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The Dangers of a ‘Gender Reveal’ Party
- Sophia Domingo
- Sep 12, 2020
- 12 min read
Updated: Sep 20, 2020
Disclaimer: This article contains intricate topics in relationship to gender on a whole with mentions to the LGBTQIA+ community (transgender & intersex individuals). If you have questions in regards to this, please email me at sophiadomingo.inkmagazine@gmail.com. See the formatted article HERE for the citations in footnotes.
Introduction
The ‘gender reveal’ party, a common Western staple known to be a now accepted part of parenthood in this day and age. But, unfortunately, like many accepted events and customs in our modern-day social framework, they aren’t as much of a joyful event as they may seem. What are they exactly? Why do we even have them? And why are they not so good as the media makes it seem? Hopefully, in this piece, you will come to understand these main questions surround the dangers and a 'gender reveal' party.
What are they, and why do we have them?
Overall, a ‘gender reveal’ party is essentially the event where the baby’s ‘gender’ is revealed to the expecting parents, family and friends of the baby through something other than telling straight from the mouth the ‘gender’ of your baby.
It all began in 2008 when Jenna Karvunidis threw a party for her unborn child Bianca while she was pregnant. The main event of the party was when she announced her baby’s ‘gender’ by cutting into a cake filled with pink icing. Upon writing about the event on her blog, the event went viral online. ‘Gender reveal’ parties became a worldwide trend with parents around the globe announcing their baby’s ‘gender’ to the world through common examples such as:
Cakes
Boxes filled with balloons
Piñatas and balloons filled with confetti
Party poppers
Smoke bombs
Silly string
Dartboards of balloons filled with paint
Bath Bombs
Sparklers
Other ideas surrounding seasonal events dependant on the time of year include:
Fireworks (4th of July in the USA or New Year’s)
Eggs (Easter)
Jack O’ Lanterns (Halloween)
Presents (Christmas)
Though separate from a baby shower, the event where families and friends give the expecting parents of the baby the essential equipment and items they need for their future infant, the ‘gender reveal’ party is sometimes intertwined but it has its own distinct difference. The use of something other than telling straight from the mouth the ‘gender’ of your baby, mainly through the use of gender stereotypes such as pink and blue objects.
But why do we do this? Why has this become the ongoing trend of publicising what was once a private, intimate moment in parenthood online? Well, to put it simply, the ‘gender reveal party’ is something that many parents do to create a sense of stability and security in the categorisation of their baby’s sexual and ‘gendered’ difference. Now, keep this in mind for later on as this may seem a bit more problematic as we continue looking into this issue.
Why are they not as good as they seem?
At this point, all seems well from looking at its origin and basic definition alongside knowing that it creates a sense of stability and security for the parents. Why would this be such an issue if it’s just a party? Well, upon looking at the other side of this seemingly benign event, you will be able to see the real-life major problems; the physical and the psychological.
Part 1: Physical
Physical problems are what you would expect, problems that have occurred with a physical consequence such as injuries or environmental impacts; things such as getting a sprained ankle when about to kick a rugby ball with coloured powder inside, letting a bundle of balloons into the air never to return, letting an alligator onto your front lawn and giving it a jelly-filled watermelon to squash in its mouth just for the sake of doing it, and so on. If you couldn’t tell, one of these examples is not like the others.
One common example of a 'gender reveal‘ moment gone wrong to the physical extent time and time again is hitting a coloured powder filled baseball with a bat and seeing when colour the powder is when it breaks open upon impact. Although this already seems dangerous, on multiple occasions has a person been hit with the baseball instead of the ball hitting the bat. Many people online have posted videos of this going wrong with even a grandfather being hit by this uncommonly common way of this method of revealing being messed up.
Another more serious example of the physical safety of the people participating in these sorts of events is when more than one person gets hurt. It was July 2018 in Philadelphia when fireworks were set off at a relatively simple ‘gender reveal’ party. It was decided that it would be a great idea if they were set up onto a clothes-drying rack, but would you believe that it went wrong. Fireworks flew in all directions and many of the adults attending the celebration had first-degree burns by the end of the supposed joyful event.
However, an even greater example of a party gone wrong is when on the 23rd of April 2017, an off-duty Border Patrol agent named Dennis Dickey (Border Patrol Agent: someone who has the duty of guarding the border wall between the USA and Mexico,) set off a target to explode with blue powder in the grasslands using live fire (gunshot) in the grasslands of Arizona. Like the usual expectation of finding out your baby’s ‘gender’ though the colour of ‘x thing’, this was expected of the explosion but, like you would expect when setting off an explosion in the grasslands of Arizona, this was not the result. The explosion revealed not only a blue cloud but it also sparked a massive 47,000-acre (190,202,545 m2) wildfire that spread to the nearby Coronado National Forest. This was later to be renamed the Sawmill Fire, a fire which took 20 different agencies of firefighters to put down after about a week, a fire that took about US$ 8,200,000 in restitution fees to recover the burnt land and pay the state of Arizona, federal agencies and the private landowners who owned the land burnt down by the accidental explosion.
