Alternately: Humans plan, Murphy the Trickster God laughs…
the woman who invited gender reveal parties thinks they've gone too far, and the child she once welcomed with a pink-frosted cake is now 10 and non-binary https://t.co/FUSWxOIQCl
— Jessica Roy (@JessicaKRoy) July 29, 2019
The gender reveal party likely has more than one inventor, but one of the first documented examples belongs to Los Angeles blogger Jenna Karvunidis. The year was 2008; the cake was shaped like a rubber duck. Karvunidis, who was expecting her first child, sliced it open, revealing pink frosting between white layers. It’s a girl!
Over the ensuing decade, a Pinterest- and YouTube-fueled arms race produced cakes that vomit pink or blue MnMs, black balloons burst to reveal pink or blue confetti, and “color blasters” that detonate a cloud of pink or blue smoke. Today, expectant parents send sealed lab results to bakeries, and gender reveal fails are fodder for Tik Tok. An Arizona Border Patrol agent is paying $8M in restitution for the 47,000-square-foot wildfire caused by his gender reveal color blast. Also? The child Karuvinidis welcomed with a pink-frosted cake is 10 years old and prefers to wear suits…
“I did [the gender reveal party] at the time because we didn’t live in 2019 and didn’t know what we know now—that assigning focus on gender at birth leaves out so much of their potential and talents that have nothing to do with what’s between their legs,” she wrote in the Facebook post, which went viral. The post included a recent family photo in which her oldest child sports short hair and a sharp gray blazer…
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
Oh, good grief. If I owned a bakery, I’d be tempted to send back a rainbow layer cake that vomited rainbow sprinkles and a banner that said “They’ll figure it out themselves, for fuck’s sake, you idiots!”
Yeah, I know it would be the last cake I ever baked professionally, but it would be worth it.
Brachiator
I misread this the first time I scanned the anecdote.
smike
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice:
Ramen!
Anne Laurie
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: Never had kids, but we did get married — partially because the Spousal Unit’s father really, really wanted to have one of his kids in a permanent legally-sanctioned relationship, and we’d been together for 15 years by then. He offered to pay for the party, which seemed like a fun diversion going in, but you’d be amazed how invested the most unlikely people get in Doing It Right, i.e., how it’s “always” been done in their circles. (Invitations! Dress codes! Professional planners!) And we were all nerds, mostly from more-or-less dysfunctional families…
I can totally understand how a hormone-addled pregnant lady might get caught up in the Doing It Right excitement, especially in more ‘traditional’ circles. One minute it’s Sure, why not throw a party for the people who might care — next they know, there’s sealed-lab-test cake professionals, if not accidentally setting fire to a national park!
Jay
It may have been Emily of the State, or Chyler Clylmont, who did the gender reveal party,
“Here a pipe”
“Blue, boy”
“Pink, girl”
“Pipe opens, fluid, drowning folks”
“Yeah, bitches, gender is fluid!!!! “
Major Major Major Major
I’m on the west coast this week (brr!) so I didn’t catch either debate. Yay respite thread!
I picked up some weird Charles Stross space opera, and he’s going on at length about interstellar cryptocurrency. Begrudgingly into it.
divF
@Major Major Major Major:
See your doctor – I think it can be treated with antibiotics.
(And why are you griping about the cold – this is paradise!)
Major Major Major Major
@divF: oh, no, I’m quite pleased to be wearing pants for a bit.
Also, I’d forgotten what you can just *walk into a store and buy* here.
Mnemosyne
I’m half-packed for my trip to Chicago — I leave on Friday morning. I’m super anxious about the trip for multiple reasons. One of which is that I realized this is my first solo family trip since my dad died in 2013 — G doesn’t have any vacation time built up at his new job yet, so he’s staying home with the cats. It’s very strange. I’m excited to see everyone and yet freaked out at the same time. I haven’t seen my mom since she had her stroke in December.
divF
@Major Major Major Major:
Huh ? does everyone expect you to use Amazon Prime in NY ? Or is it the produce ?
