The 'Gender Reveal Party' Menace
Congratulations! It's a catastrophe!
There are very few good reasons to fire a gun into the air. A baby's penis is not one of them.
Last week, three schools in Tennessee went on active shooter lockdown when a 911 caller reported hearing screaming and gunshots in the area. The culprit, thankfully, wasn't an armed person who wished students harm, but rather an armed person squeezing off a few celebratory gunshots in joy over the news that his pregnant wife was expecting a boy baby. The screaming came courtesy of his celebrating wife. The man has since been charged with a misdemeanor. Let's hope, for the future child's sake, that terrible judgement doesn't run in the family.
Last week's Tennessee Incident marks the umpteenth time in recent memory that anecdotal evidence shows that "gender reveal" parties have gotten totally the fuck out of hand.
While "gender reveal parties" were likely going on as soon as ultrasound technology became sophisticated enough to get a detailed view of the fetal pelvic region, it wasn't until 2008 that they really started to blow up (pun intended). That year, Chicago-area mom and blogger Jenna Karvunidis posted a video from a "gender reveal" party she threw. In the footage, Karvunidis cut into a cake that was color-coded to reveal the sex of her fetus.
Since then, technology that enables expectant parents to know what's between their baby's legs has only gotten more advanced, and the attendant parties have only gotten more absurd and, in some cases, deadly.
Here's a list of a few disasters brought to you courtesy of "gender reveal parties.":
April 2017: A border patrol agent named Dennis Dickey started what became known as the Sawmill Fire when a giant bullseye packed with explosives malfunctioned. The fire burned 47,000 acres and took 800 firefighters a week to contain. Dickey eventually pled guilty to a misdemeanor and was ordered to pay $220,000 in restitution, an amount that paled in comparison to the fire's $8 million in damages.
October 2019: A 56-year-old Iowa grandmother-to-be was killed when a piece of metal from a homemade gender reveal pipe bomb struck her in the head.
September 2020: Refugio Manuel Jimenez Jr. and Angela Renee Jimenez threw a gender reveal party involving explosives in a national forest in the middle of one of the worst fire seasons in California history, and it went about as badly as a gender reveal party could go. The couple ignited what eventually became known as the El Dorado Fire, which burned 36 square miles, caused hundreds of people to be evacuated, destroyed 5 homes, injured 13 people, and killed the leader of an elite firefighting unit that worked primarily in national forests. They pled not guilty to charges related to all that havoc earlier this summer, and their next court date is September 15.
February 2021: A 26-year-old Michigan man was killed when a cannon malfunctioned at a gender reveal party thrown by some friends.
February 2021: A 28-year-old Liberty, New York father-to-be was killed and his 27-year-old brother was injured when a pipe bomb they planned on using during a gender reveal party exploded in a garage.
March 2021: Two people were killed when a small airplane crashed after an airborne gender reveal in Cancun, Mexico.
April 2021: Neighbors in New Hampshire and Massachusetts reported that their houses had shaken with the force of a large explosion that turned out to be part of a gender reveal party thrown in a nearby quarry. The family's patriarch later pled guilty and was fined.
[Note the uptick in gender reveal disasters during 2021, a pandemic year! Vaccines for COVID weren't widely available until late spring, and then there were only a few weeks of irrationally exuberant reopenings and mask mandate relaxations before Delta showed up to speedbag the American pandemic recovery right in the balls. Most public health officials were advising against big gatherings of people from multiple households during that time. Then again, something tells me that people accidentally starting forest fires or killing grandmas with jerry rigged gender reveal pyrotechnics aren't strict adherents to public health guidance.]
According to Google Trends, interest in the topic "gender reveal party" was virtually nonexistent prior to mid-2010. Over the next several years, interest grew evenly and assuredly, spiking in September of 2020 (probably because of the aforementioned El Dorado Fire incident) before resuming its steady, tedious climb. Now, the phrase is most commonly searched in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and West Virginia, the five states that also happen to be some of the most conservative and five least-educated states in the country.
Explosions, deaths, and public nuisance aside, the term "gender reveal party" is a misnomer that, like attitude onesies, ultimately says more about the parents than it does the not-yet-born person at their center.
An ultrasound or maternal blood test can't tell anybody anything about "gender," which is psychological and social. A baby in utero is not performing gender; a baby in utero is trying to put its hands all the way in its mouth and kicking its mother in the ribs, activities they would be performing regardless of whether their birth certificate will eventually say "male" or "female." A blood test or ultrasound can tell parents about chromosomes or genitalia, which are signifiers of biological sex, which means those parties with the colored pyrotechnics are "sex reveal parties"-- or "genital reveal parties" or "chromosome reveal parties" or "junk reveal parties," if you really want to get technical.
Josh and I decided pretty early on that we weren't going to find out our baby's sex until the birth. This decision had less to do with the fact that we both read some Judith Butler in college and more to do with the fact that one of my friends told me how special it was for her and her husband to learn their baby's sex at the same time, within moments of meeting the newest addition to their family. (She enjoyed the experience of not finding out sex in advance so much that she did it three times.) I thought about it, and brought it up to Josh, and it felt like the right decision for us. Plus--and this could just be confirmation bias on my part--gender neutral baby stuff is just cuter on average than the aggressively boyish or girly stuff. Once the kid gets here, I assume it won't be long before they develop their own preferences for colors and toys.
The only sacrifices we've had to make-- if they can even be considered sacrifices-- is that we had to come up with a longer list of names, and warn our ultrasound technicians that we don't want to know the baby's sex. And not knowing has given me time to process the idea of being a parent without throwing gender into the equation.
I get that nine-plus months of pregnancy is a long time, and that there's so little knowable information about one's future baby that any little tidbit is exciting. I think I overwhelmed my mom, sister, and sister-in-law with texts about the minutiae of my doctor's appointments up until the middle of the second trimester. (Maybe I'm still annoying them; who knows!) And it's nice to have an excuse to get family and friends together and celebrate the excitement of a new baby. I just don't know if throwing a huge party centered on a concept that already feels old-fashioned is the move. Cut a cake, put some color-coded dry ice and dye in a plastic cauldron, whatever-- but understand that one day the future child being feted in a "gender reveal" might find photos and videos of that event weird, confusing, or hurtful.
That's because never in history has a child been more likely to grow up to not adhere to the gender binary. According to a global survey conducted this year, one in six members of Generation Z (born in 1997 or later) identify as queer; 4% identify as nonbinary or trans. (Just for a sense of how many young adults this is: 3.8% of Americans live in the state of Pennsylvania.) How many babies celebrated with an exploding bullseye will one day have to throw their own "gender reveal" that is more in step with who they actually turn out to be and not a celebration of what their parents expect them to be?
Besides all that, learning about a child's gender-- if it were even something we could know about a person who hasn't been born yet-- is only a small aspect of what makes a person who they are. There are more significant milestones to celebrate. You'd learn a lot more about a kid at a party commemorating their first viewing of The Empire Strikes Back than by watching their parent run in terror from an errant cannon exploding in blue powder.
A generation from now, gender reveal parties will be looked back on with the same gawking curiosity once afforded to the episodes of Mad Men when Betty Draper nonchalantly smoked and drank cocktails balanced on her pregnant stomach. Jenna Karvunidis, the woman largely credited with throwing the first viral "gender reveal" party, wrote in 2019 that she regretted how over the top the trend she'd started had gotten, in part because the child whose "gender" she'd once commemorated with a cake was now a happy nonbinary 10-year-old "girl who wears suits." Time to commission a new cake.
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