Gender reveals are the epitome of unnecessary, harmful capitalistic gain leading to climate change—and the California wildfires which remain ablaze prove it.
On Sept. 5, an accidental explosion during a gender reveal party in California sparked what would soon become a wildfire, causing 13 injuries and one death in 13 days. Nearly two-and-a-half weeks later, the El Dorado fire continues. The fire has burned nearly 23,000 acres of land, causing extensive property and environmental damage, destroying kilometres worth of vegetation.
It would be a stretch to claim that gender reveal parties as a concept caused the California wildfires, but there is much to learn from this situation about both climate change and gender roles.
The very idea of a gender reveal party is the type of reckless, short-term thinking which promotes the selfish mentality exacerbating climate change. A gross disregard for others—from hosting social gatherings during a pandemic to silencing transgender experiences through a blatant nod to the gender binary—is what has led to this disaster.
According to the Centre for Climate and Energy Solutions, 80 per cent of climate fires are ignited by people. This unnecessary and harmful party was no exception to that statistic. The fire was ignited by a smoke-generating device.
The fact that this gender reveal could have been achieved through a simple cake-cutting party is yet another example of how excess and capitalism can lead to disastrous consequences.
One life, 20 structures and 23,000 acres of land would exist intact today if it were not for this ridiculous dog and pony show of a heteronormative baby shower.
It isn’t even the first gender reveal party to have caused such a fire. In April 2017, another gender reveal party started a fire that burned 47,000 acres of land.
In addition to causing such extensive damage and injuries, gender reveal parties may actually harm the children they intend to celebrate.
Assigning pink to girls and blue to boys is problematic for many reasons, including the fact that they reinforce gender roles and can limit children’s gender expression from a young age.
Most notably, gender reveal parties affirm a correlation between one’s birth sex and gender, reinforcing a pervasive societal belief in which transgender people are considered “other.”
This kind of exclusion can result in a lack of belonging with serious repercussions. One study, published in 2017 by the Journal of Gender-Based Violence, found that social isolation and dysphoria—vulnerabilities that are heightened by heteronormative activities like gender reveal parties—increase the risk of sexual victimization in transgender individuals.
Even the creator of gender reveal parties, Jenna Karvunidis, agreed that they are harmful to the LGBTQ+ community. Karvundis’s 10-year-old daughter, the first “gender reveal baby,” uses she/her pronouns and identifies as a girl, but rejects gender stereotypes and expresses herself in what her mother describes as androgynous ways: sporting suits and wearing her hair short.
Transgender and non-binary people should be able to live in a world which does not place so much weight on one’s birth sex. When enforcing the gender binary becomes so extravagant so as to organize and throw a co-ordinated party, members of the trans community are excluded from society’s general understanding of accepted gender.
This harmful gender reveal party trend is nothing if not a wake-up call to stop celebrating the birth sex of a child, and to focus instead on ensuring the child in question grows up in a world without human-caused climate disasters.
Featured graphic by Sara Mizannojehdehi.
