Episode 45: Gender Reveals Revealed
with originator Jenna Karvunidis
Amy is joined by Jenna Karvunidis, originator of the Gender Reveal Party, to discuss where this trend came from, why it reinforces patriarchal ideas, and how she came to adamantly oppose the celebrations she created.
Our Guest
Jenna Karvunidis
Jenna Karvunidis is a writer, artist, attorney, and entrepreneur based in Los Angeles. She is a critic of the gender reveal party and has been featured in Vogue, NPR, The Guardian, BBC, and beyond for her cultural commentary and evolving perspective.
Amy Allebest: Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy, I'm Amy McPhie Allebest. Just the other day, while I was scrolling on social media, I saw a gender reveal party. The expecting couple was sitting on the grass, each holding a cupcake, and on the count of three, both bit into their cupcakes, and then the smiling mother excitedly revealed pink filling to the camera. The father, however, visibly grimaced. In the video, he balls his hand into a fist, crushes the rest of his cupcake, and then throws it forcefully into the distance. He screams into a pillow and then stomps away while his wife uncomfortably turns off the camera. Maybe you've seen a video like this before. There are lots of them circulating on TikTok right now. Fathers cursing and shouting, throwing decorations, storming off at the sight of pink. Meanwhile, other gender reveal videos can focus on injuries, on grand spectacles, and epic fails, or on the heaps of pastel-colored litter left in public spaces. And even when these parties go perfectly as planned, some skeptics raise concerns that gender reveals enforce patriarchal norms and might even be damaging to queer and transgender communities. Gender reveal parties have become a multimillion-dollar industry as well as a common source of both controversy and clickable content. To help us make sense of this very complicated phenomenon, I am so grateful to be joined today by the originator of the gender reveal party, Jenna Karvunidis. Thank you so much for joining us, Jenna!
Jenna Karvunidis: Thank you for having me! I'm so excited to be here.
AA: This is such an interesting topic, so I'm really excited to dive into it. But first, I'll just have you introduce yourself to listeners. Tell us a little bit about you, where you're from, your education, what you do for work, and how you came to be the originator of the gender reveal party.
JK: Okay, well, I'm Jenna Karvunidis. I am a civil litigation defense attorney in Los Angeles. I work in the area of housing justice, defending tenants against eviction. I'm also the founder of an app called YesTable, which is an app for event planning that centers the disabilities and dietary needs of guests. I am also a former mommy blogger, the past haunts me. And I have three children who are now in their teens.
AA: Awesome. And I understand that your writing and your work has been featured in a lot of major publications like Vogue, NPR, The Guardian, BBC. You've done a lot of public writing.
JK: Yes, mainly about the gender reveal party. I'm now a gender reveal party critic. I never intended to invent anything when I was in my mommy blogging era and we had this gender reveal party. The whole thing stemmed out of a completely different circumstance. I was pregnant with my first child, and I had a really difficult time getting going. I couldn't seem to maintain a pregnancy. I was having miscarriage after miscarriage. I don't mean to trigger anybody, but it was a time. So by the time I was pregnant with Bianca, I finally had made it to that midpoint of pregnancy where you go in for this big ultrasound. If people are listening and you don't know how it goes, basically you have to wait until you're four or five months along, and then you have this big anatomical scan at the midwife’s or doctor’s.
So I went and it was, you know, it was a random Tuesday, and it coincided with a family member's birthday, so I was already planning on making a cake. And it came to me because I kind of needed to solve a couple of different problems. One, I wanted to celebrate my own milestone, like, “We're here! We get to know if it's a boy or girl, you can see the baby.” Finally, it's a real thing on the screen with its body parts and whatnot. But I also wanted to get my family really jazzed up, for lack of a better term. On my husband's side of the family, they were a little baby fatigued because we had just had a baby on that side and they kind of got their fix of a baby. So now I'm coming along and it's kind of like womp womp. But on my side of the family, they live far away and there was a lot of toxicity and difficulty getting the excitement going from that angle too.