A more tragic incident: Pamela Kreimeyer, a 56-year-old from Knoxville, Iowa, was killed by a piece of metal from an explosion meant to declare the ‘gender’ of her son’s child. She was hit in the head by a flying piece of metal when the explosion went wrong and was instantly killed. An event that was supposed to be happy, now turned sad as someone was killed through good intention but bad execution.
When physical, environmental, financial and even governmental impacts suddenly come into play, although only governmental in that one example, things do not look too great for something created to give a sense of ‘stability and security’ for the new parents, especially when the death of a family member was involved in one of these examples.
Part 2: Psychological
The last section of this article will be devoted to understanding the psychological impacts of a ‘gender reveal’ party. By now, from reading the article until here, you would probably have noticed that subtle, and not so subtle, hints regarding this final section have been placed intentionally. The main purpose of this article is this: ‘gender reveal’ parties do not actually reveal a baby’s gender and further categorise gender into the stereotypical girl and boy opposites.
When looking back to why a ‘gender reveal’ party is performed in the first place, an event to "create a sense of stability and security in the categorisation of their baby’s sexual and ‘gendered’ difference” is not something to be smiled at. Yes, where it does create that wonderful sense of stability and security for the parents, categorising a baby’s sexual and gendered difference is regressing to a previously correct narrative that we see today as being false.
It is allowing the reinstatement of binary perceptions of the now more understood concept of gender and allows adults to push their now false gendered expectations and ideals onto the unwritten body of an unborn child and push these assumptions onto the digital, social and public world through the internet sensation known as the ‘gender reveal’ party.
The binary outlook on a baby’s biological sex, gender identity and gender expression is being reinstated with phrases such as:
“He or She?”
“Guns or Glitter?”
“Buck or Doe?”
“Boots or Bows?
“Rifles or Ruffles?”
“Touchdowns or Tutus?”
“Lures or Lace?”
“Hair Bow or Bow Tie?”
“Staches or Lashes?”
“Little Man or Little Miss?”
These phrases are being commonly used in ‘gender reveal’ parties to determine the difference between girl and boy and are quite frankly something to be taken notice of but, let us take a minute to further understand why something being binary is taking steps back into the past.
But how does biological sex, gender identity and gender expression have anything to do with this and what do they mean?
Well, biological sex is a person’s hormonal, chromosomal, external genitalia and internal reproductive sex organ composition and anatomy. From this, people are assigned either the gender male or female by the doctor taking care of you when you are born by looking at your external genitalia, this assigned gender is put onto your birth certificate. But, when someone’s internal composition and anatomy does not fit the typical definitions of the binary terms ‘male’ and ‘female’, they are given the term ‘intersex’. 1–2 out of every 100 people are intersex in the USA and on the amount of complex biological, anatomical, and chromosomal variations that can occur, there is no telling if your baby will fit into the two categories we have set for male and female.
Some people have chromosomes that are different from the XY chromosomes associated with men and XX chromosomes associated with women, such as XXY, XXXY, YY, etc. Some people have XX chromosomes but have male sex organs and genitalia vice-versa. Some people have typically female genitalia but have no female sex organs. Some people have hormonal balances typically accosted with men when they have XX chromosomes. The list goes on and on for a multitude of combinations but the main thing to take away from this is that you can’t rely on technology to tell you a baby’s biological sex. If a person’s genitals look different from what doctors and nurses expect when they’re born, they might be identified as intersex from birth. Other times, someone might not know they’re intersex until later in life, like when they go through puberty, get an injury or have surgery. Sometimes a person can live their whole life without ever knowing that they’re intersex.
Why celebrate something that is technically unknown and something that is not as black and white, or rather pink and blue, as it is?
On the topic of biological sex and having multiple sides of a coin, what happened to gender identity? Gender is a person’s internal sense of who they are and their personal relationship and experience with gender. ONLY THE INDIVIDUAL CAN KNOW THEIR TRUE GENDER IDENTITY. No one can assign them their true gender. For people who are transgender, their biological sex does not match the gender identity they attribute themselves to. Even if someone falls into the binary categorisation of male and female, their identity may still not be the same as their biological sex. This means that someone who has been assained female at birth could identify as male or as a gender outside of the binary as the term transgender is an umbrella term (Non-binary/Genderqueer/Other subsections). This is a huge issue in terms of 'gender reveal' parties, as it is known as a ‘gender’ reveal; hence the quotes on gender throughout the article.
In 2016, 0.6% of adults in the US identified as transgender, about 1.3 million people. However, this number is not reliable as it is likely much higher due to many more younger people being transgender and many adults not willing to share their gender identity. Because of this, it was reported that an estimated 3% of the US population identified as transgender across various age groups. Many more young people are transgender. This is likely due to the internet providing education on this topic and thus making the topic of people transgender more available and known, thus giving youth a chance to understand themselves better instead of struggling with themselves for the rest of their lives trying to find out who they are.
