On 'gender disappointment' – why are we so obsessed with giving birth to girls?

A response to Maybe Baby's recent article on the topic

Last week I read Hayley Nahman’s Maybe Baby article Regarding boys & girls (and which you want), which was essentially about the concept of ‘gender disappointment’ – specifically in relation to having a boy. The article posed a few (very juicy) reader-written questions which opened up a *lively* discourse in the comments section. The TL:DR? Women want daughters. Badly.

Reading the 250+ comments acted as a kind of permission slip to write about it myself. To come out of the closet on this topic, as it were.

I’m cautious to write I felt gender disappointment when I found out I was having a son, because I never want my son to feel that he was anything other than deeply wanted. Because he always was, and always will be. I absolutely fucking love him.

I don’t think I would ever go as far as to say I had a preference for a daughter. Largely because I was taken aback by my own reaction upon seeing the result of a blood test I took at 10 weeks pregnant, which revealed my son’s sex. Although, hilariously, my husband saw MY sex listed on the document and squealed “it’s a girl!” whilst I was staring at the part of the document which very clearly read MALE.

Very important information my husband missed

Once I pointed this out to him (and all lols subsided) I felt a wave of disappointment course through me, which I very much kept to myself. Ergh, Tessa, Yuck! I said to myself, how can you possibly feel anything other than joy at this news? How incredibly petulant and selfish, knowing many people struggle to, or cannot, have babies at all. Mostly though, I didn’t want to take ownership of any negative emotion towards my pregnancy that could transfer to my child. But emotions don’t work that way, according to my slightly woo-woo belief system. If I believe my baby can feel my emotions (whether I named them out loud or not) the jig would be up.

As I sat with it, and after finally naming it, I realised that whatever *misc* emotion I had felt, had been borne from several things I am going to try and unravel in this essay.

(1) the way women (in 2025) feel about boys

I learned quite quickly that my feelings about having a boy were not unique nor developed in a vacuum. I realised this most potently as I clocked the reactions I received from so many people about having a boy. From mothers who had sons, from women pregnant with boys and childless people (usually women hoping to have children in the future) and mothers of daughters.

The women pregnant with boys seemed flush with relief to be speaking to another future “boy mum” – no need for envy, it seemed. We were all terrified about dealing with a tiny spout!! How does it even work?! we’d laugh. Hahaha.

The mothers of sons would insist that boys were the best. Don’t worry, it’s great!!! They would tell me, extremely enthusiastically, boys are the best!!! The undertone of these conversations always seemed to be I know you must be disappointed, but don’t worry, having boys really is lovely. I now know this sentiment comes from a place of truth (noone I know who has actually birthed a son would change that child for anything). Even when there wasn’t this undertone, there might be a comment like it’s so amazing seeing how many strong women are going to be raising boys or something of this ilk. A qualification (or assurance) that I’m not sure women pregnant with girls are receiving.

In fact, during a “conscious (!!) business incubator” [emphasis added by me] I took recently, the woman facilitating the course reacted to a participant’s pregnancy announcement by closing and pulling her first down while breathing out an empathic “yes” (like she had just scored the final point at Wimbeldon, or something equally momentous) upon the participant telling the group she was carrying a girl. I was pregnant at the time and I’m not going to lie, it kind of hurt. No women reacted like this to me telling them I was having a son. It was a strangely tone-deaf moment, given there were 60-odd women in that space.

Reflecting on it now, if we are going to run around yelling !!toxic masculinity!! at every turn, I would say this was a moment of toxic femininity. Babies are unborn. Their gender presentation is unknown. Their personalities and the gifts they are yet to undoubtedly proffer the world are literally still in utero, and we have women expressing palpable relief (beyond excitement) when it’s a girl? It’s kinda gross.

And then, from mothers with daughters and maybe-mothers-to-be, however well-hidden, there was always a slightly detectable air of pathos in their congratulations. Maybe I projected, maybe I imagined it. But having read the comments on the Maybe Baby article (most of which express an overwhelming desire from women to have daughters) I realised that I had likely imagined nothing whatsoever.

Incredibly, some of my friends overtly told me they experienced gender disappointment, notwithstanding already having a daughter. Or, they’ve said things like “I just never imagined I’d have a boy” or “I assumed it would be a girl.” And so, the idea that it’s about “missing out on having a daughter” cannot explain this phenomenon entirely, or at least not for every mother.

I wonder if this disbelief around having sons is why some women throw gender reveal parties and then cry when then confetti is blue. Why would you throw a party to publicly discover news that has a 50% chance of upsetting you? Perhaps because they quite literally didn’t think having a boy was possible. Sounds dumb, right? But the psyche can do some crazy shit in service of maintaining our delusions and denials.

