9a public catastrophe. He pleaded guilty
and agreed to pay $220,000 in restitution,
along with starring in a public- service
announcement for the United States
Forest Service.
This is the gender reveal in its baroque
phase. Social media moves personal
milestones, like expecting a child, into
the public realm, which pushes people
to mark them with ever more elaborate
announcements. Proposals and wed-
dings, too, have snowballed into perfor-
mative spectacles. Tellingly, the visual
language of the gender reveal mimics
the escalating drama of reality- television
fi nales — as though there are two genders
competing to be born, but only one will
be revealed as America’s Next Top Baby.
The baby shower is, traditionally, a fem-
inine space. Now that fathers participate
in parenting in ways they did not even a
few decades ago, it’s only natural for them,
too, to be included in these prenatal rit-
uals. For some, evidently, this requires
replacing the usual parlor games with
something more aggressively masculine.
Gone are the days of proff ering ‘‘It’s a girl’’
cigars in sex- segregated waiting rooms;
the gender reveal is now a baby shower
with stunts. Perhaps you’ve seen the one
with the baseball fi lled with blue pow-
der hitting Grandpa on the head. Or the
one with the sky diver landing in a ring
of pink smoke. Or the alligator wrangler
who has an alligator bite down on a bal-
loon fi lled with pink smoke. Even the oldpink-or-blue shorthand has given way to
amped- up gender signifi ers and strangely
lurid themes, like ‘‘Rifl es or Ruff les?’’ and
‘‘Guns or Glitter?’’
The unpleasant belief underlying ‘‘Guns
or Glitter,’’ obviously, is that gender is
destiny — that learning this single thing
about a fetus will answer almost every
other question you might have about the
child you expect to parent. Perhaps people
place so much importance on this reve-
lation because, until that point, the child
remains an idea, a featureless abstraction.
At the instant a sex is assigned, an image
forms — an image of a person who is,
before all else, gendered. The announce-
ment off ers a green light to start layering
the unborn person with signifi ers: to planSex of Monica
and Kyle Thayer’s
expected child,
as revealed,
in the middle of a
2016 concert,
by the singer Brad
Paisley: male.