We Need To Confront Our Obsession With Genitals

‘It must be a boy, because she’s so overdue. Girls are in a rush to come out, boys are just lazy…’

Overheard in the waiting room for maternity triage, said by the sister of a pregnant person. She laughed, the pregnant person laughed, the pregnant person’s partner laughed, as did the other pregnant person in the waiting room they had been speaking to for about 5 minutes. I had been waiting to have bloods taken for about 2 hours by this point (little did I know I’d be there another 2.5 hours…!) And as unpleasant and exhausting as that was, it gave me plenty of people-watching and listening time. And to be honest, my whole pregnancy so far has been an interesting experiment in people observation. As I heard these words come out of this person’s mouth, I wondered to myself, does she even believe that? Does she realise the weight of the statement she just made? Is she just ‘making conversation’?

And why, oh why, is everyone so hung up on the genitals of foetuses?!

People are obsessed with my child’s genitals. OBSESSED. Does that sound gross? Does it make you feel weird? Good! We need to start recognising that when we ask if someone’s baby is a boy or a girl, we are asking to know what genitals the baby has. Gender reveal parties may as well have balloons that announce ‘It’s a PENIS!’. The weight, the pressure, the level of projection and expectation put on this one biological sex marker is absolutely diabolical. It sets the stage for the piling on of patriarchal, racist, misogynist, transphobic, rape-culture assumptions about who someone is going to be, and what kind of behaviours we will allow them to exhibit, and whether they will carry negative or positive consequences. Foetus’s have their wardrobes, their character traits, their romantic lives, their careers, the expectations of everything the might do, or should be allowed to do, predicted and projected on to them before they even have legal human rights. Please read that again. If I had any gaps in my understanding as to how we ended up with the levels of gender inequality, gendered violence, and gendered mental health issues we face today, my eyes have been well and truly opened.

I have been asked about the ‘gender’ of my baby by approximately 99% of those inquiring over the last 8 months. 1% have asked about the sex of the baby. This is not an idealogical difference, this is a misunderstanding of basic science. Gender, cannot be detected in a foetus in the uterus. Gender is a social construct determined by how an individual feels about who they are, and is heavily influenced by social, historical, cultural and colonial contexts. It may be man, it may be woman, it may be neither, it may be both - and that is from an oversimplified, western view point. There is a beautiful lexicon that continues to grow and evolve around how we understand and express our own genders. My regular readers will know that I am transmasc and non-binary, and that I still feel like they don’t come close to capturing the essence of who I am, they are just helpful vehicles for communication. We cannot know someone else’s gender until a) they are able to know it themselves and b) they trust us enough to share it with us. Just because we know what pronouns someone uses (with us!) that doesn’t mean we know their gender. If we have not shown ourselves to be a safe space for them, the pronouns they use with us may simply reflect their level of safety around us.

We can detect one sex marker through foetal scans - we can also do tests for sex chromosomes on foetuses. If you really want to know whether a foetus has a penis or a cunt (yes, I said cunt), then the most accurate question you can ask is ‘do you know the sex?’. For those who are wincing over my use of cunt - I get you. Until the last couple of years it was a word I mostly associated with being the worst swear word I had ever been taught. Growing up, I learned that it was the most offensive word you could call another human being - while also learning that it was a word for a private part of my body. When you compare this to the relative levity of calling someone ‘a dick’, or the absolutely delightful ‘cockwomble’ (thank you, Scotland!) you start to realise what kind of message we are sending to children assigned female at birth (AFAB) when they learn about these terms and how they are used. I learned that cunt was absolutely taboo. That only horrible, foul-mouthed people used it. Later on, I learned it could be used in a sexy way, but it was still considered incredibly ‘dirty talk’ if used when having sex. Meanwhile, science books and biology teachers referred to that same part of my body as a ‘vagina’ - presented to me as a neutral and accurate word. It wasn’t sexy, it wasn’t dirty, it was ‘the correct term’. Well, let’s see about that…

The word ‘vagina’ originates from the Latin word vāgīna, which means "sheath" or "scabbard", and this word was chosen due to the apparent similarity between the shape of the vagina and the sheath for a sword. This term was then adopted into English, initially in the early 17th century. A sheath for a sword? Or perhaps a cosy place for a penis? The etymology of this supposedly ‘neutral’ and ‘scientific’ term, is steeped in patriarchy and tells AFABs, in no uncertain terms, that our bodies are designed to please penis bearers. Not only this, but that the most correct way to refer to our anatomies, is to include the role of the penis in our bodies and our lives… regardless of whether we want it there or not. ‘Cunt’ has a disputed etymology, with potential roots in ancient India and various middle-English origins too (as English is derived from Sanskrit, these two are not necessarily separate). The Goddess Kunti appears in the Hindu epic Mahabharata, although her stories may well predate Vedic texts. She bears the child of the Sun God - Surya, essentially though an immaculate conception, and she goes on to later birth Arjuna, who is the warrior hero in the Hindu holy book - the Bhagavad Gita. Yes, so far her importance seems to be in relation to men, but when you dive deeper, you find much more. She bore children by many fathers, and her divine power was such that in some stories she was able to procreate without a partner, parthenogenetically. She represents female regenerative power, is protecter and healer of female sex and reproductive organs, and also a protector and role model for child bearers who raise children without a male partner. She’s ultimately, an absolute badass. Based on what I now know, and how it all makes me feel, I am personally reclaiming cunt, as a word that at least has some evidence of being linked to bodily autonomy, power, strength, and breaking more than a few patriarchal traditions.