I am a notorious excitement monger. So I was like, “You know what we're going to do? I'm going to make two cakes and I'm going to put blue icing in one and then pink in the other.” And then I made this third tiny cake that went on top that was a duck head, and then it was the whole gender reveal thing. I was like, “I'm going to figure out at the doctor's office if the baby is a boy or a girl, and then I'm going to tell my sister-in-law in an envelope. I'm going to have her put the ducky head on the right cake and then bring it out and I'm going to make everybody come to a barbecue/birthday celebration.” So, that's how it was. It was for 10 people in my backyard. It was for my mommy blog in the summer of 2008. That's how it came to be.
It was popularized, I would say, through a different vehicle. The way that happened was that I was quite a popular mommy blogger for that time, back in the day. I've since shuttered it, of course, but somebody contacted me from a magazine called The Bump. I don't even know if they're even still in publication, they were all in the Midwest at the time, like six or seven states in the Midwest. I don't even know if it ever made it to the coast. But they contacted me and they were like, “We want to do a spread of your pregnancy journey.” It wasn't like a centerfold, but a publication with stuff like where I shopped and what I did, and this party was in there. That magazine then was circulated as the free magazine at all the little offices where people were waiting for their appointments, and back before smartphones were ubiquitous, people would just pick up, like you’d do with the kids’ Highlights magazine. And it took off.
AA: Oh, that's so interesting. I didn't realize that that was the story. So this was kind of pre-social media.
JK: I think I had a Facebook account, but it wasn't like it is now, where people are just sitting and scrolling. TikTok was not invented, there was no Instagram. So if people remembered to come back to your website, which, you know, I did have quite a few who did, and I had a subscriber list and the whole thing, that's where people got their internet news back then.
AA: Got it. Yes, yes, yes. Not like exploding solely on the internet. It was through print media at the beginning, it sounds like. Yeah, that's so interesting.
JK: I feel so old saying that.
AA: No, no, I get it. I was having my babies around the same time too. And for me, I didn’t have a gender reveal party, but it is really fun and joyful, right? To reveal “we're having another baby!” to your friends and family. There's certainly nothing wrong with that, and it's actually a very clever and fun idea, just hearing how fun that would be to have two different cakes and you can see the intention behind it and how fun that could be for a family. So, you just talked about what it was like back then when you started the thing, and it kind of took off. Walk us from that point to now. How did it start to balloon into a very common social phenomenon, and what does it look like? What do gender reveals look like as an industry today?
JK: I think the explosion, no pun intended, I guess, or pun intended, I should say, was really the dovetail of social media. With the rise of Instagram and those types of platforms, people just needed to up the ante, and they just upped it and upped it and upped it. And one person did a cupcake, and then the next person has to do a firework, and the next person has to do a plane or a pipe bomb or whatever it is that they're doing. And they get increasingly more dangerous as the stunts go on and as people try to capture the views. And I have a hard time faulting the individual people doing it, because it has become such a lucrative business. To have these platforms kind of seems more like a structural problem with social media in general allowing dangerous stunts, allowing and rewarding dangerous stunts, rewarding the views at any cost. They're not looking at the content, going, “Wait a minute, that's a dangerous stunt that shouldn't be on here, and we're not going to reward that with views.” There needs to be some fail safe in that mechanism that, I don't know if it exists, but it certainly didn't at the rise of the gender reveal party.
AA: Mm-hmm. One thing that I did hear about was, and I think it must have involved fireworks, there was a huge fire that resulted, a huge forest fire. So those kinds of dangerous things, I'm just trying to envision what could be dangerous, and I guess if you're using fire, or did you literally say a pipe bomb? People have done this?
JK: Yeah, that was actually a really sad one. And the reason why I know so much about all the different disasters is because anytime there's a disaster, the media calls me. Just think about it. They can't call the people who actually started the fire because it's a criminal litigation. Their identities are protected until there's actually an arrest made, so they don't have anybody to talk to. They call me. I'm like, “Okay, I'll talk to you.” So that's how I know, I start getting phone calls. I'm like, “There must have been an explosion.” And guess what? There was. This particular one was a pipe bomb. It's a really sad story. The baby-to-be’s grandmother was actually killed. A family made a little makeshift, do-it-yourself pipe bomb, and it was supposed to explode with pink or blue, I don't know which one. It was so sad. It's so dangerous. You would think common sense would override, but... I don't think anybody was intending to kill that woman, so I'm not trying to judge, but yeah, really sad.
