Jenna Karvunidis, who is credited with inventing the gender reveal party, has long spoken out about how out of hand the phenomenon has gotten, and in a recent interview with Nexstar Media, she expressed how strongly she does not want her name to be connected with the trend.

“I’m kind of horrified, going ‘Oh no, please don’t associate me with that,'” Karvunidis said, saying it’s hard not to feel responsible for the increasingly extravagant and dangerous ways parents-to-be have decided to reveal their babies’ sexes, not to mention the extreme gender normativity of it all.

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Some of these celebrations have turned deadly. Some have caused actual natural disasters. “I know that I did not directly cause anything… but you know, in my own way, I felt responsible,” Karvunidis said.

Karvunidis threw what is considered the world’s first gender reveal party in 2008. It was simple and understated. She cut into a cake that revealed pink icing inside.

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“I was really just trying to build a community for my baby,” she said. “I wasn’t even trying to focus so much on the gender. I was just kind of using that as a hook to get everybody excited and to have something to reveal.”

But after she posted the idea to her blog, it took off.

Over the years, gender reveals have become increasingly outlandish, sparking injuries, deaths, and other catastrophes.

In 2019, for example, a 56-year-old grandmother-to-be was killed while attending the gender reveal party for her grandchild in Knoxville, Iowa. The reveal involved a pipe bomb and colored smoke, and the woman was hit by a piece of metal when the bomb exploded.

In 2021, two people died as a crowd cheered for a gender reveal stunt that resulted in a plane crash.

That same year, a California couple was charged with manslaughter in connection with a fire started at a gender reveal party that killed a firefighter. Authorities said at the time that the Jimenezes seemd to have set off “a smoke generating pyrotechnic device” to release dyed smoke to signal whether the baby they were expecting would be assigned male or female at birth.

Karvunidis posted at the time of the fire that she was disgusted to find out it was caused by a gender reveal party.

“Stop it,” she wrote on social media. “Stop having these stupid parties. For the love of God, stop burning things down to tell everyone about your kid’s penis. No one cares but you… Oh, and of course I’m getting hate messages. Excuse me for having a cake for my family in 2008. Just because I’m the gEnDeR rEvEaL iNVeNtoR doesn’t mean I think people should burn down their communities. STOP.”

In addition to the dangers, these celebrations are also problematic for LGBTQ+ people. The parties usually rely on gender stereotypes (a football if it’s a boy, dance slippers if it’s a girl). They build up expectations around the child’s gender and emphasize it when the child may not even identify as the gender that gets revealed or identify with the clichéd expectations around that gender.

In 2019, she also made a declaration on social media, along with a photo of her family: “PLOT TWIST, the world’s first gender-reveal party baby is a girl who wears suits!”

“Who cares what gender the baby is?” she added. “I did at the time because we didn’t live in 2019 and didn’t know what we know now – that assigning focus on gender at birth leaves out so much of their potential and talents that have nothing to do with what’s between their legs.”

Karvunidis told Nextstar Media that the post led to a spate of cyberbullying.

“She was in fourth grade or something like that when all this started going viral,” she says. “She’s not transgender, she’s just who she is, she’s always gone by she/her pronouns… but that was really traumatic for her.”

“I would love to tell you, ‘Oh, it’s been a great family story and we just really enjoyed the attention,’ but that’s not true. That’s not true at all. If I could have gone back and never done it I wouldn’t, just for the sole reason of not affecting her childhood. I would have never done it.”

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