When Strikes the Gender Reveal

What with all the gender reveal events for expectant parents, I wondered, "When did this all become a thing?"  

Well, it began in 2008 and it began with Jenna Karvunidis.

It started simply enough, a cake served at her baby shower showed the pink icing, revealing she was going to have a girl.

She wrote about it on her blog (and this is the part that confuses me) other people read her blog (wait, people read these things?) and began to do their own gender reveals.

Of course, it took off because, hey, let's never overlook an opportunity to make a spectacle of ourselves on social media.

And as more and more people began doing gender reveals, that ratcheted up the pressure to be even more noteworthy and more spectacular. It was no longer enough to slice into a cake to reveal pink or blue icing. Genders were reveal with pink or blue confetti or exploding powder.

Or the accidental pipe bomb.

In late October in Iowa, Pamela Kreimeyer, 56, was tragically killed by debris flying from a homemade device meant to emit colored powder. The device was basically a pipe bomb. 

Last year, an Arizona wildfire that burned 47,000 acres of land was sparked by a gender-revealing smoke bomb.  

A Texas plane crash in September that injured one person was part of a gender reveal stunt gone wrong, a National Transportation Safety Board report said Thursday.

Jenna Karvunidis, inventor of the gender reveal, wishes everybody would just stop.

People are getting hurt and even killed.

And for what?

It does seem odd that at a time when gender identity is becoming less and less of a binary choice, there are these people making a really big deal about the gender of their unborn child.

Is it more than just getting more looks and likes on social media? Is this part of some kind of hetero-normative push back against a world where sexual and gender identity is less rigidly defined?

By the way, apologies to my daughter Randie if I didn't use "hetero-normative" in the correct context.

Speaking of my daughter, I'm going wrap this up with our own gender reveal moment.

In 2000, my wife's pregnancy was proceeding along quite well, even if our unborn child was determined to use Andrea's uterus as a bouncy house.

We were at one of Andrea's check ups where they were doing a sonogram. The technician asked if we wanted to know the sex of the baby.

We looked at the flickering image.

Our child was mooning the sonogram!

It's a girl!