People Keep Dying or Getting Injured Due to Stupid Gender Reveal Parties
At least one to two people have died or have been injured within the last few weeks due to these moronic and totally unnecessary “gender reveal” parties.
Gender reveal parties are dumb.
Here are links to editorials and news stories about these deaths:
(Link): A woman died at a gender reveal party. But it has long been clear this fad is out of control.
At some point, this all feels like it’s less about the baby and far more about the parents loudly pledging public allegiance to gender norms.
…Yes, you read correctly: A 56-year-old woman was killed instantly last weekend when a homemade contraption crafted to send pink or blue powder into the atmosphere at a gender reveal party accidentally exploded like a pipe bomb, traveling hundreds of feet and striking the woman in the head and killing her.
This isn’t the first time a stunt has turned tragic, either. In Arizona,a 2017 gender reveal sparked a wildfire that destroyed tens of thousands of acres of land and required a week of firefighting to get under control.
(The man who set the Coronado National Forest ablaze was fined $8,188,069 in restitution for the damages.) Another man doing a burnout in his car in Australia as part of a gender reveal in 2018 nearly set himself on fire instead.
All this, and for what? A clip intended to go viral on social media?
…And then there are the videos where family members express disappointment that the baby will be a girl, or over-the-top excitement because it will be a boy — suggesting that, for some people, they’re not really about celebrating the birth of a baby as much as rooting for mother-to-be to live up to an outdated stereotype about providing “an heir.”
Plus, allowing a child to be represented by pink or blue food coloring, confetti or smoke has little to do with legitimate color preferences and far more to do with corporations, which once needed to boost sales, deciding to create “color by gender” as a way of encouraging families to buy two of particular items.
That’s right: The origins of “pink is for girls” and “blue is for boys” are as intrinsic to our celebrations of parenthood as Mother’s and Father’s Day cards are to loving your parents.
The results of this early gendering have been dramatic: Kitchen toys, once entirely gender-inclusive, were color-coded for girls; toys that encouraged the kind of critical thinking used in hard sciences were not.
A study done by the University of Hong Kong identified that when toys were coded in neutral colors not identified with any particular gender, young school-age boys and girls performed at equal levels. But when the toys were coded in colors understood to be gender-specific, girls not only preferred not using the “boys” toys, they also performed more poorly than when the toys were gender neutral.
In other words, boys and girls learn from a young age how we sort and value ourselves and each other by gender.
Furthermore, there are sincere questions about what these kinds of strict gender identity adherences mean for relationships between boys and girls.
If our society codes pastel colors to mean “softer” and “more vulnerable,” does that explain why we’re keeping boys away from them and steering girls toward them?
Are we saying that masculinity is somehow in opposition to vulnerability?
Are we teaching empathy toward the vulnerable, or are we teaching that vulnerability is only acceptable for some and, if we feel vulnerable, we should overreact with violence … usually against the vulnerable?
(Link): Small plane crashed during gender reveal party: report
by David Matthews
Nov 2019
A September plane crash in West Texas happened after the crop-duster’s engines stalled out after the pilot released hundreds of gallons of pink water as part of a gender reveal party.
A National Transportation Safety Board report said the stunt-gone-wrong left one person injured after the crash in the Sept. 7 crash in the town of Turkey, about 250 miles northwest of Dallas.
In the report, the incident happened while the plane was flying at a low altitude to drop 350 gallons of pink water. The crash damaged the fuselage and right wing, the NTSB said.
A photo of the aftermath shows the plane upside down in a field.
The pilot, 49-year-old Raj L. Horan of Plainview, Texas, was unharmed, but a passenger sustained minor injuries.
An FAA inspector noted that it was a single-seat aircraft and should not have been carrying two people.
(Link): A woman died from an explosion at a gender reveal party
(CNN)A woman has died after an explosion at a gender reveal party in Iowa, authorities say.
The 56-year-old woman, unnamed by authorities, was pronounced dead at the scene Saturday in the city of Knoxville, according to a press release from the Marion County Sheriff’s Office.
The subsequent investigation found “a gender reveal announcement resulted in the explosion” — and the woman was struck by a flying piece of debris, according to the press release.
Gender reveal parties, which have grown in popularity in recent years, feature expectant parents who find out and announce the gender of their unborn baby, often with guests watching and filming on the sidelines.
Update, Sept. 2020:
(Link): Gender Reveal Party Blamed for Sparking (2020) California WildFire
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