It’s Time to Officially End the Gender Revelation Party
If you’ve been pregnant in the past decade, you’ve probably heard of the concept of a gender revelation party. The trend goes back to one mom who hosted what is considered the first gender revelation party in 2008. Jenna Karvunidis cut the cake to show the pink frosting (it’s a girl, guys!) And her subsequent blog post – and the idea itself – went viral. Now is the time to stop.
Gender revelation parties are problematic for one obvious reason that many of us, in the decade since this original party went viral, have become better understood and recognized. The gender assigned at birth is not necessarily gender-specific.
To learn more about gender identity, watch the video below:
At these parties, the gender of the child is considered the main distinguishing feature – after all, we still know very little about them. The said child may find out years later that we were all wrong, but he will still definitely see photos from the party, specially designed to celebrate what they are not.
If that wasn’t enough, the Americans have raised the ante in the ten years since Karvunidis’s party. I will see your homemade cake and I will give you pink or blue balloons from the box. No wait! We could pop a balloon filled with blue confetti or open a piñata full of pink candies. Or how about a few handy smoke bombs or powder cannons ? Bombing or setting fire to makeshift devices designed to grandiose gender reveal seems to be a hot new trend.
On Labor Day weekend, a couple and their young children traveled to California’s El Ranch Dorado Park to launch some kind of device that would reveal the sex of their unborn child while a loved one videotaped the moment. As Bloomberg reports :
… the device they used set off a wildfire that burned thousands of acres of land and forced people to flee the city east of Los Angeles.
The fire prompted evacuations in parts of Yukaypa, a city of 54,000 people, and its environs. Helicopters were brought in, dropping water, but the fire proved to be persistent – by Monday morning it had grown to 11.5 square miles (30 square kilometers), and more than 500 firefighters at the scene had only minimal containment.
Sadly, this isn’t the first time a sex revealing party has been accused of starting a wildfire. A sawmill fire in Arizona in 2017 that burned 47,000 acres was initiated by a Border Patrol duty agent :
And last year, a grandmother in Iowa was killed when she was wounded by an improvised explosive device fragment during a sex revealing party.
Even Karvunidis, the mom who cut the pink frosting cake years ago, begs people to stop these parties:
The time for grand gender disclosure has come and gone. Mark something else and leave the pyrotechnics at home.