Gender Disappointment in 2024 is Almost Always About Boys

A shameful secret kept from the public eye but omnipresent in online mom spaces

Edit:

I got some feedback, some more fair or relevant than others, and I’d like to address the pieces I feel are at least somewhat fair and relevant:

1. This is a piece about one particular demographic- not stated explicitly, but upper middle class (usually but not always white) college-educated women. Other demographics probably don’t react the same way to gender announcements, and in fact some demographics do still favor boys. I always assumed this was obvious because I pretty much only ever write about my own demo- but hey, I didn’t explicitly state it.

2. I’m insinuating that women on Reddit feeling negatively about having a boy is just as bad as men committing violence against women. This feels so absurd that nobody could believe it in earnest (especially because I’m not entirely unsympathetic to women experiencing gender disappointment), but the accusation is too severe for me to ignore. So anyway: not my intention! Sorry if it came off that way!

Recently, a Slate article came out about the parents who are seeking IVF—not because of fertility struggles or even genetic diseases, but strictly for the purpose of having a daughter instead of a son. Selfishly, as an IVF mom, I don’t love articles like these. The vast majority of people who choose IVF do it for infertility reasons, and a much smaller percentage to it to avoid serious familial diseases. The people doing IVF solely for gender selection (let alone absurd things like height or eye color- nearly impossible to do anyway) are few and far between, so rare in fact that articles like these almost seem like hate-bait, describing a rare phenomenon as if it’s a growing trend because almost everyone reading about it will disapprove. This is especially prescient with extreme right-wing disapproval of IVF. We’re dealing with that already, and now you’re gonna try to get everyone else on their side because you’ve painted IVF parents as vain, self-absorbed, baby-designers. Okay.

What is a common trend, however, is gender disappointment—a strong feeling of sadness or anxiety that happens when parents discover the sex of their child isn’t what they hoped. Technically it should be “Sex Disappointment,” not to be confused with how I’d describe losing my virginity.

Gender disappointment isn’t new. For most of human history, parents have wanted sons instead of daughters. During the one-child policy era in China, baby girls were aborted, killed after birth, abandoned, or adopted out. Other cultures around the world still practice infanticide, mostly targeted at baby girls. If we resurrected everyone who has ever lived, and told them that people in modern-day America often feel gender disappointment, they would naturally assume people were disappointed about having girls. But that’s not the case.

Modern-day gender disappointment is primarily an online phenomenon (mom groups, Reddit, etc.) because people don’t want to be judged. It’s not acceptable to want anything other than a “healthy baby.” In fact, when I was pregnant and I jokingly mentioned that I hoped our first born would have my husband’s beautiful eyes, a relative chided “all you should care about is that the baby is healthy.” Even a minor, innocuous preference for one gender is met with judgment—every mom must insist they don’t care. So naturally, online mom spaces are where moms go to voice their fears and sadness around gender disappointment. And 99% of the time, they’re disappointed to be having a boy.

The disappointment when popping a balloon filled with blue confetti or simply opening a Sneak Peak test at 8 weeks and discovering XY chromosomes can be boiled down to multiple things. Let’s start with the most simple and harmless reason. I think almost every parent has a slight preference toward having a child of the same sex as themselves, not because they find their own sex superior, but rather because one of the fun things about being a parent is getting to introduce your child to all your favorite things from childhood (and if you’re a feminine woman, there’s a lot of fun in dressing up your daughter—dressing up your son can be fun too, but the options for boy clothes aren’t as cute.) In 2024, we have to pay lip service to the idea that “of course my son might like dolls and my daughter might like monster trucks,” but I do think boys are generally, on average, more likely to gravitate toward some things and the same goes with girls. Even in my super-progressive circle, where everyone says they raise their kids gender-neutral, I’ve noticed that all the girls in my son’s class love the movie Frozen, even if they also like dinosuars, and almost all the boys in his class love superheroes, even if they also play with baby dolls.

When we found out we were having a boy, my husband was excited to introduce him to basketball, and when I found out I was having a girl, I got excited to gift her my old dollhouse which I designed with my mother over years of attending dollhouse trade shows and shopping at antique dollhouse stores. That doesn’t mean we’d love our children any less if they weren’t gender conforming, or that we wouldn’t adjust our plans if we turned out to have a son who loved dolls and a girl who loved basketball, just that it’s fairly reasonable to assume your average girl is going to get some enjoyment from a dollhouse, and your average boy will get some enjoyment from sports. They may not, and that’s okay too! But it’s reasonable to fantasize about it, as long as you aren’t strongly tied to that fantasy.

But maybe it’s deeper than a sadness about Carter’s only offering camo-pattern cargo shorts after age two, or about never getting to use Felicity the American Girl Doll’s pet lamb Posey again. I can’t help but notice that all the positive traits that used to be associated with boys are now considered gender neutral (strong, capable, intelligent, ambitious), while most of the positive traits that used to be associated with girls are still associated with girls (nurturing, empathetic, detail-oriented, polite). Meanwhile, boys have been assigned plenty of negative traits: they will embody “toxic masculinity.” They will be difficult. They won’t be kind. They’ll grow up to be obnoxious frat bros. They’ll be violent. Many of the women who express these concerns, paradoxically, are progressives who claim to believe that there are no innate differences between men and women. Perhaps they’re concerned that the negative traits associated with boys will emerge because of “society,” but to be honest, I’m not really buying it. I think they do believe in some differences, and there’s cognitive dissonance when belief in those differences collides with paying lip service to the idea that men and women are interchangeable and the insistence that all gender preferences are morally repugnant.

Perhaps, most terrifying even to women who don’t believe in the other gendered stereotypes: boys apparently won’t visit you when they’re older, provided they are heterosexual. They will become absorbed by their wives’ families, and pay more attention to their mother-in-laws than to you. “Boy moms” across social media post short videos joking about their fears of becoming “the paternal grandmother” or “the mother of the groom.”