These days a lot of people, for a lot of very good reasons, think we should all knock it off with the gender reveals for our babies.
And now one couple is adding a compelling new rationale to the list.
It might result in daddy accidentally walloping mommy in the face with a baseball bat.
Might sound random, but they're speaking from experience—and the video is the internet's latest viral mishap. The video hit the internet last week and instantly got people talking.
It shows a daddy-to-be winding up to hit a baseball off a tee. He rears back and gives the ball a good hard whack and, like a good batter should, he follows through—forgetting that his wife is standing right beside him.
So... he follows through right into his wife's face.
Yikes.
The baseball explodes into a puff of blue smoke—it's a boy, apparently—but the big reveal is wildly overshadowed by the fairly sickening sound of this guy accidentally bashing his wife's face in and then everyone losing their minds as the wife walks away with her face in her hands.
Cool party, guys...
Gender reveal parties have been widely criticized as a fad that got out of hand and even a dangerous ritual—not just because of dad's inadvertently hammering their wives faces, but also due to the fact that gender and sex are two different things. So critics point out these parties are basically celebrating the genitalia of a fetus... which is... a very weird thing to do.
But perhaps more important, gender is a complex spectrum influenced by more than two chromosomes and the issue has complicated psychological implications—ones that routinely result in suicide attempts by children and teens who don't conform to the sorts of rigid ideas of gender that a gender reveal party upholds.
Even the mother who kickstarted the trend of gender reveal parties now regrets ever having done it.
And that's before you even get to the gender reveal stunt that sparked a 47,000 square foot wildfire in Arizona. Or the one where the family created a gender reveal pipe bomb that killed a woman.
They're just not... a great idea! Which is probably part of the reason the internet wasn't exactly on Team Mom and Dad.
Anyway, quit having dangerous gender reveal parties. It's not worth the risk.
The book You and Your Gender Identity: A Guide to Discovery is available here.
