If there’s one thing the Internet can’t get enough of right now, it’s gender reveal parties.
Soon-to-be parents can’t stop flocking to social media to find out their baby’s gender with blue and pink-filled cakes, balloons, confetti and even coloured car exhaust (don’t try this one at home).
However, not everyone is loving gender reveal parties, including the alleged creator of concept. Jenna Myers Karvunidis, who writes the blog High Gloss and Sauce, has written in a statement on Facebook that she was credited as the “inventor” of the gender reveal party, but believes people have now taken it took far.
According to Karvunidis, after she wrote about her gender reveal party on her blog and a parenting forum in July 2008, “it was picked up and an interview with me was published in The Bump magazine and the idea kind spread from there.”
She added that, “It just exploded into crazy after that. Literally – guns firing, forest fires, more emphasis on gender than has ever been necessary for a baby.”
“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 how – that assigning focus on gender at birth leaves out so much of their potential talents that have nothing to do with what’s between their legs,” she wrote.
Karvunidis ended her post by writing, “PLOT TWIST, the world’s first gender-reveal party baby is a girl who wears suits!” and shared a photo of her family, including her daughter wearing a suit.
While gender reveal parties are cute and obviously go down a treat on social media, Karvunidis has a point. Putting so much emphasis on an unborn child’s gender feels a little outdated in 2019.