Why Grimes and Elon Musk’s Baby Won’t Have a Gender
Singer Grimes, the significant other of tech impresario Elon Musk, has decided not to reveal the gender of her child as she heads into her eighth month of pregnancy. This comes at a time when celebrities increasingly safeguard their kids from prying eyes.
Grimes, however, is taking the step of protecting before her child is even born. She is also doing this at a time when gender reveals are often frowned upon.
How Elon Musk and Grimes got together
Musk, an entrepreneur that is known primarily for the Tesla line of electric cars, and Grimes, who performs electronic music, first made their relationship public at the 2018 Met Gala in New York. Their meet-cute was through a joke both made independently of one another about artificial intelligence, according to USA Today.
Musk came up with a pun about an Artificial Intelligence thought experiment called Roko’s Basilisk. There is also a European art style called rococo, so Musk combined the two and came up with “Rococo basilisk.”
However, Musk discovered Grimes had already made the same joke years before. Figuring that two people who would come up with the same esoteric joke must have a lot in common, Grimes reached out, and a relationship was born.
Fatherhood will not be new for Musk. He has five sons — a set of twins and a set of triplets — from his previous marriage. Motherhood, however, is new to Grimes, and she has told reporters that she thinks pregnancy is not all it’s cracked up to be.
She wrote on Instagram, “I feel like I was woefully ill prepared cuz I dunno if pregnancy is as visible or discussed as it should be … it makes working a lot harder. Good at writing and having lots of wild ideas tho, but anything physical is hard. Im also way more emo and less capable of bravery in the face of haters online and stuff haha.”
Why Grimes won’t reveal her baby’s gender
When someone learns a woman is pregnant, one of the first questions that naturally occurs is “Is it a boy or a girl?” Grimes has her reasons for not saying.
“I don’t want to say the gender of the baby … because I feel like their privacy should be protected. I don’t think they can consent to being famous or being in public,” Grimes said. “And I don’t want to gender them in case that’s not how they feel in their life. I don’t know, I just feel like it doesn’t need to be known,” People quoted her as saying.
Such sentiment is not uncommon, as gender reveals are criticized in some quarters, no matter if the parents are famous or not. Gender reveal parties, in particular, have come under fire with the increasing visibility of the trans community.
A piece in Marie Claire points out: ” For starters, gender-reveal parties don’t actually reveal gender—they reveal anatomy. Gender is a wholly different thing, inextricably tied to the social constructs around it … A gender reveal conflates the two.”
Celebrities increasingly shield their children from the public
Regardless of one’s feelings about the wisdom of gender reveals, famous parents and parents-to-be have become ever more protective of their children. Celebrities such as Julia Roberts have argued with paparazzi photographing their children, saying while they, the famous parents, are fair game, the children are not. They didn’t sign up for this.
Today reported that when something similar happened to Kristen Bell, she shamed the photographer into deleting photos of the kids at their school. She handled the situation calmly, knowing that if she had gone ballistic, that would have been even more grist for the tabloid mill.
As for Grimes, she’s taking a similar tact, not telling the name of the child either.
“I have a name for the baby, but I don’t want to say what it is because everyone I’ve told it hates it, and everyone’s gonna make fun of it,” she shared. “But it is, in fact, a genius name and people just don’t appreciate it yet because it’s too avant-garde.”
