I Was Devastated to Learn I Was Having a Baby Boy. I’m Far From Alone.

Article here. Excerpt:

'“What do you think it is?” my doctor asked me on the phone. He was calling to reveal the sex of my baby, which expectant parents can find out these days via a blood test about 10 weeks into pregnancy.

Call it a mother’s intuition or a penchant for pessimism, but I already knew.

“A boy,” I replied stoically, resigned to my fate. I could feel it in my bones, or, more aptly, in my uterus.

And now science had confirmed it: The thing I had long feared was coming true.

“This baby is going to have a penis,” said 32-year-old Anna, who was in her second trimester when we talked. “That feels so—even though I’m married and have a husband, it just feels so, like, alien, almost.” (I’m identifying some of the parents and parents-to-be by first name only to protect their privacy.) The anxiety that your child will be confoundingly different from you extends far beyond physical attributes (although the concept of male puberty was another source of anatomical concern). As 34-year-old Rana Othman, the mother of a 13-month-old boy, put it: “I know how to navigate the world as a woman, and my mom taught me that. I don’t know what it’s like to navigate the world as a man. I have no idea. I truly have no idea.” Sarah identified with this conundrum: “I know how to raise, like, a confident woman who’s not going to take any shit, but I don’t really know how to raise an empathetic man.” Her son is 4, and “on a day-to-day basis, I just see him as the individual,” she said. “But once in a while, something will, like, trigger me, where I’m like, Oh, shit. Like, yes, it’s, like, this giant responsibility that’s, like, sitting on me to cure the problem of, you know, white men.”'