Bozell & Graham Column: Uncorking Hate for Pink and Blue Parties

August 10th, 2019 8:00 AM

The “gender reveal” has become a growing phenomenon in the world of social media. When expectant parents discover the gender of their unborn baby, they make a big announcement revealing the baby’s sex, with cakes and balloons and even pyrotechnics. 

It’s a celebration of life, a desire to share the joyous news of the little boy or girl. Ah, but there’s the rub. A boy or a girl. In today’s perverted culture this is wrong… very wrong.

It’s not surprising that in today’s war on the “gender binary,” major newspaper columnists appointed to write on “gender issues” (can you believe it) have written jeremiads attacking the very idea. Enter Monica Hesse of the Washington Post, whose July 31 article was headlined “Let’s have a gender-reveal party that reveals gender is a construct.”

In other words, stop doing “gender reveals,” because gender isn’t “assigned at birth,” it’s something for the child to decide later.

Hesse began by telling the tale of a mother named Jenna Karvunidis, who first made this trend viral by having a gender-reveal party with a pink cake. Now she regrets the whole thing. Karvunidis recently composed a follow-up post about her daughter Bianca – now just “Bee” –  whose female gender she’d celebrated. “PLOT TWIST,” she wrote on Facebook. “The world’s first gender-reveal party baby is a girl who wears suits!”

Karvunidis included a family photo of “Bee,” now wearing a white suit and an androgynous haircut. This regretful mother declared her fealty to the gender-crushing revolution: “Who cares what gender the baby is? 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.”

Hesse was delighted by this confession, since “I was already buried in gender-reveal footage, planning to write a column about the perverse pleasure of watching the ones that fail.”

She hates the “gender reveal” people. 

Hesse began the article by admitting she gleefully watched four times when a couple in Australia celebrated with blue exhaust fumes, but then the car burst into flames and was destroyed. She also enjoyed, “another in which a man attempts to hit a pink-powder-filled balloon off a golf tee, and instead thwacks his buddy in the groin. Or another, of a guy accidentally hitting a softball into his wife’s face.” 

At the Washington Post, civility dies in schadenfreude.

Hesse hates how these parties are often “hypermasculine” events, with axes and chainsaws and footballs. Or there was the off-duty Border Patrol agent who caused a 47,000-acre forest fire after he “shot a blue-dust-filled target that exploded more thoroughly than planned.” 

The Post columnist angrily claimed “the entire event is based on remarkable hubris: Parents try to concoct a memorable moment out of exhaust pipes, only to have nature inform them that there are no carefully concocted moments when it comes to raising children.” Parents must learn today’s lesson on “the limits of binary color choices.” Your child may “choose” their gender as they grow, and parents must be expected to promote that choice, and whatever mind-numbing terminology follows. 

The cultural deconstructionist Left is always reminding us that yesterday’s religiously informed “patriarchy” isn’t the only orthodoxy that pushes a set of manners and expectations on the culture. They have toppled God, and put the solipsistic anarchy of gender politics in His place.