When I found out that my first child was male – that is, he has XY chromosomes – I cried for two days.
No one was more surprised about this than I was. My pregnancy was the result of a lengthy and invasive IVF process on the heels of a grueling infertility merry-go-round, and I genuinely thought that all I cared about was having a happy, healthy child. The sex didn’t matter to me. Chromosomes and genitals were only that, and whoever I birthed, I planned to parent gender neutrally.
But what I hadn’t accounted for was the fact that, for decades, I’d been unwittingly carrying the assumption that I’d birth girls. After all, I was a girl, my sister was a girl, and so I naturally assumed that any baby I would make would also be a girl. It never even occurred to me to consider the possibility that I’d have a boy.
Nearly four years later, I relish parenting my sweet, funny toddler and can’t imagine it any other way. But at the time, the feelings I had were overwhelming and upsetting. They didn’t make sense, even to me.
If you’re upset after finding out the sex of your child, it can feel confusing and isolating. Here are some tips for how to make sense of it.
1. Remember that what you learn in utero is only sex chromosomes and genitals.
“Gender disappointment” is the colloquial term for what I’ve described above, but it’s a deep misnomer.
20 years ago, my intro psych professor said that “sex is the biological component of whether a person is male or female, and gender is the sociological component of whether a person is male or female”. In a post Laverne Cox world, this feels like such an obvious distinction now, but at the time, it blew my mind.
(Also, as an aside, the existence and prevalence of intersex people makes this a much more complicated idea than my professor presented at the time.)
Instead, I prefer the term “sex chromosome disappointment,” which doesn’t exist anywhere on the internet, other than in this blog article.
And the reason I like it is that it serves as a reminder that the news you get while you’re gestating a new human is literally just chromosomes and genitals. It doesn’t tell you what your child is going to enjoy doing, how they’re going to interact with others, what their personality will be like, or even, necessarily, what pronouns they will decide are the best fit for them.
Actually, this information tells you one more thing about your baby: it tells you how society will treat them, and what most people will expect of them.
When my child is being calm and sweet, playing quietly, focused on an engaging activity, people say, “wow, you’re so lucky, most boys aren’t like that.” When he’s being a hellion, running all over a restaurant and dumping entire salt shakers on the floor, people tell me, “ah, that’s just how boys are”.
No, those are both fallacies. My child has XY chromosomes and male genitals, and he contains multitudes. And in present day, I wouldn’t change his chromosomes or genitals or personality. But I wish I could change our culture.
2. Recognize that what you’re feeling is grief.
“Disappointment” is such an unsatisfying word for the debilitating experience I had upon learning the sex of my first child. It implies, “that’s a bummer, but oh well.”
That’s not what I felt. What I felt was a deep, resonant grief that lasted for days, and didn’t truly abate until my child was old enough to show the beginnings of a complex, multifaceted personality.
I did all of the Kübler-Ross stages:
- Denial (“wait, that can’t be true, can you check the test again?”)
- Anger (“Why do so many of my friends get to have the experience of parenting daughters?”)
- Bargaining (“Well, maybe the remaining frozen embryo is female. No, it’s male? Perhaps I’ll consider having three children after all”)
- Depression (“I just want to sit here and cry”)
- And finally, Acceptance (See the rest of this blog post)
My favorite model of grief comes from a viral Twitter thread posted by Lauren Herschel. The idea is that when you first begin to grieve something, you have a box with a button and a ball:
The ball, as you can see, fills almost the entire box, so as it bounces around, it hits the button repeatedly.
Over time, the box and the button are still there, but the ball gets smaller:
So as it bounces freely around the box, it usually doesn’t hit the button. But once in a while, even a long time after you thought you’d healed, you can get a pang of grief.
For example, when Kamala Harris was sworn in as Vice President, I felt a wave of deep sadness that I would never get to share an experience like that, on a level that felt deeply personal, with an AFAB (assigned female at birth) child. Tears welled in my eyes, I felt weary for about a day, and then I moved on.
The other thing about this particular kind of grief is that it’s not tangible, nor is it widely acknowledged or discussed. The term for this is “disenfranchised grief”. Grief that is disenfranchised can feel particularly lonely, because even though loved ones may sympathize, it can still feel very isolating and invalidated.
