In America, it's known as the gender reveal phenomenon.
And it's been in the news in recent days, particularly because of one gender reveal that got out of control, leading to a wildfire in California that has caused now, we are told, over a billion dollars in damage and has led to the death of one firefighter.
That's not the first gender reveal party to get out of hand. As Taylor Lorenz reports for the New York Times, "At a party last July, a car inadvertently burst into blue flames. That September a crop-dusting plane crashed after dumping thousands of gallons of pink water across a field in Texas. The following month, a woman was killed by flying debris from a device meant to shoot out colored smoke in Knoxville, Iowa." We're also told that the California fire is not the first to be caused by a gender reveal party gone bad. We're told, "In 2017 a fire was sparked at an Arizona party, resulting in more than $8 million in damages and 45,000 acres of destroyed land."
As a Christian, let’s look at a big question. The New York Times article by Taylor Lorenz goes on to say that there are a couple of problems, that become apparent with gender reveal parties. Number one, societal pressure. As Alia Wong noted in The Atlantic in 2018, young Americans are formally over-celebrating many life events and in a way that their parents would not understand.
Now here's something that really is important, this over-celebrating. When you go back a couple decades, young people graduated from high school and college and not much else. Now people have to graduate from everything. There has to be a formal party for every occasion and every even minor life transition. We also have to note as Christians that as religious observances and ceremonies have fallen to the side, secular observances have taken on an oversize importance, even when they're frankly artificial. Now, I'm not arguing that gender reveal parties are artificial, but this over-celebrating is something that we can recognize. Some of these parties, frankly, get out of hand.
The second issue is societal pressure. Yep. We can certainly see that. As a matter of fact, the gender reveal party phenomenon has almost everything to do with the rise of digital and social media. Take social media out of the equation, and a gender reveal party becomes an intra-family, or intra-friendship-circle affair. Social media changes everything, but it also ups the ante, so to speak.
In order to gain attention on social media, you have to outdo whoever has done a gender reveal before you. There has to be more pink, more blue, and more surprise! There have to be more cute little videos of older siblings who are registering shock or disappointment when the pink or the blue is revealed. There have to be more moments of hilarity. You have to have a bigger and bigger smoke bomb. You have to have a bigger and bigger reveal, even if you end up with a crashed plane in the backyard. It’s all worth it.
But Wait
But those are the issues of lesser significance when compared to the larger complaint that is now made about the gender reveal parties. As the New York Times article says, "Many critics of gender reveal party say the events are out of step with current times, and over-reliant on the notion of gender as a binary." You knew this was coming.
You knew that the major complaint against the gender reveal party wasn't going to have anything to do with over-celebrating or social media or even one-upsmanship. It was going to be those dreaded words in our contemporary context, boy and girl.
As a matter of fact, the references to male and female, boy and girl, that are now so much a part of the gender reveal phenomenon, are a continuation of something that God has put into creation, a testimony to the fact that human beings are male and female, man and woman. And of course, boy and girl, son and daughter, brother and sister. It's all a part of an inescapable whole, a network of truth that reveals God's glory in the world, God's purpose for us as human beings. But that's all part of what we are now told is an oppressive gender binary. Reality meets the new gender dysphoria madness, and the madness is not amused.
The reality is that even now, except in the most unusual circumstances in a delivery room, when a baby is born, the parents are congratulated for having a boy or a girl. There are gender reveal parties, even amongst many of the younger generation who say that they're way past the gender binary. They can’t wait to put the announcement up on social media. What you have here could be the fact that reality always wins.
So the complaints against the gender reveal parties are telling us something very, very basic. The article in the New York Times that tells us that many critics of the gender reveal parties describe them as out of step with current times and over-reliant on the notion of gender as a binary. Haha. Then they go on to tell us that one of the problems of this is that people make too much out of pregnancy in the first place.
The New York Times article tells us about one expectant mother, Morgan Neal, who hosted an outdoor gender reveal party to announce that she was going to have a little boy. She explained the excitement and the celebration by saying,
"My whole family is literally all girls. The last boy we had was 25 years ago. It was my older brother."