Chetan Murthy
@divF: Pot.
divF
@Chetan Murthy: Duh. I guess it’s that my pot-smoking days are so long past, I never think of that.
ETA: although it never ceases to amaze me that, as I drive around Oakland, I see giant billboards for cannabis, while at the same time hearing ads for erectile dysfunction remedies on sports talk radio. I sometimes think that I am living in a John Brunner novel.
Major Major Major Major
@Chetan Murthy: I have to go to Brooklyn like some sort of criminal!
Procopius
How on earth does a 10-year old child know they are non-binary? [I don’t like using “they” there, but am uncertain what the appropriate pronoun would be.]
Major Major Major Major
@Procopius: I believe the appropriate pronoun for your sentence is in fact “they.”
Mnemosyne
@Procopius:
One of my cousin-in-law’s kids knew as a preschooler that she should not be a boy. She would say things to her parents like, Maybe when I go to heaven, God will let me be a girl instead of a boy.
So I do think that kids can know at a fairly young age that they’re not comfortable with their birth sex or birth gender. It’s probably good that we’re giving kids options rather than shoving them into a PINK or BLUE box based on their genitals and locking down the lid. That hasn’t been working out very well, historically speaking.
Joseph A Miller
I agree with Procopius. You know you’re non-binary at 10?? How exactly?
Death Panel Truck
Acres.
Steve in the ATL
@Mnemosyne: @Joseph A Miller: the boy next door when I was growing up was gay to the point that it was obvious to us naive, sheltered, young kids from age four years old on. That may not be the case for everyone but it does seem to be for at least some people.
Chetan Murthy
@Joseph A Miller: [incorrigibly cishet here] Maybe sometimes they feel like a boy, and sometimes like a girl, and they don’t feel like picking one? Maybe they’ll pick one later, and maybe they won’t.
Steve in the ATL
@Death Panel Truck: what border patrol agent has $8M for paying restitution?
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Anne Laurie:
Oh lordy, yes. We were spared some of that when we got married (23 years ago this month!) because we set a date only 7 weeks after we got engaged, so for a lot of decisions – Invitation wording! Dress! Cake! – we just accepted the first thing that was good of its kind and moved on. The most unexpected moment was when my mom, who used to be pretty uptight about same-sex relationships, asked me in an oddly formal tone out of the blue if my longtime friends Susie and Sally were a couple, or just roommates. I hesitated for a bit, wondering where the hell she was going with that, and she said, “well, if they’re roommates, each gets a separate invitation. If they’re a couple, they get invited together with a single invitation.” (Spoiler: they got one.) So dedication to the “correct” way to do a wedding got her over that hump and a good time was had by all.
Serving champagne before the ceremony helped. That was my dad’s idea.
Steve in the ATL
@Chetan Murthy: on a related note, this song popped up in Spotify during my morning workout yesterday
Steeplejack
@Mnemosyne:
What job did G get? I missed that.
Congratulations to him!
Brachiator
@Joseph A Miller:
Isn’t 10 a binary number?
Anne Laurie
@Procopius:
To quote a wise proverb: Not my circus, not my monkeys.
Mnemosyne
@Steeplejack:
Oh, yes, sorry — he started it back in May. He has a 2-year fellowship with one of the Cal State schools as an archivist. It’s through a grant that’s meant to help community archives in the LA area start digitizing their collections.
He has a few frustrations with his boss, but he’s really enjoying the actual work. As is usual with a new job fresh out of school, he spent the first couple of months wondering if he’d made a huge mistake, but he’s settling in now. ?♀️
Chetan Murthy
@Joseph A Miller:
Another way of thinking about it. There’s that story about the SEAL who later transitioned to female. And you wonder: how could they be a SEAL? I mean, isn’t that the -manilest- thing around? And then transition to female? How? I remember when I was 12, and the thing I wanted to be more than anything else, was a big-ass football player. B/c y’know, that was what a boy wanted to be. And y’know, in small-town Texas, the gender roles are ….. *constricting*. Really, really constricting. I mean, even for a confirmedly cishet male, they’re constricting.