“people just needed to up the ante, and they just upped it and upped it and upped it. And one person did a cupcake, and then the next person has to do a firework, and the next person has to do a plane or a pipe bomb”
A common one, and it's sad to say they're common, is the forest fire or brush fire. I live here in LA, and we were evacuated because of a gender reveal instigated fire. I think that was in 2020 or 2022. We have a lot of fires, so it's hard to remember exactly where it was. We've been evacuated many times. And, you know, I have some really nuanced feelings about that. Obviously people should not be starting fires in dangerous conditions, and that, too, involves a lot of common sense. But also, there are a hundred thousand brush fires a year, and maybe one or two are started by gender reveals. It's kind of like, are they just looking for a way to blame women? I don't know. I've had that thought before. And they shouldn't have been doing it, of course, also because the real harm of a gender reveal party is really not like the 0.01% chance of a forest fire. I think that's just what gets clicks and views. The real problem is harm to the LGBTQIA+ community, people who don't see themselves in the gender binary, things like that. Social harm.
AA: Yeah, that was going to be my next question, is how you came to change your views on the gender reveal parties. What was the instigator in changing your mind on that?
JK: It was a slow process. For one, I have a child who is of the LGBTQIA+ community, and we support that person 100%. Her pronouns are she/her. There's that. But also, I didn't go into it thinking, “I'm going to stomp my feet in the ground and say there are two genders and this one's pink.” That's not what happened. I mean, her nursery was blue and yellow. Anyway, I knew I was bringing home a female child from the hospital and I didn't make things pink. It was just kind of an evolution of realizing more as I went on to have more children. And all of my children are girls, and I noticed that they wouldn't play with toys unless they were pink. And I know the whole pink-washing thing is supposed to be good, like, “We'll make a science kit and we'll make it pink and we'll get girls to play with LEGOS because we'll make them pink.” And with my children it seemed to box them a little further in. It was kind of like, “I'm not going to play with that unless it's pink. So unless they make a power tool set or a truck that's pink, it's not for me.” And they're getting these messages because they don't generally make– I mean maybe they do, I'm sorry, I don't want to get an email in my inbox. “We make a pink truck.” But generally speaking, a lot more girly things are pink. A few of the shared toys are pink, but as far as really traditionally boy’s toys like that, you don't really see those in pink as much. And I just didn't really like it for my kids that we boxed in like that. It just started to feel kind of claustrophobic. And then I'm looking at the gender reveal party and I'm going, “Oh, this is reinforcing that and this is where it's stemming from and I don't like it.”
AA: Yeah, that's so interesting. I have three girls and a boy, and I remember a day in the swimming pool when my son was, he had to have been only two, maybe he was three, but still a toddler, very little. And a pink Disney princess kickboard was floating around the pool, and he backed up to the side of the pool and just plastered himself on the side. And I think he said, “Don't let it touch me.” And he had three sisters whom he adored and still does. His sisters were his best friends, he had friends who were girls, he loved his mom. So, I mean, he knew how wonderful girls and women are, and yet he had still somehow absorbed in the culture that if it's pink and girly, that would contaminate him somehow. It would diminish something in him. I was horrified to see that and I just thought, “I wonder how he's gotten that message?” He knew already that there was something yucky and that that would somehow lower his status if he let the pink thing touch him. I think that's so interesting to hear, even from your own family, too. It wasn't a boy necessarily that was like, “Ew” and ghettoized the girls. You even felt that in girl world, like, “Oh, this is limiting.” Right?
JK: Yeah. And it's interesting to hear your point of view, because now that I'm thinking about it, it's like, are they learning from day one that women and girls are just less than? Because it wasn't that the boy LEGOS were icky, it was, “I'm not allowed.”
AA: “I’m not allowed.” Yeah, that's interesting. Well, right, because “I'm not allowed,” you see in a patriarchy that something masculine will raise a person's status. So a girl can wear pants, but a boy can't wear a dress. Because that will raise a girl's status to be able to participate in masculinity, but it lowers a boy’s status to participate in femininity. I don't know how they get the messages so young, because we were certainly not saying anything like that in our household. Maybe he was three and was playing at preschool or with friends. I don't know. It's very distressing to me.