3. Figure out what, specifically, you’re grieving.
Okay, so now you know that the feeling you’re having is grief, not just mere disappointment.
But what, specifically, are you grieving? Right, I know, the news of your child’s birth sex. But when you dig a little bit deeper, what do you feel you’ve lost?
In the book The Gender Trap, Emily W. Kane discusses her research on parenting and gender hopes. She writes that among other things, women who are disappointed not to have girls grieve the loss of shared interests like shopping and close emotional bonds, and men who are disappointed not to have boys grieve the loss of shared interests like sports, or feel that it reinforces their masculinity to have a son. (What?)
None of this resonated with my own experience. I didn’t care about having a shopping buddy, and I believe that I can have a close emotional bond with a son.
For me, it was about a vision of raising someone who had a personal investment in dismantling the white supremacist, cis-heteronormative patriarchy. The refrain I kept hearing in my mind during my first pregnancy was “oh my god, I am gestating the most privileged creature on earth”.
Maybe that doesn’t resonate for you, and that’s okay. Maybe what you’re grieving is a vision of beautiful princess dresses, or someone to toss a football with. Or maybe you were really hoping for a “balanced” family, and yearned for the experience of parenting both a daughter and a son.
Whatever it is, once you put your finger on it, it feels a lot less nebulous, and you can figure out where to go from there. Which brings me to:
4. Develop a mission statement.
Go back to the very beginning, when you decided to become a parent. That is a massive decision – one that transforms every imaginable facet of your life. What made you choose to do this? And how did the imagined future gender of your child play into this choice?
Revisit those decisions and thoughts with a curious and discerning eye, and see if there’s anything in there that feels like a salve for your grief.
For me, becoming a parent was, at least in part, a political act. I wanted to have a daughter who could propel a social justice mindset into the future, and build a better world for people from all backgrounds.
And through unpacking that, I found the narrative that began to heal me: “My job is to build a better white boy.”
Because white men have power and privilege, and some of them wield those things for good and make the world a better place. If I could raise a boy who was allowed to exist out of the narrow confines of traditional masculinity, I could still have a child who would work to build a better world for marginalized people.
Again – this may not be your mission statement, and that’s okay. But it’s an example of how, by figuring out what made you want to have a specific-gendered child in the first place, you can begin to find some peace with the grief you feel.
It’s also worth noting that there was a delay in my ability to find my mission statement meaningful. I unearthed the narrative during my pregnancy, but I didn’t truly begin to heal from my sex chromosome disappointment until I held my baby in my arms. Before that, everything was too theoretical to wrap my head around, but once he was born, it was easier to see him as a whole person.
5. Lastly, challenge the premise of the gender binary.
There was a plotline on the TV show How I Met Your Mother where Lily, played by Alyson Hannigan, reveals that because she had a feminist mom, she was never allowed to have an Easy-Bake Oven as a child. She yearns for one for years, eventually acquiring one as an adult.
When I talk about challenging the binary, this is not what I’m suggesting. This is actually the opposite – noting the gender binary, and selectively only allowing your child to engage in “opposite-gender activities” can be just as damaging as pushing gender conformity.
Instead, what I’m urging is a lot more foundational. Do a deep inquisitive dive into the premise we’ve been sold that gender is two boxes, and that the color inside your gender reveal cake says something fundamental about who your child will be. Once you disrupt that narrative, you can put your son in pretty clothing, or let your daughter play with earthworms. Or you can allow your child of any gender to do both of those things at the same time.
What I’m saying is that you have a lot more agency here than what our culture tries to sell you.
As it happens, I have a giggly, happy little 3-year-old boy who is (at least for now) confident in his male gender. He will tell you, sometimes unprompted, “my pronouns are he/him”.
But he loves putting on a tutu and twirling around to watch it swirl, he’s showing early signs of deep empathy for the people in his life, he wants to learn to tap dance like Sutton Foster or Jonathan Groff, and at his play gym, he loves the little basketball hoop.
This stuff isn’t binary. It’s complex. And if you let your child be free – if you make an effort to see and offer them the whole buffet of gender complexity – they’ll show you who they are.