And if the idea that the question ‘Is the baby a boy or a girl'?’ actually translates to ‘does the baby have a cunt?’ makes you feel more than a little queasy, perhaps it’s time we realise just how incredibly weird that question is in the first place.

So how did we get here? I have some ideas…

Extractive Capitalism At Its Height

The explosion in private sonogram offerings over the last decade is really quite something. You can get scans from 6 weeks to see if the embryo has a heartbeat, which can feel like a life buoy in a stormy sea to those of us who have experienced miscarriage. The other thing these companies do, is offer you package deals on gender reveals and 4D scans, so you can start your baby photo album, with the ‘right’ colours and decorations, long before little Jade or Jaden makes her or his appearance. They only ever say hers or his, or his or hers, never their. If they said their, they might give the game away that we don’t actually know, and that there are other options available! I found out recently that many NHS sonographers will only tell you the baby’s sex verbally, and will not write it down, so as to prevent you from taking it to a baker, a party store, or a sky-writing plane pilot with the hope of having pink or blue cake, balloons or smoke in the sky tell you what exterior genitals your baby has. Something private sonographers are more than happy to do. For a price, of course.

Rampant Transphobia And The Avoidance Of Connection

People start talking about the ‘gender’ of my baby almost as soon as they spot that I’m pregnant. We live in an increasingly gender-obsessed world, spurred on by enormous increases in transphobia due to government and media-backed discrimination in order to make trans folks the latest scapegoat and distraction from all of their colonial evil doings. This is one reason that people bang on about gender as soon as they so much as see a not entirely flat stomach (hello fatphobia and racism) on a femme presenting person. But it doesn’t end there, I believe there is something else altogether going on.

Small talk, as long time subscribers will know, is something I abhor. If we are going to talk, I want it to be real. This doesn’t mean it has to be intense, it simply needs to mean something. What is missing from small talk, is connection. Small talk allows us to pretend we are communicating, or even bonding, when in fact we are going through a set framework of questions and answers that form part of politeness and whiteness. It’s about keeping people at a distance while performing colonial norms as expected. Many people are so conditioned and entrenched in these constructs, that they think that IS connection. Now add pregnancy into the mix, and people very quickly locate the right ‘script’ in their minds and go through the motions, with very little actual thought or feeling, I believe.

The estate agent who showed me around a house we didn’t end up getting, didn’t actually give a flying cockwomble about my due date, the baby’s ‘gender’, or if we have thought of any names yet. They asked about these things, because they have learned that these are the questions you ask when you know someone is pregnant. Whether you have any relationship with that person at all is completely irrelevant. They are a pregnant human, and there are questions you ask a pregnant human in order to ‘make conversation’. The thing is, I didn’t want to make conversation with them, I was happy in our shared silence. So here we have one person asking questions with zero interest in the answers, and a person answering them with zero interest in sharing any information. So what in the hell are we doing here?! We are moving through socially accepted norms about polite conversation, that prevent us from finding real, human connection in the ‘every day’ moments of our lives. It is by design, to keep us from forming community bonds, to keep us from trusting each other, to keep us hyper individualised and dependent on harmful systems instead of each other.

And yet, in all of this diabolical nonsense, we have a choice. We have, multiple choices. We can choose to unlearn colonial misinformation and stereotypes around sex and gender. We can choose to be deliberate about the language we use, and to consider the subtext of veiled questions and terms. We can choose to view pregnant people as people, who may have more to share than what they know about the contents of their uterus. We can choose silence over small talk. We can choose to trust that silence may lead to organic conversation and genuine connection.

Instead of projections, assumptions, or cakes in unimaginative colours telling us who our children are, we can choose to let them show us. Slowly, beautifully, over time. With nurture, care, support and no agenda whatsoever.

Now wouldn’t that be something?

— AJ

Today’s Neuro-Embodiment Prompts:

Suggestions and questions to help you engage with mindbody decolonisation:

• Have you ever asked about the ‘gender’ or ‘sex’ of someone’s unborn child? What may you do when in the same situation again? What other questions may you ask?

• What language do you use for genitalia? Have you ever given any thought to the etymology of those words? Or the messages you were given around them?

• What can you do to help the children in your life have a healthy relationship with their own bodies? With their own genders? How can you show up as a safe and informed space for them?

• What do you want to unlearn around colonial projections of gender? How have they harmed you? What healing needs to take place? What possibilities exist for you outside of these ideas?