JK: Yeah. I'm thinking too, and I don’t know. But they definitely get the message. And I'm thinking another example of that, it occurs to me, is with names. A name will be used for a boy for a long time, like Leslie or Lauren, and then once parents use the name for a girl, the boy parents just completely abandon it. It's another example that girls are supposed to be kept at bay, because the minute you start to achieve it, it somehow poisons and lessens the man.
AA: Yes, exactly. Exactly.
Back to your timeline, you started to feel this shift and like, “Uh oh, I don't like my girls being limited in this way by the symbol of the pink stuff.” Did you start talking about it and writing about it at that point and saying, “I started this trend and I'm seeing a problem with it”? Did you start speaking out publicly about it?
JK: I didn't start writing about this actually until I was pulled into the conversation on social media years later. Like I said, I was a mommy blogger. I actually had my first blog in the ‘90s, like when the internet was a baby. Yeah, I was an early adopter to social media and blogging from the beginning. So I had quite a following by the time I had the mommy blogger thing going on in the mid 2000s. It was like ‘05 to I'd say 2010, 2011, something like that. I had the blog, and one of my followers from that time followed me also on what is now X, which was then Twitter. And somebody on Twitter who had quite a bit of a following, this must have been about 2019, somebody asked the question, and they were a gender reveal critic, they were an activist, an outspoken voice in the LGBTQIA+ community. And they said, their tweet was something like, “I want to know the full definitive history of the gender reveal party.” I didn't see the tweet, but somebody who had been following me for a long time remembered my party, remembered it was me, remembered the article and all that, and tagged me.
And that year, we had just issued our Christmas card, and the picture on the Christmas card was our family, and my oldest child was dressed in a powder blue tuxedo. She was dressed in a tuxedo because she didn't want to wear a dress. And I said, “That's fine. You don't have to wear a dress, but you do have to get dressed up. I'm sorry, we have standards around here. It's the annual Christmas card picture, so you can't roll in in jeans.” But I said, “Would you like to wear a pantsuit?” And this is not too long after the Pantsuit Nation or whatever it was that Hillary Clinton had done. My daughter said, “Well, can I wear a suit if I did a suit?” And I said, “Yeah.” And she goes, “Can girls wear suits?” And I said, “Absolutely. Let's get you styled up.” So I ordered it in a size slim fit because she was very, very tiny. I got a slim fit, I styled it with a t-shirt and some sneaks, it was really cool. And then that picture had just so happened to be our Christmas card.
So when this tweet was happening in 2019 and somebody tagged me in it, I was like, “Oh, funny you should bring up the gender reveal party, because here's the gender reveal baby. She's in the middle.” And there she was in the tux, and people were like, “Wait…” And it's funny now in 2025 that that picture caused such a stir, but we've come a long way. Six years ago it was kind of unheard of for a little girl to wear a pantsuit, and now you've got whole fashion houses that cater to women and girls wearing suits. That's where the impetus came in to draw me into the conversation, and that's when I started writing and speaking against gender reveal parties, the harm that they do to people who don't see themselves in that binary.
AA: Okay, I see. That makes sense. Given all of those dynamics, can you envision a way of revising a gender reveal party to be something that you would be proud of and you would think is a good idea, or is the concept just problematic at the core?
“that’s when I started writing and speaking against gender reveal parties, the harm that they do to people who don’t see themselves in that binary”
JK: I actually really like it whenever I see transgender people announcing something new about their pronouns and they use the gender reveal party to do that. I think that's really cool and it's really fun. It's fun to pop a balloon or have some cake, as long as you don't make an explosion out of it and you're in charge of your own pronouns. You can say, “Hey, my signature color is purple, and I'm coming out of a cake to let you know.” Whatever you want to do. I think it sounds great. There are a lot of people who have done it, and I think it's really neat. And as far as the cisgender, hetero, straight community, they've actually listened to a little bit of what I say. Or at least I think, I have no idea if they're getting the message, but they're doing it. They're actually doing name reveals now, and you could do a nursery reveal and you're like, “Hey, this is a nursery, and look, it's neutrals,” or whatever that is. You can still have that visual pop and that excitement and that moment of revealing something that doesn't have anything to do with how the child will self-identify their pronouns in 10 years, you know? So, that's kind of where I see it going.
