Pop singer Demi Lovato claimed that gender reveal parties are “transphobic” in a lengthy Instagram post on Wednesday. The post was not Lovato’s original thought, but rather a copy and paste from Alok Vaid-Menon, a self-described “internationally acclaimed gender non-conforming writer, performer, and public speaker.”
“Gender reveals uphold the gender binary and the binary prevents people from observing reality,” the post about parties for unborn babies read. “Only individuals can determine their own gender.”
“It’s both insincere and incorrect to pretend that gender reveal parties are not transphobic,” the nine-slide Instagram post stated. “You can’t have your proverbial pink-blue binary cake and eat it, too. This is not about political correctness; it’s just … correct. We condemn gender reveals not because of our identity, but because of reality.”
“Gender reveals require not just the invalidation of transness, but the impossibility of transness,” the post from the 28-year-old singer claimed. “The assumption is that the baby is cis. Cisness is positioned as the default and everyone else is understood as derivative of it.”
“The idea goes: while we might ‘identify’ as trans now, we were ‘originally’ ‘born’ cis and we later ‘became’ trans,” the screed continued. “When in truth, everyone is just born. And we all become after the fact.”
Lovato’s post said that basing someone’s gender off their genitalia is “inconsistent with science.”
The post argued that there were more genders than just male and female, “Gender reveals are based on the illusion that genitals=gender and that there are only two options ‘boy’ or ‘girl. This definition erases the fact that there are boys with vaginas and girls with penises and that there are people who are neither boys nor girls.”
The Instagram post asserted that people believing there only being two genders “naturalizes cultural myths as ‘biological facts.'”
The caption on the post said that there is a misunderstanding of what transphobia is, “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.”
Earlier this week, Lovato talked about her own sexuality during an InStyle interview.
“I’m very fluid,” she said. “I think love is love. You can find it in any gender. I like the freedom of being able to flirt with whoever I want.”
In September, Lovato expressed shame in her whiteness because of racial injustice and the high-profile deaths of black people.
“At first, I was self-conscious about speaking out about these issues because I didn’t want anyone to feel like it wasn’t genuine,” Lovato wrote. “I also felt like I wanted to call every person of color that I knew and apologize, which I know isn’t the right thing to do either. Like a lot of people, I didn’t know what to do.”
“All I knew was that I hated that I shared the same skin color as the people accused of committing heinous crimes against Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and many, many other Black lives,” Lovato said.