gender reveal parties, but a pendant shows up and explains it's meant to be a sex reveal party, but due to the more risque use of the word sex, and the ambigious uses of the word gender, communication about the motive of such things are difficult, and a feeding ground for pendants, people who have been marginalised, and oppressors.
I also don't know where I'm going with this. I'm not sure what my next task should be and I'm letting my mind percolate.
Ambiguous usage of the word is one of the reasons oppressors have such outdated and undereducated views. The less ambiguity the easier it can be explained to the common folk.
The fun bit is that the word gender was pulled from linguistics into sociology exactly to try to make a less ambiguous situation.
It literally went "what if we talked about people having gender like the French talk about objects?”
Much like people, a table is feminine in French regardless of if it has a penis or not.
Later, people decided to use gender as a synonym for sex and complain about using the word gender in a way that's ambiguous with sex.
"Sex reveal party". No, that sounds bad, too. "Assigned sex at birth reveal party". You know what? Maybe we shouldn't make such a big deal about what sex someone is born as and let them tell us who they are as they figure it out.
in some cases the evidence of "gender" is inferred based on a blood test (the popular commercial tests I know of just looks for the presence of Y chromosome in the mother's blood and infers the baby is male if so, and if not that the baby is female), so people who throw a party based on a blood test would be throwing a "presence of Y chromosome" party ...
because you mention apples i'm physically forced to share this trivia; There are two types of apple: Regular ones, and dessert ones. We're used to dessert apples, ones that are sweet enough to just take a bite out of. For most of history we only really had normal apples, which taste like shit and are basically only usable for cider and using in cooking.
i always say that a Gender Reveal Party can't really happen until the kid is like 16 years old. the thing people are currently doing would more accurately be called a Baby Sex Party.
Do people feel like you can't say if it's a girl or a boy before they're old enough to express some preference? That seems to be the thing people pick on with gender reveal parties but that doesn't really make sense to me if you're cool with "It's a girl. We're going to name her Alice." without the party. It's not like the party is usually hyper fixated on gender roles. You cut some cake or pop some balloons during a pretty normal family party. Sex chromosomes/genitals are one of the only unique things you really learn about the baby before they're here that isn't generally considered bad news. I guess we could have height percentile parties?
The problem is that if you do away with gender roles, then a gender reveal party turns into a baby vagina/penis reveal party. It's a creepy concept that is only normalized because of society's hyper fixation on gender roles and we should just get rid of it.
Very often at this point, expectant parents are basing it on the presence of a Y chromosome or not, not on genitals. Does that take the creepiness out for you?
Do you have a problem with them disclosing the gender of their children at all?
I might guess with such a party you really reinforce everyone's image of the baby's sex and they might be less accepting if the person comes out as a different gender further down the line? Idk
Doesn't really matter. The moment the people hear it's male or female, determines how people will treat the baby. Put a baby boy in pink and don't tell people, and people will talk to him like they would to a girl.
Whether or not people accept the small chance that the kid turns out transgender, depends on their personal views. I doubt a gebder reveal party is significant. Besides, it's a party for the parents to be. Not the baby.
This is my people. By that, I mean "nerdy leftists who are pretty self-aware in their absurdity, but it can be very hard to tell from the outside, so they are often very cringe to people who aren't of the same story". It's silly, and I love it
shit still doesn't exist outside of america as far as i can tell, it's one of those things that are hilariously predicable which people in sweden will start doing it: rich stockholmers with more money than sense whose lives seem to revolve around american media and NOTHING else
What's the point of a gender reveal party if not an excuse to use high explosives? There's no fun if something isn't being blown up in some way or form.
I always found it weird, you invite family and friends and then use colours to say "Yaaay, the baby has a penis/vagina!!" and everyone cheers no matter what it is, so it just feels empty. It's like the people who comment the disgustingly spammed identical crap on every youtube video, "wake up babe, blabla dropped a new video!!" and then get hundreds of likes.
It's all so fucking soulless and disturbing.
When I had my kids, my wife and I would play a game where if someone asked the gender of the baby, we'd pick opposite sides.
Like a stranger would ask and my wife would go, "Ah yeah it'll be a boy." And id shout with excitement while my wife starts crying. Or I'd go, "No not another alpha in the house!" While my wife is laughing maniacally and making the "slice your neck" motion.
EDIT: this is clarified in the walls of text in my responses below, but to be clear here, I do not endorse a biological essentialist account of gender, by saying gender is not only a social construct and has biological components, I am disagreeing with a view that gender is just socialization / performance / etc., but this does not mean I endorse the view that gender is just your chromosomes / genitals / etc. Neither of these views work.
Please read the article I linked to, and for additional reading see Whipping Girl by Julia Serano, esp. relevant to this discussion is chapter 6, some of which I quoted in my responses below.
When I say gender identity is biological, I am talking about what Julia Serano calls "subconscious sex" which she also sometimes interchanges with "gender identity", which is basically that innate and unchanging sense of your sex / gender. What I don't mean by gender identity is the label you choose to identify with (or the concept that label represents).
From Whipping Girl:
the phrase “gender identity” is problematic because it seems to describe two potentially different things: the gender we consciously choose to identify as, and the gender we subconsciously feel ourselves to be. To make things clearer, I will refer to the latter as subconscious sex.
Results: Evidence that there is a biologic basis for gender identity primarily involves (1) data on gender identity in patients with disorders of sex development (DSDs, also known as differences of sex development) along with (2) neuroanatomical differences associated with gender identity.