AA: Yeah, okay. I was going to ask you what some alternative ideas would be. Because, like I said, I remember when I was announcing “we're having another baby,” it is so fun, right? It is so fun to make it a celebration and involve the people in your community. I love those ideas of something that can be more neutral and still keep the joy of it and keep the goodness of it without the problematic aspects.
JK: Yeah. People love to have a visual on their social media. I mean, who doesn't? We do live in this day and age, I'm not telling people to get off Instagram or anything, but just do it in a way that doesn't say something about the child that may not end up not turning out to be true.
AA: Here's another question in that realm of the interpersonal part. Really where the rubber meets the road is, so, if you are a person who has decided that you're not a fan of gender reveal parties, and you have a family member or a friend who does throw them and really likes them, do you have any guidance on how to walk that line? Not shaming the parents and understanding where they're coming from, but this is kind of representative of a bigger issue, right? Family and friends who aren't supportive of certain ideals that maybe we are supportive of.
JK: You know, that's going to be a tough one for me to answer. I'm the type of person who unfriended my dad after the 2016 election. I don't have friends in my sphere who don't believe in the rights and equality of others. And maybe I have acquaintances, but they certainly would not be inviting me to a gender reveal party. Because I feel like in 2025, the gender reveal party is entrenched in a certain ideology that does deny LGBTQIA+ people, it denies trans people their existence, I would say. If you have a conservative family member who's having one of those, what are they, like bows or guns, or deer or doe, those kinds of parties. I mean, if you don't want to cause waves, I don't know. I'm just too much of a loudmouth speaking out to people and being like, “Really? What if the child's transgender? What if the child doesn't identify that way?” Should you still go? Maybe you still go and you say those things. Start a problem in your family is my recommendation.
AA: Hahaha. Yeah. Well, I guess it's going to come down to people's different personalities and their relationships that are specific to them. But I love that, I love that perspective of just saying what you think, and then sometimes the seed gets planted and it takes a while. And if you don't say anything, then there's not that chance for growth over time. But a lot of times, hearts and minds don't change right away. But if you say something, say what's true and with love, then maybe it can change right away. And maybe it takes time, but at least you've said it and then it has the opportunity to grow.
JK: Yeah. And maybe for the gift, just bring something that's gender neutral anyway. “I didn't pick a side because I don't care. Love you!”
AA: Yeah. That's so great. One of the most common places that we see gender reveals is on social media. And a lot of the videos that I've seen about this are similar to the one I shared in the introduction, where the father is visibly upset when the gender is revealed that they're having a girl. This is just kind of blatantly exposing misogyny. I'm always fascinated when I see this, and I wondered if you have any thoughts about this. Why are those videos so popular? I wonder if it's striking a nerve and that people are like, “See? That's misogyny for a father still to be disappointed that he's having a girl.” And is there anything we can do to minimize the negative gender-based reactions among parents?
JK: I'm really hoping that people are hate-watching that. I hope that they're watching that going, “That man is terrible.” The truth is that if you are not ready to have a child of any gender or sexuality or ability, then you do not need to be having children. Why are you having children? You need to really rethink that before you make a decision to become a parent. As far as how to curtail these sorts of reactions from fathers. I mean, sit them down. Women, people who can become mothers, anybody who is reproducing with a man. Have these conversations before you have children with somebody. “What is your attitude? What is your attitude going to be if you have– say we decide to have three children and they're all girls. What are you going to do if all of your children are female? What are you going to do if your only child is a girl? What is your attitude going to be about that?” And if they have any sort of hesitation, and I would even say if they were like, “Oh yeah, I'd love to have a daughter, but she better watch out with those boyfriends, because I'm gonna have a pistol under my pillow,” or the rifle in the closet or whatever it is. If that's the reaction, that is actually, even though that sounds positive, that is a negative reaction too.