So really, I can’t imagine how a kid could want to be anything other than their genetically assigned gender. But it’s clearly happening. And when a SEAL (ffs) does it, clearly all the societal pressure in the world isn’t enough to stop it. It’s not a big jump from there, to imagining that small children can know they’re not quite what their body parts tell them they are. Or that maybe they’re more than one thing.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Very cool. Congratulations to him.
Jay
@Procopius: @Mnemosyne:
???????
Mnemosyne
@Anne Laurie:
I am also childless, but it has seemed to me for at least 10 years that a lot of parents had a weird mania for keeping their kids tethered to the “right” gender, which required gender-specific clothes and gender-specific toys, to the point where even stuff like radio-controlled cars had to be clearly for Boys Only or Girls Only. I have some marketing information that it was being driven by parents and what they would buy — most parents refused to buy toys made for the “wrong” gender.
I kind of suspect that the “non-binary” thing is a backlash from kids who don’t want to be put into a box like that. They stand out so much because childhood is WAY more gendered than in the “Free To Be You And Me” days of my childhood.
Anne Laurie
@Joseph A Miller:
If it helps, remember this is a vocabulary term now in common use.
When I (we) were kids, a girl who wanted to wear pants was a ‘tomboy’, and a boy who wanted to wear a skirt was a ‘sissy’ (or worse). Using the word non-binary is probably less stressful for the individuals, if not always their parents.
When I was seven, I was absolutely sure I was going to become a nun, because the nuns who taught in my primary school were the only women who weren’t ‘required’ to have a husband and a pack of kids; they each had their own room (however bare) and shared domestic chores equally, which was a considerable upgrade from the other women in my neighborhood. Ten years later, I walked away with my parochial high school diploma and never set foot in a church again. But some of my classmates, and not necessarily the ones I’d have expected, *did* enter the convent. Declaring oneself ‘non-binary’ at the age of ten seems an equally changeable decision.
Steeplejack
@Steve in the ATL:
Great song! Always makes me think of this one, maybe because they were next to each other on Nuggets?
The Castaways, “Liar, Liar.” (Note: inspired lip-sync-ery, marginal yet worthy go-go dancers.)
ETA: Completely wrong about the positioning. Anyway, more to your theme: the Zakary Thaks, “Bad Girl.”
BlueDWarrior
There are so many gradations to gender expression that it’s easier for me just to roll with how a person declares and presents themselves until behavior proves otherwise.
And I hate the stupid bro-sounding comment about how there used to be 2 genders and now there are 20. No idiot, we just have names for all the ‘weird’ permutations now.
Joseph A Miller
@Chetan Murthy: At 10 I was more interested in building models than most other stuff. I didn’t know squat diddly about gender definitions, I can tell you that.
Steeplejack
@Mnemosyne:
Cool!
Mnemosyne
@Joseph A Miller:
At 10, I was constantly admonished to be more “ladylike” and scolded for being a tomboy.
Perhaps you weren’t thinking about gender definitions because no one was pressuring you to conform to a gender standard that you found problematic.
And yet even that isn’t the full answer, because I grew up to be cishet, though I’m the kind of cishet woman who lives in jeans and t-shirts and only wears makeup once or twice a year.
Joseph A Miller
@Mnemosyne: I appreciate your answer.
Mnemosyne
This is probably going to get me in trouble in this discussion because someone is going to whap me upside the head and remind me that being a butch lesbian is not (necessarily) the same thing as being gender fluid, but it does remind me of a scene in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home that was turned into a musical number in the Broadway musical, “Ring of Keys,” where young Alison sees a butch lesbian and realizes that’s what she wants to grow up and be. And, yes, IIRC the character is about 10 years old in the play (a little younger in the book):
https://youtu.be/pMAuesRJm1E
Omnes Ominbus
@Procopius: @Joseph A Miller: I have no idea, but then I am a cishet dude. As I understand it, I was born with a body with dangly bits that matched my interior “persona.” It doesn’t happen to everyone, and I am not going to question when or how the realization that things don’t match up comes to a person.
