Over the past decade, expecting parents across the United States have created a new practice of gender-reveal parties: held during pregnancy, the couple stages an elaborate — sometimes dangerous — display in which their unborn child’s sex is announced through the surprise “reveal” of a pink (girl) or blue (boy) effect.
.
Jenna Karvunidis, the mother who started the craze in 2008 with a simple cake, came to recognize the inherent conflict of equating genitalia with identity. “Who cares what gender the baby is?” she wrote on Facebook in 2019. “I did it 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 its legs.”
.
The perfect plot twist, Karvunidis revealed in her post, was that “the world’s first gender-reveal party baby is a girl who wears suits!” Recognizing that the practice she unintentionally introduced is offensive, if not outright harmful, to nonbinary and transgender people, Karvunidis told ELLE: “That’s the thing with oppression; only those affected feel it.”
.
.
