As a GSWS graduate student, I always agree to have my name, and the descriptions of the presentations I can offer, on the list of potential speakers that communities and organizations can access through the Series. I do so because I enjoy sharing what I know, and I value learning from others. Being a participating member in the Series has allowed me the opportunity to present, in-person and virtually, several times. I also love to travel and participating in the Series has allowed me to visit different places, including Haida Gwaii, Vernon, and Nelson. These are all places in BC that I had never visited before and may not have had the chance to do so without the opportunity to present.
My most recent foray for the Series, at the invitation of the Nelson and District Women’s Centre, was a trip to Nelson for a presentation on September 14, 2023. The Centre, as per their website, “is a feminist organization that has been celebrating, supporting, and empowering Kootenay women since 1973. The Centre believes that advancing gender equality helps to build a healthy community for everyone.” Malia Joy, the Centre’s Executive Director, and Programs Manager Anna Jauncey had asked if I would make the trip to Nelson and if I would deliver my presentation on gender that was described in the promotional material from GSWS.
This presentation, which I call “It’s a fact! Or is it? The Turbulence of Gender”, is one that I have made a few times and one that I continue to refine. I have adapted it for high school classes and community presentations, and I also use it in the SFU seminars I lead as a Sessional Instructor. It is a helpful overview for students that provides them with a sense of the discourses swirling and whirling around them. Such an introduction is especially important for those students who register in my courses with no prior GSWS experience.
In my view, one of the reasons that this presentation continues to attract interest is because the conversations around gender today are contentious. I use the word turbulence in my title because I have found that people feel unsettled when they talk about gender. They struggle with the concepts that underlie new ways of understanding gender, and they are navigating their way through the cacophony of competing viewpoints and clashing ideologies. People are searching for information that will help them establish the parameters of their investigations and that will help them better grasp what is at stake.
Gender, when people understand it as a choice between male or female, is a binary based on a visible physical difference. It is a sorting mechanism and helps to establish order in a life that can be random and chaotic. It is also one of the simplest ways to organize the world, and in its simplicity, it is inherently exclusionary. When we start to question the assumptions that offer only two choices for identifying people — not because academics tell us that there are more options, but because the historical reality of human lives shows us that there are — we are shaking the foundation of something that seems so certain, so stable, so unchanging. Opening conversations about gender also introduces a scope of deliberation that overwhelms folks because it raises questions about so many other things beyond the issue of individual identity. Talking about gender challenges assumptions and beliefs that seem cast in stone and that have formed the basis for almost every aspect of the ways humans live, the ways they have organized society and culture, and the ways they have understood themselves.
There are many spokes that construct the wheel of gender and many ways to disassemble them. Cultural practices are one such spoke, so whenever I give this presentation, I like to interrogate the phenomenon of gender reveal parties with the audience. A gender reveal party is a celebration, like a baby shower, with the added excitement of revealing the biologically assigned sex of the baby. Gender reveals are incredibly popular and are replicated over and over and over again. For example, when I was preparing my Nelson presentation, I typed the phrase “gender reveal party” in the Google search bar and was rewarded with 134 million results in .74 seconds demonstrating the scope of this phenomenon. However, the rush to be a part of the gender reveal trend has also resulted in tragedies. There have been instances of significant property damage and even of people dying because gender reveals have gone horribly wrong as people try to outdo each other in staging bigger, more spectacular stunts coded in pink or blue. The event becomes less about a familial celebration and more about competing to be the best, to go viral, to capture views, likes, and subscribers.
The truth is that at its very core a gender reveal party is about celebrating the baby’s genitalia and all the assumptions that go with that marker of physical difference. In my opinion, it is characteristic of the posturing that has become endemic to modes of expression and self-expression today on social media and in cultural practices. That is, although hosts of gender reveal parties — the parents of the child-to-be — believe themselves to be distinctive, individual, and unique, they are in fact mimicking a rite or a ritual that serves to cement and codify patterns of behaviour along with systems, structures, and institutions that perpetuate inequities, inequalities, and injustices.
If we think about it in a historical context, a baby with a penis is being born into a world of unlimited potential because in patriarchal societies, authority, power, and privilege are centred in being a man. A baby with a vagina is being born into a world of constrained potential because the traditional assumption is that as a woman her ultimate destiny is to grow up, find a husband, get married, and have children. In other words, gender reveal parties celebrate the patriarchal status quo and the associated social norms that have been constructed based on the difference in genitalia. It is a status quo that has marginalized and oppressed anyone considered other than and less than. I know the world has changed in terms of the opportunities available to those with different gender identities in many parts of the world, especially for women, and yet I find myself astonished in moments and instances when I realize how little has changed in terms of the social scripts that we live with, and which still dictate the shape and pattern of our lives.
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