Steeplejack
@Mnemosyne:
Great book. Didn’t see the play.
Kent
I have a 16 year old daughter who doesn’t use the term non-binary but she is pretty gender fluid . She knew it at 10 and so did we. I kind of suspect she’ll end up in a more traditional gay/lesbian place. But the point is, for kids of her generation, lesbian vs straight is also a binary choice that they seem to resist. “Having to decide if you are gay or straight is so 1990s, Dad. I just like who I like”
Major Major Major Major
@Steeplejack: we read it last month for a graphic novel book club I’m in. So good.
Mnemosyne
@Joseph A Miller:
Honestly, I only have that answer because LGBTQ+ people explained it to me over and over again until I finally got it. It’s definitely not an easy thing to grasp, and I probably never will understand it the way someone who lived it does. The best I can do is decide that, as long as it’s not hurting anyone, people can decide for themselves what they want to be and I just need to find out what that is and go from there. ?♀️
MisterForkbeard
@Major Major Major Major: Saturn’s Children, is that the one? Slow money vs fast money was a food concept.
Mnemosyne
@Steeplejack:
I really loved the play because I related to the troubled father/daughter relationship in a huge way. I saw it a few years after my own father died and the ending made me cry for so long that we were the last people to leave the theater after the lights came up.
I know that NotMax was not a fan of it, but he and I have completely opposite taste in just about everything, so take that as you will.
Major Major Major Major
@MisterForkbeard: Neptune’s Brood, yes.
Mnemosyne
@Major Major Major Major:
@MisterForkbeard:
I found out after it was over that someone at the Tor site was blogging the whole Vorkosigan Saga over the past two and a half years. I’ve spent WAY too much of the past week reading that and all of the comments.
All of the discussion in those books about the fish not feeling the pressure of the water they swim in is feeling relevant to this thread, too.
Amir Khalid
Apparently there’s a Norwegian Liverpool fan who named his daughters Ynwa (for club anthem You’ll Never Walk Alone) Sofie and Tia (for This Is Anfield, the words on a sign over the players’ tunnel at that stadium) Louise. The girls’ mother came up with the normal middle names.
I’m not sure how to pronounce Ynwa.
prostratedragon
“The Child Within,” jazz pianist Jessica Williams
mrmoshpotato
Gender reveal parties? *eyeroll* How about ‘Our baby is going to be born healthy’ parties?
Mike in NC
Going to be a fine sunny day here in Dublin. Might do some laundry before our afternoon coach tour of the city. BBC News saying that Trump’s tariffs backfiring on US economy. Who could ever imagine?
mrmoshpotato
@Mike in NC: Umm…..65.8 million of us. :)
Drink a Guinness! (sorry)
opiejeanne
@Mnemosyne: You could be my twin sister, except for the age difference and a few other things.
Although, when I was in elementary school I had crushes on other little girls a couple of times, up until 5th grade when I decided that despite boys being so stinky that one boy, Steve, was pretty nice.
opiejeanne
@mrmoshpotato: Our church group held a baby shower for us after the baby was born. It was fun and even the husbands had a good time, or at least they seemed to.
opiejeanne
@Mike in NC: Take the Jameson tour as long as you’re there.
mrmoshpotato
@opiejeanne: I have no problem with baby showers. :)
mrmoshpotato
Respite! Bruce Springsteen with the Sessions Band – Further On (Up the Road) (Live In Dublin)
Been enjoying The Boss’s music (and cover tunes) all night.
J R in WV
@Mnemosyne:
AS a huge fan of Miles Vorkosigan could you share the link to that trove of words to read? Please? Now…
ETA … AHhh, there it is!
https://www.tor.com/2019/01/21/rereading-the-vorkosigan-saga-the-flowers-of-vashnoi/
JoyceH
@mrmoshpotato:
I know. Gender reveal parties are one of the things I hate most about this century. Another one – that apparently ‘influencer’ is considered a valid profession.
