A mother of three who claims to have invented the “gender reveal” party is looking back on the trend through a new lens over a decade later.
On Thursday, High Gloss and Sauce blogger Jenna Myers Karvunidis shared a photo of her family — her husband, three daughters and dog — with the two younger girls sporting matching blue dresses and long blonde hair and her older daughter in a sky-blue suit with a short haircut.
“A weird thing came up on Twitter, so I figured I’d share here. Someone remembered it was me who ‘invented’ the gender reveal party,” she began. “I had written about my party on my 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 kinda spread from there. I’ve got the article framed!”
Myers Karvunidis went on to admit that since the article was published more than 10 years ago, she has “felt a lot of mixed feelings about” her “random contribution to the culture” that “just exploded into crazy after that.”
“Literally — guns firing, forest fires, more emphasis on gender than has ever been necessary for a baby,” she wrote in the post, which has since gone viral.
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Despite where and when exactly the “gender reveal party” originated, over recent years, the trend has grown to show parents-to-be using everything from balloons to cakes to lasagna, shooting targets and even alligators to learn the sex of their unborn children on the way.
“Who cares what gender the baby is?” Myers Karvunidis challenged in her post. “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.”
The mother of three went on to share her family’s “PLOT TWIST” — that her older daughter Bianca, a.k.a. Bee, “the world’s first gender-reveal party baby, is a girl who wears suits!”
As of Monday morning, Myers Karvunidis’ Facebook post had racked up more than 31,000 reactions, 12,000 shares and 1,600 comments, with a tweet sharing the post boasting over 65,000 likes and 19,000 retweets.
“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,” the user wrote in a separate tweet.
While many social-media users defended their own choices to have “gender reveal” parties for their own kids, others applauded Myers Karvunidis for reflecting on the trend and helping parents to understand something deeper when it comes to children’s futures and gender identities.
“Thank you for exemplifying what it means to learn and grow and adapt so that our community can hold and see everyone!” one Facebook user wrote while another lauded, “Absolutely love this. I love the evolution of thought and feelings related to gender. My heart is full.”
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