Conclusions: Although the mechanisms remain to be determined, there is strong support in the literature for a biologic basis of gender identity.
That's not saying what you seem to be implying, and it's not contrary to what people mean when they say gender is a social construct.
Saying gender expression is not only performance is not really related to gender being a social construct.
What we define the genders to be is what is a social construct. The masculine gender encompasses a wide array of behaviours and expressions, as does the feminine. The behaviours and attitudes we assign to each gender is what's socially constructed. People tend to have a gender identity that matches their biological sex, and through acculturation we teach them the behaviors associated with each gender in our culture. Some people later realize that they're most comfortable conforming to a different gender than what matches their sex.
I agree with you that the "gender is a social construct" is ultimately an ontological claim, about what gender is. When I hear "gender is just a social construct", especially from an anthropologist, I am entirely expecting a social constructionist account of gender, that's what they are communicating - what gender is.
Clearly there are social elements to gender, like the color we associate with a gender, which has changed over time and is arbitrary. There is nothing intrinsic about gender-color associations, no reason "blue" means "boy" and "pink" means "girl".
Regarding gender expression not only being performance: some people use Butler's performative theory of gender as a social constructionist account of gender. It's not really a coincidence in my mind that Butler shares some intellectual roots with the psychoanalytical sexologists who popularized social constructionist views in the 1960s, so while I'm sure you could parse several social constructionist accounts I don't think it's unfair to lump them together as a broad camp. The Julia Serano article I linked even does this:
Look, I know that many contemporary queer folks and feminists embrace mantras like "all gender is performance," "all gender is drag," and "gender is just a construct." They seem empowered by the way these sayings give the impression that gender is merely a fiction. A facade. A figment of our imaginations.
Notice how she lumps together views like "all gender is performance" and "gender is just a construct". I think this article is a relevant response to "gender is a social construct".
And yes, it depends somewhat on what people actually mean when they say "gender is a social construct", but I generally take them to mean that they believe in a social constructionist account of gender, i.e. that gender is entirely arbitrary, the result of how we are raised, and the result of socialization. If you are raised a boy, you are a boy because of how you were raised.
The idea that gender identity is biological, which is what that Safer meta-analysis concludes, contradicts the social constructionist account because it claims that a person's gender is intrinsic to them in some way, for example you can't just take a boy and raise them as a girl without problems (as the case of David Reimer illustrates, when the sexologist, John Money, who believed gender was just a construct and tested that theory by trying to have a boy raised as a girl).
When I say gender identity is biological, I am talking about what Julia Serano calls “subconscious sex” which she also sometimes interchanges with “gender identity”, which is basically that innate and unchanging sense of your sex / gender.
Okay, but what about those of us that have never had an innate and unchanging sense of my sex/gender?
The closer you look at these things the more complicated they become. What we seem to know from the science is that:
the brain is not entirely neutral, there are sexual traits,
the sexual brain traits cannot be easily categorized into two boxes like "male" or "female", but are more like a constellation or mosaic of traits all in different configurations with very few brains fitting a category like "male" or "female", and
trans women seem to share overlapping sexual brain traits with cis women, and it seems like this is true of trans men as well.
The science is just the current body of evidence we have, so we should expect our understanding to evolve as our evidence grows.
To more directly answer your question requires some clarification. It is unclear whether you're asking how subconscious sex relates to agender people (no sense of gender), or to gender fluid people (a changing sense), or detransitioners (sometimes changing sense), or even just any normal person, since none of us has that kind of direct access to our subconscious sex, it is implicit. If we could inspect it directly it would certainly make the whole "am I trans" or "am I a woman" question much easier, wouldn't it? Maybe someday we will have the technology, or maybe we will find that our concept of "woman" simply cannot be mapped to a complex biological trait like brain sex.
Subconscious sex is inferred, gender dysphoria and innate behavioral drives seem to give us footprints from which we can infer that subconscious sex from. Being a man and feeling the desire to wear a dress and skirt, how does he make sense of this? Maybe he assumes it's a fetish, but what if they enjoy it outside of sex, and maybe the sex when dressing up brings up so many complicated feelings (later she learns: dysphoric, even). Can it still be a fetish, can you be a crossdresser if you just want to wear a skirt around the house, but you have trouble extracting sexual pleasure from it? These are the kinds of investigating thoughts, the attempt to read between the lines. Some people might live their whole lives and never know their subconscious sex, they might successfully put off dealing with dysphoria or taking their crossdressing further. Some people have strong convictions from a young age and just know without as much ambiguity. There is quite a variety, just as the complex biology would imply.
It is also worth noting that it is a complicated relationship between something like subconscious sex or an innate brain sex and something like a self conception of one's gender. I certainly experience fluctuations in my self conception and even my felt sense of gender. Testosterone can make it much harder for me to feel like a woman. Moving through the world as a woman and being seen and treated as one by others creates a social circumstance that bolsters a psychological self conception as a woman. Neither of these things directly tell me my subconscious sex, but when the testosterone makes me feel awful, or when being treated and seen as a woman makes me feel wonderful, or when estrogen gives me mild waves of buzzing bodily euphoric, I make inferences about my subconscious sex from that.
So I don't know what you mean, but hopefully I have covered some of the ground you had in mind.
i don't see the point they are trying to make, of course it's a social concept, that's why it's a social gathering.
that's like going to a party for a doctoral degree and tell them its a social construct, like yeah so?