“Are you f—king kidding me!” A woman shrieks up to the heavens while shrouded in a blue mist and lightly dusted in indigo confetti. While a dramatic scene with glittery accoutrements might suggest that she has just been assaulted by a flamboyant genie, she’s just the accidental victim of her own gender reveal: the newest member of TikTok’s “gender disappointment” club. Comedian Katherine Ryan, who is already mum to three girls and a boy, recently revealed that she would likely suffer ‘gender disappointment’ should she have another boy. While as recently as thirty years ago, these little saddenings would have been skewed largely on the female side, there’s been a reversal in preferences since the early 2000s, with many couples now hoping for a girl. There are even (of course) Instagram specialists you can find to counsel you through it.
For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to have two girls. As I grew up in the nineties’, much of the after-school brainrot I watched on television was about females. From Sister, Sister to Sabrina The Teenage Witch to Gilmore Girls, I was surrounded by little sisterhoods, and dreamed of creating one of my own. Like all borderline delusions, I ignored the fact that sometimes women don’t get along and can be psychologically diabolical, and hoped I’d just give birth to a modern tribe of Bennet women. We’d leave their father at home and go on girl’s trips to Morocco and the Cotswolds, have movie nights with popcorn and slasher films, and be in a group chat filled with mischief and hilarity. It was, as all lofty and romantic notions are, totally perfect and completely unlikely.
In the days that followed our gender revelation that we were going to have a boy, I had a small meltdown
When I got pregnant, I was relieved to find out that my firstborn child was going to be a girl. At the ultrasound, we asked the technician to write the gender down on a piece of paper so that my husband and I could read it alone without worrying about our facial expressions. We sat in our car outside the hospital and unfolded the note with a sigh of relief. My husband, too, had always wanted a girl - something I think that mainly sprang from his own idealised perception of father-daughter relationships (as well as a general fear of football). When I was pregnant for the second time, however, we repeated our little ritual in a parked car with the folded piece of paper, although this time we were greeted by something slightly different: “IT’S A BOY!”.
In the days that followed our gender revelation, I had a small meltdown as I began to realise my deeper reasons for wanting another girl: I had no idea what I was doing to do with a boy. In bringing up a girl, I believed that I would just be showing her the ropes. I’d be taking her down a path I’d previously trodden myself and pointing out any dangers along the way. With a boy, however, I was starting over and improvising as I went, with large question marks hanging over most of the experiences he was going to encounter.
I didn’t know how to mother a boy, and had watched enough murder documentaries to know that the mothers are usually the root of all problems
I didn’t know how to mother a boy, and I’d watched enough (read: too many) murder documentaries to know that the mothers are usually the root of all problems when it comes to serial killers, or people with refrigerated body parts. In this day and age especially; the problems I associated with bringing up a boy felt like a minefield. How does one begin trying to understand how not to accidentally create a pervert, incel, or a ”toxically masculine” man? The responsibility of piecing together a puzzle of manhood felt overwhelming and exhausting. Where with a girl I felt like I just had to not raise a dickhead, with a boy I felt tasked with shaping him to be strong, yet soft, quietly confident without being misguidedly cocky, a feminist (who doesn’t introduce himself as a feminist). The list of things I thought had landed on my plate - a stew of oxymorons and contradictions - felt far beyond my capabilities.
But then, my son was born. And suddenly everything that I had overcomplicated in my head seemed much simpler. Of course, I can’t deny that the modern world feels like a weird place to be a boy right now: a strange little hellfire of Andrew Tates and questionable ideologies, mixed with the conflicting concepts of what we historically tolerated from men versus what we now expect them to be. But, I quickly realised that I wasn’t alone on this road and that I’d chosen a well-adjusted man as my son’s father who, as far as I know, has never refrigerated any torsos. It wasn’t just up to me to shape this person, and in my husband my son has a normal, kind, and decent man to look up to as a role model. It is, of course, natural to have preferences, but these are often shaped by our own experiences, and I could never have understood the joy my son would bring to my life — the way he hoards house keys or is delighted by diggers — before he was born. Looking back, I sometimes feel guilty that I felt any disappointment about his gender, but then I also know that there’s no point beating up my past self over lack of experience. I’m pretty sure, however, that my husband will always view football suspiciously - but we’ll cross that bridge if we ever get to it.
