Gender Terror

I just watched a story on The Damage Report where they discussed a what turned out to be a deadly gender reveal party stunt gone wrong. And I just… can’t fucking even with this nonsense. Don’t make fucking bombs for a gender reveal party. Don’t do anything that could start a goddamned wildfire for a gender reveal party. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say stop doing gender reveal parties. They’re a bad idea regardless of whether or not someone dies or a wildfire ignites.

To be fair, it’s not gender reveal parties’ fault that I come across this story while I’m still fuming over Marjorie Greene’s appalling anti-trans sign or Rand Paul’s infuriating line of questioning towards Assistant HHS Secretary nominee Rachel Levine, a transgender woman. But this whole idea of gender reveal parties might be the last straw. The truth is that gender reveal parties are on a continuum with Greene and Paul, a bright, splashy gesture that reinforces transphobia.

Alok Vaid-Menon suggested as much on Instagram recently, further writing that “Transphobia is not just prejudice or violence against an individual trans person, it is a belief system that presumes non-trans people to be more ‘natural’ than trans people. Only individual people can self-determine their gender.” Gender reveal parties — essentially a splashier, more public version of the already violent process by which children are assigned genders — reinforce the “naturalness” of assigned genders, although doing so with explosives and unintended wildfires might be the most honest possible metaphor for the whole process.

But at least most gender reveal parties are, I’m going to guess, held out of ignorance. People haven’t thought through what might happen if their child turns out to be trans. People haven’t thought through what could happen if their carefully planned, elaborately choreographed, calculated-to-go-viral event to declare their child’s gender becomes a haunting, even traumatic, reminder of the social pressures to be something you’re not.

I grew up long enough ago that, thankfully, my parents (though not the type to do so regardless of timeline, for many reasons) couldn’t have posted a slickly produced video announcing a gender I would grow up not to identify with. I don’t envy trans folks who are in that situation, having gender binaries imprinted on them by their families through bright, splashy gestures.

Greene and Paul made bright, splashy gestures too, in service of reinforcing transphobia.

After a colleague (whose office is across the hall) in Congress put up a trans pride flag next to her door, in support of her transgender daughter, Greene put up a sign outside her office that read “There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE”, followed by “Trust The Science!”, in quotes, because that’s probably something Richard Dawkins has said at one point, probably in an equally awful context. Greene posted a video of her putting up the sign that mirrored (i.e. plagiarized) her colleague’s video, down to the self-satisfied hand gesture, which is supposed to seem clever but really just makes it obvious that Marjorie Greene has exactly zero original thoughts in the mass of rotting cottage cheese that passes for her brain. That’s not me talking; “Trust The Science!”

Rand Paul, meanwhile, interacted with Rachel Levine, transgender Biden cabinet nominee, by ranting about genital mutilation, which is unrelated to transgender issues, but serves to associate the two phenomena in the minds of morons like Marjorie Greene, who are already inclined to think trans people “grrrr, BAD”. Now, I could stoop to Paul’s level and start talking about unrelated bad things like white nationalist domestic terrorism, except that’s not unrelated because Rand Paul totally supports white nationalist domestic terrorism. I can say that because Paul voted to acquit Donald Trump in the second impeachment trial. Paul, on the other hand, has no basis to discuss “genital mutilation” at Rachel Levine.

Paul is drawing on the long history of transgender imagery in horror (famously Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, to name two films). In Paul’s case he’s doing the reverse, inserting horror into transgender context, also not entirely new for discourse (see Doris Wishman’s Let Me Die A Woman). Paul is simply trying to induce gender terror in his audience; or is that enact stochastic gender terrorism against trans people? It’s a right-wing favorite these days, with far more than just Paul getting in on the act. Trans people are an easy group to demonize: small portion of the population, often visibly deviant from the norm, already deeply marginalized. But the problem is, it goes beyond Paul’s attempt to create a particular association.

Transgender film studies can teach us a lot about gender reveal videos.

When it comes to transgender cinema, my particular area of study, I’d prefer not include Greene’s insulting little video clip. But as time progresses forward, transphobia can be traded around in clips like Greene’s, distilled down to its basest form. Janice Raymond wrote an entire book, The Transsexual Empire; Greene simply filmed herself putting up a sign. The effect is similar.

Gender reveal parties, particularly filmed ones, are not entirely different either. The effect is subtler than Greene putting up a hateful sign, but no less pithy and to-the-point. What’s more, as a transgender genre they are entirely (and somewhat uniquely) unaware of that classification.

I can’t claim to be an expert on gender reveal cinema; I got about five minutes into this TikTok compilation I found on YouTube before I gave up all hope for humanity’s future and went back to watching Fishing with John on DVD. But in the age of TikTok, Snapchat, and other forms of microcinema, these colorful clips, often utilizing bursts of pink or blue confetti, powder, or water, speak to the ways in which visuality is so often tied to the gender binary. Gender throughout the history of visual culture, including cinema, has been marked in aggressively simple ways. I’ve written about this before: throughout cinema history, trans identity often hinges on a single image, usually one of incongruity, frequently tied to genitalia.

In many of these instances, the images serve to reinforce what the filmmakers would have you think: this character is really this sex, no matter what appearances might suggest. Only as trans cinema progresses can we be generous and suggest that such reveals are deliberately trans reveals as opposed to misgenderings, but the effect is not entirely different to an audience raised on transphobic narratives and imagery, including, you guessed it, gender reveal videos.

In this way, gender reveal cinema goes beyond the videos documenting gender reveal parties. The entire history of transgender film is littered with gender reveals. It’s what transgender cinema has hinged on for a long time.

Like conventional trans cinema, the reveal is only half the equation. The other half is the reaction. In gender reveal videos, at least the ones I’ve seen, the reaction is some variation of jubilation, whereas the counterpart in the trans canon is some variation of trans panic. These are not entirely far apart. Again, I’ll say that I’m glad there’s no video documentation of my parents and other family members cheering on a gender foisted on me that I don’t experience as an adult. Excitement and panic, when it comes to gender, are two sides of the same coin.

In one of the most famous transgender reveals, we learn that Angela, the main character from Sleepaway Camp, is not only trans, she’s also the film’s heretofore unseen killer. Sleepaway Camp is the union of everything I’ve talked about thus far. Like Rand Paul, Sleepaway Camp mixes trans identity with monstrosity. Like Marjorie Greene, the film essentializes identity down to simply MALE or FEMALE. Like a gender reveal party, the moment is punctuated on a single, simple image, one that tells the audience everything they’re supposed to know.