Amir Khalid
@JoyceH:
There’s no law against influencing, and there are people who (claim to) make a living at it. So yeah, it is a legit profession as far as that goes. But like you, I consider it an Ark B passenger’s profession.
Bostonian
@Mnemosyne: As someone who has kids and has personal reasons to encounter the vogue of transgenderism among kids, I think you’ve put your finger on it. We are ten times pushier today about gender than people were when we were kids, and the saturation of the media has a lot to do with it. Transgenderism among kids is both a reaction to, and part of, this gender pushiness. Also, when we were kids people had interior lives. Now, “interior life” is a marketable commodity bought and sold by Facebook.
I’ve had a lot of discussions about this with my son, who for a brief time thought he preferred to be my daughter. (My daughter, who feels she has that job filled, was not thrilled about that). Most children who believe they are transgender eventually stop believing that, especially the ones who begin believing that in reaction to their own adolescence. Letting children actually have some privacy (and to clarify, nothing involving an electronic device and the internet can be classified as privacy), and private, non-monetized feelings, can help. Pushing children to have a big public song and dance about being transgender is entirely of a piece with gender reveal parties. If parents keep off social media, and keep their kids off social media, it can help calm down both types of hysteria.
I would not be surprised if more kids whose parents gave gender reveal parties came out transgender than kids of parents who didn’t: it’s partially a ‘get the F off my back’ declaration, and partially an inversion of private life into public space which kids catch from their parents.
Tony Jay
@Amir Khalid:
Ynwa = Inwah or Eenwah, probably. Tia is probably the smugger of the two, though secretly jealous that ‘Eeny’ gets the cool name while she’s stuck with conventional old Tia.
In the main topic, we made a conscious decision not to stick to all that Blue/Pink business. If he likes something it’s not a boy thing or a girl thing, it’s just a Tom thing. Left to his own devices he’s comfortable playing with whatever, which often means his own winkle. You’ll pull that off young man!
His 4 year-old cousin, OTOH, is a hardcore Elsaphile who is much more comfortable in a dress and wants to be a Witch. Times they are a changing, and that’s a good thing.
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major: There really is an xkcd for everything.
different-church-lady
@Brachiator: You dope: 10 is a prime number.
different-church-lady
@Mnemosyne: I’ve found the best thing to do is to just stop talking to everyone.
OzarkHillbilly
@Mnemosyne: @different-church-lady: I just don’t care. Why would I? I’m not going to have sex with them, and outside of that realm of human behavior how does it matter? (to me, if it matters to them, OK, I’ll listen, just don’t expect me to care)
John S.
@Tony Jay:
Every kid is unique in their own way.
I couldn’t pry the pink and purple from my 9 year old daughter’s preferred color palette if I wanted to. And though she loves wearing dresses, she is definitely a bit of a “tomboy” like her mother. So the key is really letting them decide who they are without shoving them into a neat little box that, as a parent, makes you feel better about who they are.
But then, I also have a 12 year old son on the autism spectrum who completely defies all standard definitions and is absolutely wonderful because of that, so I gave up on the notion of neat little boxes before my daughter was even born.
different-church-lady
@John S.: Well, it is hard to be unique in the same way as everyone else…
Skepticat
I recently was in a children’s clothing store with a friend who was buying a gift, and the sharp differences in those items intended for boys and for girls made me very uncomfortable. We did find some nice neutral outfits, but it took effort. A hetero female but always a bit androgynous (okay, a tomboy), I often refer to myself as my father’s eldest son, as–despite my mother’s best efforts–we escaped nearly all of the “girls can’t do that” strictures. It never was an issue until I got out into the “normal” world. And my niece recently told me she’s bi, and my nephew is gay. So what?
Wapiti
@J R in WV: Oh! I didn’t realize that she had a new book out. To the library!
Miss Bianca
@Mnemosyne: Yeah, I hang out at the Tor site for the re-reads too! Am now up to “Cryoburn” in the Vorkosigan Saga. Be a while before I go on, because I have to process the information that comes at the end of that one.
laura
Spouse and I dont have kids bc endometriosis. If we had, I’d never want to know the gender until the actual born reveal. Just do not understand why anyone would want or need to know the biggest surprise beforehand, and when I ask its always “so we’ll know what clothes to buy, or how to decorate the baby’s room.” Yikes.