The comments section of the Maybe Baby article also offered a few interesting (and, frankly, disturbing) articles about how this avalanche of preference for girls is affecting how boys are raised and how families are approaching IVF for “family balancing” (even when there are zero fertility issues).

All of the above focuses on the reaction I received from women about having a boy. But why do we feel this way? Is it purely about points (2) and (3) below, or is it all the noise about “toxic masculinity” (which don’t get me wrong, is very real. Andrew Tate exists, we all watched Adolescence on Netflix, etc etc) making us turn away from the very idea of raising a boy ourselves? This doesn’t feel true to my own experience but, then again, it’s hard to see the water you’re swimming in, while you’re swimming in it.

Urgh, so all of this is just – a lot, right?! And we’re only at point 1.

(2) my own undiagnosed expectations for a mother-daughter relationship

In Hayley’s article, one of the questioners (carrying a boy) said this:

“I keep on dreaming once I have the baby that it's actually a girl and I wake up in tears. The only source of comfort I have is Jung's assertion that, ‘The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.’ Maybe I just wanted to have a girl to fulfill my unlived life and it's a gift to her she's never going to have [to deal with] that.”

Her words really struck a chord with my own experience.

In the wake of my unexpected *feelings* upon discovering I was having a boy, I realised that disappointment cannot live without expectation. And because I was not aware of my own expectation, it has obviously lived unexamined. Which can’t be a good thing.

I’ve been considering those expectations a lot and I think they include anything and everything from the kind of bond I would share with a daughter, how my daughter would be a reflection of me, the tastes and interests we might share, the way she would “present” in the world and the closeness we would feel towards one another.

Like I said, I didn’t realise I had any expectation whatsoever. But once disappointment appeared, I needed to accept that quiet expectation must have existed within me. And I’m so glad I am in process of confronting it, should I have a daughter one day. Cos god knows, I don’t want her to deal with my Jungian shit.

And I realised the wonderful and unexpected beauty of having a boy, is that there is much less of this projection to confront. Perhaps this is why mother-son bonds often turn out to be less fraught than those of mother-daughter bonds. Food for thought.

(3) the calm, quiet and sweet we expect of girls

We have zero idea what any person we give birth to will be like. Although I do accept that boys can, for biological and social reasons, tend towards the more rambunctious. Yet, women are also socialised for sweetness.

More than that, girls are socialised to tie tradition together, to create familial connection (you know, hosting Christmas, buying the Mother’s Day gift, keeping in regular touch with ageing parents). But isn’t it also our job as mothers (and parents) to raise boys who also see that as their duty (and joy), too?

My husband is incredibly close with his mother. I'd say they speak at length once a week on the phone. And hilariously, I do now too. This comes down to both the woman she is – self aware, boundaried, loving, warm, supportive and joyful – and to the nature of my husband. Most importantly, he is someone who values family above anything else in his life. A value modelled to him by his mother.

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I want to consider what all of this overt or latent preference for girls will do to the sons we, as a society, will raise? What conscious or subconscious messages are we sending little boys in a world where their births are not “the preference”? I know men have had “a good go of things,” historically speaking, but they have also killed themselves at higher rates than women ever have. And I’m not going to pretend to know how to unravel all of the reasons why that horrible statistic is true. But perhaps one of them, in the modern age, is a worthiness issue that can be traced right back to the womb.

From a spiritual perspective (yep, I’m going there) I believe that every person is a slice/drop/piece of the greater (collective) consciousness. And after we spend our years on earth, we return to the greater consciousness, giving back to it all of the lessons we learn during our time as a little ant on this planet (which is why, as the generations roll over, the collective consciousness evolves). To this end, I believe that when a soul inhabits a body, it does so with certain wounds to heal and gifts to give – and the science of which sperm meets which egg, is met with a divine intervention that lets the soul meet the parents it is meant to meet. I totally accept that this will make some people roll their eyes. I’m cool with that.

But with that belief system in mind, I know that I cannot birth children in an attempt to satisfy my own familial wants (that is, with a hope for one gender over another). My kids are not in service to me. I am in service to them. If I approach having children in any other way, my belief system necessarily tells me that I will end up suffering, and so will my children.

The more we keep expressing this “yes!!” (fist pump) attitude towards having girls, the more we reinforce that, somehow, our children are in service to us. Our wants. Our needs. Our vision. When, really, they are their own people, with their own souls, who (if we’re lucky) we nurture into this world with the privilege of shaping, but never defining, them.

Perhaps if you don’t have this particular spiritual perspective, you can make peace with the reasons you long for a girl. But regardless of whether you have, or are having boys or girls, it’s worth asking yourself the simple question: what do I expect of my children, and why?

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