What do you think of "gender disappointment"? Should it be normalized/sympathize with?
The title, pretty much.
I gave birth to a boy earlier in the year and had been lurking pregnancy groups and there's a lot of discussion on "gender disappointment" about their baby's sex, sometimes to the point of women legitimately crying for weeks over it. Particularly the discourse on most pregnancy subs is that it's a reasonable and valid emotion to have.
I'm not gonna lie; I was kind of surprised at the amount of "your feelings are valid" and "it's okay to feel that way" responses these women got. I personally can't relate to it at all and don't find it normal since I never had any preference one way or the other while I was pregnant. And I find the normalization/validation of the concept pretty weird since you have a 50/50 chance of being devastated, which is a massive risk to take over something that's going to affect you for life. But I also realize that raising a child of one sex versus the other is going to present certain challenges and I don't think having a preference for one is inherently wrong per se.
And I'm also slightly sympathetic just because I don't know how many of the emotions I see on those subs are just a matter of pregnancy/hormones going wild.
EDIT: Okay, I had no idea this was a recurring topic on this sub and just made this post on a whim since I've been seeing it on my feed more and more lately. I'll probably delete this post in the morning.