The Woman Who Invented Gender-Reveal Parties Admits They’re Completely Ridiculous

From Cosmopolitan

• The woman who “invented” the gender-reveal party speaks out 11 years later.

• She realizes they’re way over the top and shared that her daughter, “the world’s first gender-reveal baby,” wears suits.

The gender-reveal phenomenon has taken on a life of its own. What started as a way to let everyone know the sex of a baby has morphed into a milestone during many people’s pregnancies that sometimes includes wild parties that involve guns, alligators, forest fires, and lots of crying. (It also confuses the difference between gender, a social construct, and sex, which is based on which chromosomes you’re born with.) Translation: These parties have gotten way out of control. Realizing that, the woman who “invented” the gender-reveal party just spoke out against the trend and said it places way too much emphasis on the baby’s sex.

Just yesterday, Jenna Myers Karvunidis, who blogs under the name High Gloss and Sauce, wrote a thoughtful letter about all the “mixed feelings” she has when it comes to these parties. On Facebook, she wrote, “I’ve felt a lot of mixed feelings about my random contribution to the culture. It just exploded into crazy after that. Literally—guns firing, forest fires, more emphasis on gender than has ever been necessary for a baby.”

She was also very self-reflective when she said that, yeah, she threw a gender-reveal party, but that was back in 2008. She’s way more aware of how damaging it can be when people care so much about whether a baby is a boy or a girl. She added, “Who cares what gender the baby is? I did at the time because we didn’t live in 2019 and didn’t know what we know now—that assigning focus on gender at birth leaves out so much of their potential and talents that have nothing to do with what’s between their legs.”

^ Oh, that? That’s just my face reading her post.

THEN! The mother of three dropped this delightful nugget: “PLOT TWIST, the world’s first gender-reveal-party baby is a girl who wears suits!”

Taking all this into consideration, Twitter has decided to stan.

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