Because of this, it is rather confusing to hear that many people in this day and age are celebrating the ‘gender’ of their child when a person’s gender identity does not have to correlate to the birth sex that shows up on a computer in a hospital and when a lot more people in the younger generation identify as trans.
Lastly, when looking at gender identity, you need to look at gender expression. Gender expression is not something to be confused with gender identity as it is how someone outwardly shows their gender identity. This can be through clothing, hairstyle, makeup, behaviour, interests and social expressions such as names and pronouns (he/him, she/her, they/them, ze/zim, ae/aer, etc). Some play with their gender expression theatrically, for example, Drag, while most just do what is best for them. What is important to note is that gender expression applies to everyone, trans or cis (someone who identifies as the gender they are assigned at birth, the opposite of trans and majority of the population). This is why a lot of people don’t conform to ‘traditional’ gender stereotypes. Some girls hate dresses and some boys like them. Some girls hate makeup and some boys absolutely adore makeup. What is important to know is that gender expression is fluid and a spectrum.
All three of these terms are fluid and are a spectrum, this is because there is not just black and white, there is always the shades of grey in between (and many more colours but that is beside the point).
The main point of this; there is a lot of harm done psychologically when having a celebration about a baby’s gender. When looking back on the list from before:
“He or She?”
“Guns or Glitter?”
“Buck or Doe?”
“Boots or Bows?
“Rifles or Ruffles?”
“Touchdowns or Tutus?”
“Lures or Lace?”
“Hair Bow or Bow Tie?”
“Staches or Lashes?”
“Little Man or Little Miss?”
It does not look as alright as before now does it?
Jenna Karvunidis, the founder of these parties as mentioned before said it herself;
"There’s such an obsession with gender that it becomes limiting in many ways and exploitative in others. You don’t want what’s between your legs to guide your path in life. I want my kids to grow up in a world where gender doesn’t matter.”
Now, remember the child Karvunidis had a gender reveal party for, that girl Bianca is now 13 (as of 2020) and uses she/her pronouns. The average girl, only now, she only wears suits, never dresses. The child of the original ‘gender reveal’ party now prefers ‘boots over bows’.
Rebecca Christie was pregnant with her first child in 2015 when her friend surprised her with ‘gender reveal’ cupcakes at their book club. The sweets (candy) inside of the cupcakes were blue and she thought nothing of the matter. After going through life, in 2017, she contacted her friend Les, a non-binary individual who uses they/them pronouns and wrote:
“There are some people who will make too big of a deal about anything. These are the people who throw elaborate and hypersexualized gender reveal parties, just like they throw elaborate and hypersexualized bachelor/ette parties. For those people, the parties are the least of their problems in [her] view.”
Les, explaining to her why they are not as good as they seem said themselves that:
“Gender reveals can also hurt, it isn't just about what parents are imposing on their child, it's the information that this conveys [within the culture]: the idea that genitals equals to gender and that gender is a tiny box that everyone is supposed to fit in.”
This is the main reason why ‘gender reveals’ are bad, by "creating a sense of stability and security in the categorisation of a baby’s sexual and ‘gendered’ difference”, we have imposed the strict, binary delegations that have been fought for years by the people it has been hurting. Trans, cis, straight, gay—all of us have some connection with the concept of gender and it should not be something we regress on with the hard work of generations and generations at stake.
What can we do instead of a ‘gender reveal’ party?
So, moving onto the future, what do we do now? Well, there is not much you can do but, you can understand the topic and advocate from there. By reading this article, you have already done one of those things but, it is important to advocate to those who are still in the dark. Basic concepts such as why people do this sort of event and why it has such a negative impact can be explained and can make more of a difference than you may realise. Gender itself is so misunderstood and it should be something all people should understand, especially parents.
Here are a few ideas on what to do instead of a ‘gender reveal’ party:
Donate the money you were planning on spending on the party to someone who needs it, or save it for later because, and I don’t think I can stress this enough, BABIES COST A LOT OF MONEY.
Have a Baby Shower and only a Baby Shower. That’s it.
If you want cake, just get yourself a cake. You don’t need a special occasion to get yourself some cake.
As you can see, there's not much you can do other than just not have a ‘gender reveal party’. That’s it, just don’t have one. Although, if you still want one, that is your opinion and if this article has not changed your mind, then it can’t change it. After all, the real purpose of parenthood is not to like your baby because of their gender, but to love your baby. You child. Love them for who they are, and not what their gender is. There is no point in celebrating your child if all you want is for them to be happy, healthy and who they are so…….go for it.
Afterword
Hopefully, you have learned something from this relatively brief explanation on the basis of gender and how it correlates to these parties. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns as this is a very complex topic that takes a lot more than one article to explain.
If you would like to email me privately on this article for any reason at all, my email address is sophiadomingo.inkmagazine@gmail.com
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