this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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[–] Skullgrid 73 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago

It really is a genital reveal party... Never thought about it that way. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Was it an opal pendant, or perhaps a cameo?

Also, I prefer French press over percolate.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Pedant here, use an Oxford comma.

[–] Skullgrid 17 points 1 month ago

oxford deez nuts.

fixed it anyway.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ambiguous usage of the word is one of the reasons oppressors have such outdated and undereducated views.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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

a table is feminine in French regardless of if it has a penis or not.

Which most tables in France do, of course.

[–] idiomaddict 3 points 1 month ago

Gender has been conflated with human sex from the fifteenth century, but I like your explanation of the sociological application.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Who invited the streaker to the gender reveal party?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

Me. The last one was boring. And the one before that started a huge fire. Figured nudity was safer.

[–] ThePyroPython 70 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Then technically these should be renamed to "Genital Reveal Parties" but that would imply a different type of party...

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 month ago (2 children)

"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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

We should just have a 2nd trimester party or something so the parents get to celebrate at around the same time

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago
[–] Agent641 13 points 1 month ago

"Child genital information session."

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[–] nifty 30 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Saying gender is binary is like saying there are only two types of apples, red and green.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 month ago (2 children)

There are two types of apples, red apples and non-red apples. D'ya see? Everything in the universe either is a banana or it is not, all is binary.

[–] Skullgrid 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

chess/similar games/sports :

Women

Open

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Quantum physics would like a word

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

Quantum physics doesn't exist, it is invented by physics professors to sell you more quants

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

Something is in a quantum superposition state or it isn't, absolute binariness.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (2 children)

There are two types of apples: Red Delicious and edible

[–] nifty 8 points 1 month ago

Perfect, case closed.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month ago

Only if the professor comes out of the cake like a stripper

[–] nycki 22 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

[–] LANIK2000 7 points 1 month ago

Oh boy, what a name xD It is very accurate and to the point tho. Perfectly highlights how fucking weird it is.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Please don't tell trump or elon

[–] undergroundoverground 19 points 1 month ago

You know what it'll be yet?

Yes, they'll be a wage slave.

[–] candybrie 18 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

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.

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[–] Opisek 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] Shou 9 points 1 month ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago

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

[–] ConstantPain 14 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Gender reveal party is a social construct.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

Have more gender repeal parties. You're all free of gender. Now let's fuck.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

Second anthropology professor appears, chastising the first one for being so ethnocentric.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Let them organize their own gender reveal party when they are old enough to decide

[–] M137 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (7 children)

Gender identity is biological, and gender is not only a social construct:

https://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2013/10/07/book-excerpt-gender-more-performance

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (9 children)

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).

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If you understand that it's a social construct then you must understand that gender reveal parties are crepy af.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Exactly, just have a single celebration on the birthday and be done with it. Why so obsessed about the genitals of an unborn child.

[–] moshtradamus666 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure op was just trying to be funny

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