AA: Yeah, for sure.
JK: Women aren’t property. Your daughter's not any more your property than your son. Don't have children with men like this.
AA: Yeah it's true. It's fascinating to me that this can happen and that all the steps along the way… Does the mother of the baby not realize that her husband is the type of person that would react that way? And then the fact that they post it, the whole world can see that this husband is so sexist. It's just kind of mystifying to me that those things are out there, but they're so common, actually. And in a way, it's kind of validating to see, because some people are like, “The world isn't sexist anymore. There's not a problem with patriarchy.” And you just point to those and it’s an easy example of how it very much is alive. But it kind of baffles me.
“if you are not ready to have a child of any gender or sexuality or ability, then you do not need to be having children”
JK: I wonder if it has to do with the mother in the situation feeling that her options are limited to begin with. Like, “My family didn't tell me to go to college,” or, “I wasn't encouraged when I was in school to look into scholarships and programs to get to college, so I was just raised thinking that those things out there are not for me.” So they wind up with these men and it's like, “Well, I guess this is all I can get. This is all I can do. And I don't even see the seriousness,” you know, maybe they think it's cute, like, “Aw, he was just joking. He was kidding.” And if anybody ever jokes about hurting you, you take it seriously. And if anybody ever jokes about being mad that they have a female child, take that seriously as well. It's not funny and it's not cute.
AA: Yeah, for sure. One thing that I've seen on social media that I really love are initiatives to combat this. One is called The Pink Ladoo. Have you seen this account on Instagram?
JK: No, what is it?
AA: You would love it. In South Asia, there's a tradition of celebrating when a baby's born. If it's a boy, there's a big celebration and they have this traditional South Asian sweet that's called a ladoo, L-A-D-O-O, but they don't have those for girls, traditionally. So there's a celebration for a boy and just a big vacuum of just nothing for a girl. So she started this initiative, getting bakeries to make ladoos for girls’ celebrations also, so that all babies are celebrated. It’s just taking that one social tradition of celebrating boys and being sad about girls and saying, “Nope, we celebrate babies.” So maybe you would hear this and think that's still a gender reveal doing pink and not pink, but I think it's a step in the right direction of at least correcting the overt misogyny, to have all babies being celebrated when they're born. That's a really great account, and it was a social custom that I wasn't aware of because I'm from the United States, but it's a very big deal in South Asia.
JK: That is really interesting. I really like that, actually, because globally, we have a long, long way to go. Unfortunately, the gender reveal party has made its way around the globe. They're literally everywhere. But I guess you're making me realize that maybe, to the very, very small credit, the gender reveal party at least celebrates both, right?
AA: Right, exactly. You did make a cake with pink frosting and you were going to be just as happy. Yeah. That's so funny. Well, that brings us to the end, but my last question for you is that we're focusing on action this season, for season five, we've been talking about what action items we can take. I'd love to know if you have anything that you would encourage listeners to do, maybe something that they can do to push back against gender reveals, or even just against patriarchy more broadly.
JK: I would say raise your daughters just like you're raising your sons. Set them up with the expectation that you have high standards for them and they also need to achieve, so that they feel that everything is available to them. And hopefully they can make better choices with partners and we don't eventually have these sorts of situations where the father's looking down upon having a daughter because he feels that she won't achieve X, Y, and Z, and we don't have that anymore because there are actually equal opportunities. We need to see it in the workplace. It goes beyond just family medical leave policies. It goes toward time off, rotating time off. It goes toward men also taking accountability at home and rising to that domestic labor task. When we can see more equality in adults, I think it will trickle down to the next generation.
AA: Yeah, those are excellent points. Can you also let us know, Jenna Karvunidis, where we can find your work? What's your social media, and anywhere that we can find the work that you're doing.
JK: YesTable @yestableco, and also at High Gloss & Sauce, is my other blog page. Go to my bigger blog page.
AA: Love it. Well, listeners, make sure to check out all Jenna’s work, and thank you again so much for the conversation today. I learned a ton from talking to you. Thank you so much, Jenna.
JK: Thank you so much. It was a joy.
