Save this story Save Story Save this story It began, innocently enough, with a cake. In 2008, American blogger Jenna Karvunidis threw a party to announce the sex of her unborn baby. The reveal came when she cut a slice and found pink inside. She wrote about the experience online, the post went viral, and a new ritual was born.
Nearly 20 years later, we all know the drill. If it isn’t a cake, it’s a balloon or a cannon. Friends and family gather. Someone counts down; something explodes in blue or pink; the parents-to-be hug; a grandparent enters the frame looking thrilled and slightly confused. And, of course, there’s a camera rolling, meaning my daughter could have in theory earned her first “like” long before she drew her first breath.
For the first time in a century, nearly less than half of parents are circumcising their newborns. New dad Kevin Lincoln investigates how America’s favorite elective surgery became as debated as childhood vaccines—and considers his own decision.
The gender reveal has evolved from a modest party trick into a full-blown genre of internet spectacle, complete with its own newborn industrial complex. Private ultrasound companies now sell “gender-reveal experiences,” with rooms that glow pink or blue and teddy bears containing recordings of an unborn baby’s heartbeat. Online, the reveals have become more elaborate: smoke bombs, pyrotechnics (one of which started a wildfire in South California in 2020), choreographed dances, skydivers and, in one particularly memorable case, a Louisiana alligator called Sally biting through a blue jelly watermelon.
But the spectacle has moved on. A new kind of gender-reveal video is becoming a genre of its own, one in which a particular reaction is the main event. A recent compilation racked up 33 million views and three million likes on TikTok. Expecting couples do not scream with delight when the color appears. They scream in horror. They collapse and cry. The reason is nearly always the same: it’s blue. They’re having a boy.
What looks like internet absurdity may actually point to something much bigger. Last year, The Economist published data showing that in mostly higher-income countries, the centuries-old preference for sons is starting to reverse. And in some countries, the data shows that opinion has fully flipped: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Portugal and the Czech Republic are showing evidence of a preference for girls.
In the US, the same trend appears among adoptive parents. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, prospective parents were willing to pay an average $16,000 more for a girl than a boy. Among couples having IVF in the US—where, unlike the UK, sex selection is legal— leading clinics have reported that 75–80% of patients want a girl.
This is a big demographic plot twist. On one hand, it’s what progress looks like. For most of human history, boys have been the prize. They inherited the family name and property. They were expected to earn money and carry the family line into the future. Girls, in turn, were generally expected to marry out or care for relatives.
In the worst cases, the preference for sons has had lethal consequences. In China, where a one-child policy enforced by the government lasted 35 years, and in India, sex-selective abortion and the killing or abandonment of female babies has led to generations with far more boys than girls. Misogynist discrimination has been so pervasive that in 1990, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen estimated that more than 100 million women were “missing” from world history. (Researchers have since questioned the precise figure and methodology, but the point still stands.)
But there is another, stranger side to the reversal. You don’t have to spend long reading the 20,000-plus comments beneath a viral gender-reveal video to realize that some of this isn’t simply about girls finally being valued properly. There is a growing and increasingly open distaste for boys—a sense that they are inherently problematic, undesirable by default.
Having a son, in certain corners of modern parenthood, has become unfashionable. A curious society might ask itself why this is—and where it might lead.
Ruth Whippman is the mother of three boys. She grew up in England but now lives in America, in what she describes as a “progressive area of the country [with] very progressive school districts”. As she writes in her 2024 book, BoyMom , friends and neighbors kept saying versions of the same thing: “I hope for your sake this one is a girl.”
“We were a year into the [first] Trump presidency,” she tells me. “There were incels on the news. There was just this huge backlash against toxic masculinity. So it wasn’t even just a sense of, ‘Oh, boys, their clothes aren’t as nice; you don’t get to play Barbies.’ It was this sense that boys are actively toxic and harmful.”
My son and I were calling to each other across a great distance, a distance that I was aware might never close.
When Whippman’s first son was due, she had the standard worries about raising a child of the opposite sex. Would they have enough in common? Would she know how to navigate experiences she hadn’t had? As a lifelong feminist, she tells me, the additional sense of cultural disapproval made everything worse. “It was really horrible, because nobody likes to be pitied,” she says. “Nobody likes to think that their children are second best. But I think it played into something in me as well, if I’m totally honest. I had my own fears and feelings about [having boys], and hearing everybody else’s reaction just made it much worse.”