So she was saying, "Pregnancy is a big deal to people, especially around here. It's a way," speaking of the gender reveal, "to celebrate being pregnant and bringing life into the world." Well, very sweet sentiments. But what kind of moral sense does it make to be told that "pregnancy is a big deal to people, especially around here."
Consider the fact that this article was published in the New York Times and the woman who is cited here is identified as living in West Virginia. So evidently in West Virginia, unlike in New York City, pregnancy is a big deal. As this mother said, "Pregnancy is a big deal to people, especially around here."
My guess is that for parents in New York City, pregnancy is a very big deal. It's supposed to be a big deal. It has to be a big deal, even in an age of such moral insanity with rampant abortion, and opposition to the gender binary, with a plummeting birth rate. If anything, that should make every single pregnancy all the more special, which is part of the problem behind the over-celebrating. If pregnancy were more routine and there were more babies being born, it just might lower the social pressure on every single pregnancy or gender reveal (see David Read’s article). But the real problem for uptight lefties is their opposition to the idea that the gender of a gender reveal party is tied to biological sex. That’s not good for a woke millennial with a degree in gender studies.
Jenna Karvunidis, the blogger who came up with the original gender reveal party, she now says that she regrets ever having done such a thing. She said, "It wasn't even really about the baby's gender. It was just about getting my family excited." Except as much as she might want to say now it didn't have a whole lot to do with gender, it had everything to do with gender, and there's no intellectually honest way to suggest otherwise, but she goes on to apologize by saying,
"I didn't see it as problematic back then. Then I was raising my daughters and one of them wouldn't play with anything unless it was pink."
She went on to lament, "It seemed like that's where it would start in the baby's life, and after you were either a pink person or a blue person."
Well, exactly right. The issue here is not the color pink or the color blue. It is the reality of male and female made in the image of God.
But in an article on the gender reveal phenomenon published recently in the Los Angeles Times by Sonja Sharp, we're actually told that at least some transgender activists believe that a part of the current popularity of the gender reveal party is anxiety by parents that their own child might eventually be transgender. Sure. Their parents are thinking normally.
The professor continued, "Maybe things are not like the 1950s any more, but we still really want kids to be boys or girls." Well, yes, professor, we still want kids to be boys or girls, because we believe that it's God's intention that those children be boys or girls, and that God determines that those children are boys or girls, and that that is a display of His glory and the goodness of the creation that He has made. The interesting thing here is how many people are now pressing back against the gender reveal party because it flies in the face of the idea that there is no gender binary.
Recently, a woman asked the ethicist at the New York Times magazine if it would be morally permissible for her to attend a gender reveal party in this age that is so resistant to the idea of the gender binary. She would be better off reading her Bible. Genesis 1—6 please. The answer will be plain there.
According to Al Mohler,
The gender reveal party of the new revolutionaries is going to have to take place somewhat later. But then again, they're not even agreed about how much later, and furthermore, given the ideology of this absolute personal autonomy, the smoke might be blue, then pink, then blue and maybe pink again.
But it's actually more complicated than that, because the rejection of the gender binary means there is no real pink and there is real blue, which is to say, there is no ontological female and there is no ontological male. They're just social constructions. Yes, human biology and human reproduction require a certain form of plumbing, but that doesn't have anything to do with personal identity. That's what we're told. And the gender reveal party phenomenon and the popularity of that phenomenon, even if they're getting out of hand, it's a testimony to the fact that people really do think, even now, absolutely now, in that gender binary.
It is fascinating, that this is a matter of great frustration to the transgender revolutionaries. To quote one transgender "We will never be able to achieve victory so long as in the delivery room someone shouts out, it's a boy or it's a girl."
Well, here's the problem. It's hard to imagine, even in this morally-confused culture, that someone's not going to say that in a delivery room. Even in La Sierra, Loma Linda, and Berrien Springs, too many people still have too much reality running through their veins. Thank God!
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