Alternately: Humans plan, Murphy the Trickster God laughs…
the woman who invited gender reveal parties thinks they've gone too far, and the child she once welcomed with a pink-frosted cake is now 10 and non-binary https://t.co/FUSWxOIQCl
— Jessica Roy (@JessicaKRoy) July 29, 2019
The gender reveal party likely has more than one inventor, but one of the first documented examples belongs to Los Angeles blogger Jenna Karvunidis. The year was 2008; the cake was shaped like a rubber duck. Karvunidis, who was expecting her first child, sliced it open, revealing pink frosting between white layers. It’s a girl!
Over the ensuing decade, a Pinterest- and YouTube-fueled arms race produced cakes that vomit pink or blue MnMs, black balloons burst to reveal pink or blue confetti, and “color blasters” that detonate a cloud of pink or blue smoke. Today, expectant parents send sealed lab results to bakeries, and gender reveal fails are fodder for Tik Tok. An Arizona Border Patrol agent is paying $8M in restitution for the 47,000-square-foot wildfire caused by his gender reveal color blast. Also? The child Karuvinidis welcomed with a pink-frosted cake is 10 years old and prefers to wear suits…
“I did [the gender reveal party] 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,” she wrote in the Facebook post, which went viral. The post included a recent family photo in which her oldest child sports short hair and a sharp gray blazer…