Nearly a decade on from #MeToo, with Donald Trump back in the White House and male chauvinism metastasizing across the internet, it’s unusual to hear the word “masculinity” without the word “toxic” prefacing it. So parents can end up feeling—even if they’re guilty about it—that having a son is more complicated than it was for previous generations.
“When you hear about boys at the moment, at best, they’re this underachieving lunk who won’t go to college, is doing badly at school and will fail to launch,” says Whippman. “And at worst, he’s deep in the manosphere, commanding his AI girlfriend to let him choke her, or whatever. It gets to this wider consumerisation of parenthood. [The idea that] girls are better consumer products, in a way—which is a terrible, terrible way to talk about human beings.”
I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t crossed my mind, when I discovered I was having a daughter, that if I could raise her to be a confident, secure, kick-ass girl, I’d win the approval of the types of circle I move in. “ Girl dads ” who let daughters paint their nails are the subject of endless kind TikTok videos.
Parents of boys, not so much. Whippman, who has heard more and more fathers say they would prefer daughters, recognizes the problem. “Parenting a son is almost seen as a harm reduction project, rather than anything empowering,” she says. “That’s really at odds with our modern parenting culture, which is about encouraging [our kids] to reach for the stars and be happy and access all the world has to offer.”
And like everything else in 2026, the random, happy event of your unborn child’s sex can somehow thrust you into the us-versus-them culture war. “In the States and in the UK, there’s a sense that if you are on the progressive left, you are on the side of girls and women… any time you’re defending boys and men, it has this sniff of something right-wing, or being a bad actor,” says Whippman. “That’s a really hard thing to hold as a progressive, feminist parent of a son.”
There are other theories for why parents in Western countries, in particular, are increasingly downbeat about having boys. Millennials are having fewer children than any generation in history, and we’re doing it later in life. In other words, by the time it happens, we’re already exhausted. And boys are often perceived as more work, especially when they’re little: more physical, and harder to keep occupied and under control.
Lara Miller has been a midwife for more than 20 years. She uses social media to demystify pregnancy and childbirth. She thinks there is some truth to the idea that older parents may be wary of boys. “When you see older people having babies, they tend to be more controlling about everything to do with it,” she says. “I say this without judgment—I was an older mum myself—but you become used to doing things your own way and to your own routines.”
Of course, it would be silly to assume every girl will be content quietly coloring in while every boy spends his childhood trailing dog shit through the house. But according to Alex Trippier , a kids’ club leader who runs the social media account Be A Happier Parent , there can be real differences in behavior. “You get testosterone surges around age two, which I really see with the kids that I look after in my groups,” he says. “All of a sudden the boys come in and they’re going crazy. Parents who are on the quieter side can be overwhelmed by the sheer energy. Some people insist this is all nonsense, and [boys being more boisterous] is completely socialized. I think it’s a mixture of both. You’ve got that developmental layer going on, and you’ve got all the socialization on top of it.”
Trippier, who has two boys and a girl, thinks culture has shifted. Parents have always worried about teenage girls. But now, they have a whole new list of concerns for boys: porn , gaming addiction, exam results, algorithms. “There are all these fears we have for our sons, this kind of moral anxiety about the impossibility of raising good men,” he says.
In 2024, Zach Baron documented his long journey to fatherhood via IVF in GQ . Now, he reports on the mind-altering chaos (and occasional brilliance) of life with two walking, talking young boys.
Miller, who had similar feelings when she was pregnant but is now the happy mother of two sons, thinks there’s another factor: Schools aren’t always very good at accommodating boys. “We have changed as a society and we’re not as accepting of boys,” she says. “Boys don’t tend to fit the school model. You get worse reports. [Our school] gives the boys set days to be allowed to kick a football. Well, you don’t remember that at school, do you?”
She recalls being summoned by a headmaster after her son made a gun sign with his fingers. “The girls do better at school,” she says. “They’ve read 20 books; my boys have only read two. The teacher’s gone, ‘Well, if you buy a football magazine, do you think they’d read that?’ You’re like, ‘Oh, fuck off. Just fuck off.’”
There’s something else unusual about today’s parents, beyond grappling with the manosphere and Parkrun injuries. We’re the most psychologically literate generation to have ever lived. If we haven’t done therapy ourselves, we’re at least sufficiently fluent in the language of therapy to take a stab at self-reflection (or, as Boomer parents might call it, self-absorption). We know about childhood trauma. We know about attachment styles. We know that our parents’ behavior has consequences. We know that our childhoods don’t simply disappear when we become adults. It gives us an enormous number of things to worry about.
