The creator of the gender reveal party shared what she thinks about the popular pregnancy trend now

Over the past few years,  gender reveal parties have become inescapable. Social media is plastered with pictures of expecting parents cutting into cakes with pink or blue insides, and plenty of others pull even more outlandish stunts in the name of advertising their future child’s sex chromosomes. There have been reports of gender reveals featuring lasagna, alligators, and Bill Murray. In one instance, a gender reveal party even caused a forest fire, according to CNN. Suffice it to say that the industry of broadcasting a baby’s birth sex is booming. And it turns out that the woman credited with starting the whole fad has mixed opinions about it.

In a July 25th Facebook post, Jenna Myers Karvunidis of the blog High Gloss and Sauce wrote that some have claimed she “invented” gender reveal parties after she wrote about her own in 2008. (According to The New Yorker, the first gender reveal video was uploaded to YouTube in 2008.)

But despite the fame that her supposedly trend-setting party has brought, Karvunidis wrote that she’s not sure how to feel about it.

"I've felt a lot of mixed feelings about my random contribution to the culture," she wrote. "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 went on to question the weight that we place on an infant’s sex at birth.

"Who cares what gender the baby is?" she asked. "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."

Karvunidis also noted that her daughter, who was the subject of her first gender reveal party, “is a girl who wears suits.” It just goes to show that learning a baby’s sex chromosomes can’t predict how they’ll express their gender later in life.

Twitter users applauded her words.

https://twitter.com/udfredirect/status/1154730911692406785

so the woman who sparked all the gender reveal party insanity is my new icon https://t.co/y3MshUfBsO pic.twitter.com/y5qW4NEffu

— Robbie Couch (@robbie_couch) July 26, 2019

https://twitter.com/udfredirect/status/1154775804674396160

Sharing this not as a dunk, but as a genuinely happy revelation that this person realized that we aren't served by living in a world with rigid and coercive gender expectations for children, acknowledged her misstep and subsequent learning, and embraced her kid's self-expression.

— Avery Alder, Buried Without Ceremony (@lackingceremony) July 25, 2019

As a trans guy I can't say like how touched something so simple like this is. A+ parenting to be sure!!!

— Adrian (@RainyAdrian) July 26, 2019

Since they’ve taken off, many have criticized gender reveal parties. Some, like writer Jessica Winter in Slate, have argued that forcing children into one of two genders before they are born ignores the realities of transgender people and shoehorns children into restrictive gender roles. With that in mind, it’s easy to see why Karvunidis has mixed feelings about the whole thing. We’re glad that she’s reflecting on what gender reveal parties mean, and we hope it makes others reconsider how much importance they place on them, too.