Feminist Mom, Baby Boy: Dealing with “Gender Disappointment”*

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When I found out I was having a baby boy, I cried. 

This was ridiculous, of course, for a number of reasons. One is that I had been obsessed with having an alive child inside of me—my first pregnancy ended in miscarriage, and I had a lot of anxiety about something going really wrong. Another is that I thought I was “over” gender, you know? Like, even though this baby would have a penis, I still didn’t know what gender they were. And why should it matter anyway? 

But, apparently, it did. Despite my best intentions, I had what’s known as “gender disappointment.” It’s a thing a lot of people deal with—we get an idea in our heads about what raising a child is going to look like. Gender disappointment (*which should really be called “sex disappointment” or maybe “genital disappointment” since gender doesn’t really arrive until a bit later?) is the first moment where we realize we’re not in control of who our children are going to be. Inevitably they will not be what we expected. When I imagined myself with a baby, I always imagined a girl. I had thought a lot about what I would tell a girl about what it meant to be a woman in this society. I imagined teaching her things about how to navigate a misogynistic world without losing her power. But a boy? What the heck was I supposed to do with a boy? 

I’m not sure I ever totally bought this, but a lot of people warned me about what “little boys” are like when they found out I was having one. Little hellions, is essentially what they’d tell me. While I knew for sure I wanted a baby, I also squirmed at the idea of giving up my body to another person, even a person I made. So much of my life, I’ve tried to gain my autonomy, speak up for myself, and make my own choices with my body, especially in opposition to men and patriarchy. And I was carrying a person inside of me who was eating my food and drinking my drinks? And then I was supposed to give this person an all-access pass to my breasts? Did this person have to be male? 

And yeah, there might have been a little bit of internalized man-hating I wasn’t totally addressing here. Yeah. Might have been. 

Little hellions.

Everyone told me it wouldn’t matter when I finally had a chance to meet my baby. That I’d fall so deeply in love it wouldn’t matter what the baby’s sex was. And this was true—but there’s more to it than that. 

It did occur to me that it would matter to be a feminist mom to a boy. I wouldn’t be teaching my baby how to navigate the world as a girl, but I could teach him how to be a feminist, how to acknowledge his own privilege and use it to help people. I could give him a chance to understand his biological sex but still have freedom and choice around expressing his internally felt gender, whatever that might be. I could watch him grow up in a generation that is really pressing the button on what gender actually means. 

I had this (unconscious) idea in my head that pregnancy was this incredibly feminine thing. What could be more female than gestating a human being inside of my womb? But then I realized that part of what I was doing was building a penis. I was creating masculine hormones, building a male body inside of my female parts. For a time, my baby boy was a part of my body. Now I understand that pregnancy is really an all-gender kind of party. 

These realizations were cool and interesting, but that wasn’t really the thing that helped me get past my resistance to raising a boy. It was getting to know my tiny human. He is sweet and tender, he loves being tickled, he smiles and laughs easily and loves cuddles. These parts of him are some of the parts I love the most. These are also the parts that this culture is going to try to squeeze out of him, expecting him instead to be a little hellion, to be violent, unable to express his feelings, uninterested in gentle loving touch.  

Our culture is misogynistic, for sure, but patriarchy also hates men. Patriarchy does not want men to be tender and emotional, to want to cuddle and laugh easily, to be vulnerable. I can only protect my child from so much of that, but as his mom, I get to know this vulnerable side of him better than anyone else in the world. I know it will change as he gets older, and those external influences will have their power. But I can have power, too. I can be a witness to my baby’s gentleness and sweetness. I can love him completely for exactly who he is before he has a chance to understand the gendered expectations that are, even now, put on him. However he (or she or they) grows up and shifts and changes, I will always have the gift of knowing my child as a tender, perfect human person. I can advocate for him, for his right to be a whole person in a society that wants him to be something smaller than that. 

I am glad I found out I was having a boy while I was still pregnant. I needed time to process what it meant to me, even though the big learning came after he arrived. I also know, though, that if I have another baby, I won’t need to know their sex before they arrive. That’s a surprise I will relish, no matter what the result is. I know there will be more to come— but that’s some of what I’ve learned about being a feminist mom to a baby boy.