I’d be focusing on growing as healthy a baby as I could.
Searcher
@Procopius: Honestly I find ten-year-olds realizing they’re not like 60-80% of their peers less surprising than the people who conform to gender roles for 30-40 years, have a spouse and kids and then are like, “Huh, I think–“.
I mean, they’re free to be them, and I understand the societal pressures that encouraged and encourage them to conform, even to the point of denying it to themselves, and hey, sometimes people change over time. But still, it SHOULD be normal for kids to figure this out, to have societal help understanding it, and to not be compelled to change or hide who they are. (Even if the late-life realizations still happen, because being a human is confusing and hard.)
Mnemosyne
@J R in WV:
Click on the “index” link at the bottom of each post and you’ll see all of them starting with Falling Free. She covers them by internal chronology, not publication date.
And as with all comments sections, you can see how one commenter goes from neutral to annoying all and sundry — including the blogger — over the course of the posts.
Mnemosyne
@Searcher:
I think that at least some of the late-in-life realizations happen because it used to be that the only acceptable way to have children was to be a practicing heterosexual, and some communities are still like that. If you want to raise children but the only way to do it is with an opposite sex partner, people were willing to clamp down on their own feelings and force themselves to do it, but it was damaging for both the adults and the kids (again, see Fun Home.
Now that we’re unclenching and letting people have or adopt kids without having to be in a heterosexual marriage, people feel more comfortable being themselves.
opiejeanne
@mrmoshpotato: I meant to emphasize the “after the baby arrived” part. We never could tell what the gender of our babies would be from the sonogram. The little dears would not turn so we could get a peek.
Someone told me to spit on an ant, and if it’s a girl the ant will curl up just like it was shot with Raid. If it’s a boy the ant is wet but safe. I killed several ants that way. Supposedly and Old NA trick.
EthylEster
@Procopius:
I’m thinking that a non-binary kid could know at pretty much any age as several commenters have described. But most kids are not non-binary so they will never know it.
My point is that if your sample of 10 year-old-kids does not contain non-binaries then your question is reasonable. But now that we (sometimes) do not force every kid into a binary choice, it becomes clear that some kids would not make that choice.
I think analogizing to identifying as homosexual as a child and or realizing that a child is homosexual as mentioned above is useful. Certainly the freakouts about it are similar. I’m not saying you are freaking out. I like how you decided to use “they”.
I always felt forced (as an adult) to choose between queer and straight, which is a kind of binary choice. But to me it always seemed fundamentally irrelevant if your sexual partner was an innie or an outie. I mean, it’s the person, right? ;=)
EthylEster
@Steeplejack: Fun Home was my first graphic novel! I wish all the ones that come after were as substantive.
Bostonian
@Skepticat: It’s all fun and games until a child is mistakenly castrated.
Shana
I have a trans nephew who I’ve known since he was 3. He was never a girly girl and in fact the only time I ever saw him in a dress was at our wedding, and only because his parents insisted. He had always presented as a lesbian until he came out as trans at around the age of 25. He’s now happily married to a wonderful woman and they’re newly certified to be foster parents with the hope of one day adopting.
In re: gender reveals: we were all at a family wedding earlier this year. The wedding couple were pregnant at the time, completely planned since they were both older and suspected they might have some trouble conceiving and wanted to get a jump start on that process if they needed to. They did a gender reveal at the reception, cutting into their wedding cake to reveal either blue or pink frosting between the layers. Her sister was the only one who knew and had communicated with the bakery.
After they’d cut into the cake, the father of the trans nephew leaned over to us and said “good luck with that.” Hubby and I cracked up.
Mo MacArbie
Along the lines of gender reveal parties, I gather that kids are in an arms race of elaborate ways of inviting someone to [the] prom. Oh boy, this is going to be the best ask ever! All is hype. Glad I’m older now.