Gender reveal shenanigans are pretty stupid on a couple levels.
First, they are stupid just because they are stupid.
Your doctor tells you that you’re having a girl, so you plan a party. You bake a pink cake with white frosting. You send invitations to friends and relatives who have much better things to do that day. Your guests gather around the cake and watch you slice, revealing the pink interior and therefore the gender of your future child. People pretend to cheer. They shake your hand with false enthusiasm and wonder how long they need to linger at the party before leaving.
If you need this kind of attention, try stand-up comedy instead. Or ballet. Maybe learn to joust so you can perform in the local Renaissance fair. Do something where the public attention you so desperately crave is part of the deal. Required, even.
Stop turning things like gender reveals and prom proposals into performance art. Every thing doesn’t need to be a thing.
But here’s the other reason gender reveals are stupid:
There’s no way of knowing what your child’s gender is. You can know the sex of your child, but as we now know, gender is much more complex than the genitals that you have been assigned. Cutting into that pink cake is no guarantee that your child will identify as female later in life.
If you’re going to engage in this stupidity, you’ll at least need to ditch “gender reveal”” and instead call it a “sex reveal.”
Or maybe a “Penis or vagina reveal” (though it would probably be more accurate to refer to it as a “Penis and vulva reveal” since the exterior female sex organ is the vulva and not the vagina, as everyone seems to think).
Hopefully, you find phrases like “sex reveal” or Penis and vulva reveal” so disconcerting that you cancel the whole shebang and reveal your child’s sex the old fashioned way:
You call your mom. You meet your friend for dinner. You tell your buddy on the golf course. Hang some pink or blue balloons off your mailbox. You post the news to social media.
Or do what my wife and I did:
Wait until the baby is born. Check for yourself. Then tell everyone.
And if you thought the sex reveal cake was bad – and it is – check out this Mensa candidate revealing the sex of his child via colored chalk and explosives.
