I am currently six months pregnant with my second child, and it feels like a rather strange time to be so. Partly because these unexpectedly long spells of warm weather have rendered me umbilically tethered to a fan at all times, which has done terrible things to my electricity bills. Partly because every morning I seem to wake up to a new maternity scandal and must navigate between newsfeeds in which women trauma-dump their horrendous birth stories or hypnobirthing experts chanting that my ‘body was made to do this’. Partly because since I was last pregnant, only two years ago, we have now had three Prime Ministers.
Another reason I feel discombobulated is that I am pregnant with my second son, and yet everywhere I turn, there seems to be a preference for baby girls over baby boys. My Instagram algorithm is full of #TractorsOrTiaras gender reveal parties in which parents are devastated by blue icing or turquoise confetti cannons. My Mumsnet feed contains dozens of anonymous posters confessing their ‘secret shame’ of gender preference – and yet it always seems to go one way.
When I tell people I am having another boy, they seem to react in one of three ways. They either ask me how I feel (as if ‘happy’ is not the obvious answer); warn me that I will ‘have my hands full’ (probably true, but still not helpful); or ask if we will try for a third for a girl (as if two boys is somehow incomplete).
Across the developed world, it seems that more and more parents are now seeing girls as a boon and boys as a burden. One study found that in US states where sex-selective IVF is legal, white parents having a first child picked female embryos 70 percent of the time. Another found that American adoptive parents were 30 percent more likely to prefer girls, and were willing to pay $16,000 more in finalisation costs to ensure a daughter. According to the Japanese Fertility Survey, 75 percent of couples wanting only one child said that they would prefer a daughter, whilst demographic data in Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Portugal all suggest that families with daughters tend to have fewer subsequent children, again implying that a daughter is what makes a family complete.
So where has this girl-bias come from? Perhaps it is because girls are seen as ‘easier’: quieter, more docile, happy to sit for hours diligently colouring instead of destroying the garden or climbing onto roofs – boys are rambunctious whereas girls are socialised for sweetness. Perhaps it is because many people believe girls stay closer, emotionally and geographically, to their families and will provide support and care later on in life (there is a rather maddening saying that ‘a son’s yours for life, until they find a wife.’)
Perhaps it’s because mums want the ‘relatability’ of having daughters. One famous celebrity therapist surmised that the ‘relatively common’ desire for a girl could be put down to the concept that people want to ‘redo’ their own childhood: they want to fix themselves and their traumas by trying again with a mini version of themselves. As Jung put it, ‘The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.’
Girls are seen as ‘easier’: quieter, more docile, happy to sit for hours diligently colouring
Yet this does not explain the rise in the more emotionally-attentive ‘girl dad’. It also does not explain the crisis in masculinity and the lopsided expectations on girls; the fear, to put it simply, that boys are ‘trouble’, or at least vulnerable to all kinds of trouble. In Boy Mom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Toxic Masculinity, Ruth Whippman writes that the list of fears is long: ‘rapist, school-shooter, incel, man-child, interrupter, mansplainer, self-important stoner, emotional-labour abstainer, non-wiper of kitchen counters.’
When I found out I was having another boy, my reactions were mostly practical: relief we could use the same clothes again, hope that my sons would have similar interests and hobbies, frustration that I would have to find another boy name my husband and I could agree upon (something we found notoriously difficult the first time).
I now realise that, for many people, a baby being ‘happy and healthy’ is not a strong enough platitude to override gender preference, and that the reality of bringing another boy into this world seems rather complicated when we value masculinity less and less. Yet the truth is that we cannot birth children in an attempt to satisfy our own familial wants – our own needs, vision or expectations – because our children are not in service to us; we are in service to them. Knowing the gender of our children may give us some illusion of control over their destiny, but caring too much about having a girl suggests either a lack of imagination, an obsession with stereotypes, or an over-estimation of your ability to truly define your children.
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