The Problem with Gender Reveal Parties (and it isn’t Wildfires)

The internet exploded over the weekend with click-bait articles featuring catchy headlines that claimed a large wildfire in California had been started as a result of a gender reveal party. The fire raged across 10,000 acres of San Bernardino County in Southern California over the holiday weekend and was ignited by what officials called a “pyrotechnic device” at El Dorado Ranch Park just 70 miles East of LA.

Fed-up keyboard warriors took to Twitter to slam parents to be for these “unnecessary gatherings.” This isn’t the first time a gender reveal party has literally gone up in smoke; last October a pipe bomb killed one partygoer in Iowa, and in 2018, a couple in Philadelphia set fireworks off too low to the ground, injuring friends and family. However, can one really pin these accidents on the fact that these were gender reveal parties, or are people drawing false conclusions?

According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s annual Firework Safety report, 2019 saw 12 deaths and 10,000 injuries treated in U.S. hospital emergency departments related to the misuse of fireworks, while the National Fire Protection Association reported an estimated average of 10,600 home structure and outdoor fires involving grills per year during 2014 through 2018. These fires caused an average of 10 civilian deaths, 160 civilian injuries, and $149 million in direct property damage annually.

Don’t get us wrong; gender reveal parties are a deeply problematic example of the obsession of our culture to rear children according to their sex. However, the level of human stupidity that causes these incidents will not go away even if we see an end to these parties. Ironically enough, the blogger credited to coining the term “gender reveal party” back in 2008, Jenna Karvunidis, has since denounced the idea after her 10-year-old came out as nonbinary.

“Stop it. Stop having these stupid parties” Karvunidis pleaded on Facebook over the weekend. “For the love of God, stop burning things down to tell everyone about your kid’s penis. No one cares but you.”

Correlation does not imply causation, and when we make weak arguments against the things we do not like, our entire cause loses credibility. Throwing a party to celebrate the gender of a child before they have a chance to take their first breath, or even begin to develop their own gender expression, does suck, but not because they cause wildfires.