it isn’t always the one that their parents expect.
Why We Need to Let Our Kids Decide for Themselves
Sometimes, a child’s expression of their own gender is at odds with what a parent thinks it should be. Perhaps a child insists that they’re a girl, even though everyone assumes that they’re a boy. Or a child doesn’t like to play with the toys their parents think are “right” for their gender.
Griffin Hansbury is a licensed clinical social worker and psychoanalyst, and has spent the last decade working with adults and teens across a broad spectrum of gender identities. His practice focuses specifically on gender identity and sexuality. Hansbury argues that, in cases like these, it’s especially crucial that parents offer children time and space to explore and express gender on their own terms.
“Children know who they are,” he pointed out.
And when parents are “overinvested” in their own ideas of what their child’s gender should be — and how that gender should act — the children are the ones to suffer.
“If you are pushing your fantasy of who [your children] are on them, you’re getting in the way — in a way that will have profound ripples for the rest of that child’s life,” Hansbury continued. “It’s an incredible disservice.”
By way of example, Hansbury referred to some of his cisgender male patients.
As boys, when they’d wanted to play with dolls or do ballet, their parents shamed them for it — because it didn’t match the parents’ idea of how boys “should act.” That shame was “crippling, horrible,” Hansbury noted. “And then you have adults who are acting it out in often self-destructive ways.”
These consequences can be extremely serious. According to the Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization that provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention for LGBTQ youth, suicide rates are four times higher for LGB youth than their straight peers. Forty percent of transgender adults reported having attempted suicide at least once — and nearly all those who did said that they made their first attempt before age 25.
Those dire statistics make a strong argument for skipping that pink or blue cake — or at least postponing it.
Freedom to self-determine gender identity is for everybody, said Hansbury.
“Everybody gets to have their own experience of self, and that includes gender.”
“The thing is to really listen to your kid. If your kid is saying, ‘This is who I am, this is what I like, this is what I’m interested in, these are the toys I like, these are the clothes I want to wear,’ listen. They’ll tell you,” he said.
And when they tell you? THEN it’s time to party. But until they get there, it’s better for them — and for you — to give them the space to work this out for themselves.
Chaia Milstein has written for Racked, Waddle, Viacom, Showtime, NBCUniversal/mun2, and others. She lives in Brooklyn with her spouse and their baby.