One of the most interesting conversations I’ve had on this subject is with a colleague who is expecting a son. He’s delighted now, but initially, the prospect of having a boy unnerved him—as it did me, before I knew the sex of my baby. We both agreed this probably came from remembering difficult experiences with our own fathers, and being afraid of repeating them. For me, it may have gone a step further. The idea of having a son scared me because I had a pretty broken relationship with myself.
Dr. Chrissy Jayarajah is a psychiatrist and the author of the world’s only academic paper on “gender disappointment.” She’s quick to point out that the term is not a clinical diagnosis, but what you might call a “known phenomenon” (particularly on TikTok, where thousands of videos are tagged with it).
“Something I always say is that becoming a parent will undoubtedly make you reflect on the way that you were parented,” she says. “Whether it was a good relationship, a bad relationship, an indifferent relationship or a non-existent relationship—they all play a part. An absent father is still very present in your mind. We are more psychologically minded and reflective compared with, maybe, the generation before. But I also think we don’t know what to do with that reflection.”
This can manifest in different ways, explains Jayarajah. “Working predominantly with mothers, I would say they fall into two camps,” she says. “They either want to emulate exactly how their mother was, from recreating those childhood memories, making those family favorite meals on a Sunday, and so on. Or they’re: ‘Oh my God, I’m turning into my mother.’”
That can produce powerful feelings about your baby’s sex. “We see that with women who have experienced abuse of some kind,” says Jayarajah. “Some absolutely do not want to have a girl, because they don’t want their daughter to experience what they went through. On the other hand, I have had women who say, ‘No, I definitely want a girl. I don’t want to have a son,’ because a son [would remind] them of the perpetrator.”
The sex of your baby, in other words, can become a vessel for all sorts of fears that existed long before the baby did. Then, there’s the demographic problem. There just aren’t enough babies. A rapid collapse in birth rates and fertility is playing out across the world. In 1990, global fertility was about 3.3 children per woman. Today it is around 2.2 to 2.3. More than half the countries in the world are already below “replacement level.”
The consequences will be huge. Labor shortages. Pressure on pensions. Rising social and healthcare costs. Less of the innovation and forward momentum traditionally associated with younger populations. In that context, favoring one sex over the other seems beyond counterproductive.
Maybe we are retreating into old, narrow assumptions. “We’ve never thought about gender more as a society than we do at this present day,” says Jayarajah. “Ideas about gender are in our face all day long. There was no such thing as a gender reveal party 20 years ago, let alone putting it online. What’s happening, in my opinion, is gender essentialism. This sexist idea of what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, is playing out in what we expect for our children.”
The following week, I saw this in action. I took my 19-month-old daughter to a soft-play morning, where she likes to roll around on the multicolored shapes and go down the slide on my lap. A few minutes after we arrived, I heard a scream. “Aaaargh!”
At one end of the ball pit, a little boy was staring at his own reflection in a mirror. “Aaaargh!” he went again, hammering his fists against the perspex and making the entire frame shake. A few feet away, my daughter watched him quietly. I made a mental note to keep them as far apart as possible.
The boy’s parents were nearby, deep in conversation. They seemed oblivious, or perhaps simply immune, to their son’s King Kong routine. A dozen judgmental thoughts zipped through my head. Why aren’t you keeping a closer eye on him? What kind of irresponsible shit are you pulling at home for him to do this? If he harms her, I swear to God…
I took a sip of my coffee, scrolled through my phone, then turned around, ready to rescue my sweet, innocent little girl. The boy who had been screaming a moment ago was now shyly handing her a dumper truck with a missing wheel. She closed her eyes, grinned, and took it with both hands.
A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2026 issue of British GQ with the title “For Centuries, Everyone Wanted Boys. Now, Not So Much”
Food Styling by Sarah Hardy Prop Styling by Eve Itsuki Asami
10 Ways to Build Muscle as Fast as Humanly Possible
What Is HDL Cholesterol and How Do You Raise It?
How to Catch Up on Sleep the Right Way , According to Experts
Matt Damon Did a Gut Cleanse to Prepare for The Odyssey —Should You Try One?
Not a subscriber? Join GQ to receive full access to GQ.com.
Source: Celebrities
0 Comments