Demi Lovato has called for an end to “transphobic” gender reveal parties in a post on Instagram that states only “individuals can determine their own gender.”
“This is not about being politically correct, it’s about being correct,” read the Thursday post from the 28-year-old singer, who recently opened up about her struggles with addiction.
View this post on Instagram
“The refusal to acknowledge this stems from a misunderstanding of what transphobia is,” her post added. “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.” (RELATED: Baby Shower Explosion Kills Michigan Man)
The post also explained that “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,” it read. (RELATED: Border Patrol Agent’s Gender Reveal Party Started Massive 47,000 Acre Wildfire)
Gender reveal parties caught on years ago as couples found creative ways to announce whether they were expecting a boy or girl. One of these parties started a wildfire in southern California last year which burned some 7,500 acres.
More recently, a father-to-be in New York ended up being killed after a gender reveal device exploded.