Many people have calm gender reveals that don’t involve any explosives or wild animals, but even these come with baggage and controversy.

Read: What to expect when you’re expecting gender-reveal backlash Other gender-reveal-related explosions, and one reveal involving an alligator, have also placed people in harm’s way.īlame it on Instagram one-upsmanship blame it on a new “over-celebration of life events” in general, as my colleague Alia Wong did or blame it on the timeless human impulse to see what happens when you try something stupid, but gender-reveal disasters are now happening somewhat regularly. No one was killed in either incident, but someone easily could have been. The latest instance of a gender reveal gone wildly wrong, as The New York Times reported on Friday, involved a plane that stalled and crashed while crop-dusting a Texas field with 350 gallons of pink water in honor of an unborn female child. Last year, a father-to-be started a 47,000-acre wildfire in Arizona when he shot a rifle at an explosive target full of blue powder ( It’s a boy!), causing $8.2 million of damage, according to the Arizona Daily Star.

But in the past couple of years, some kind of communal madness has taken hold, and many of these feats of gender performance have gotten more elaborate, more public, and more dangerous-putting lives and entire ecosystems at risk. The methods for doing so seem to have started out as benign, if stereotypical-cutting into a cake to reveal either blue or pink frosting, say. In October, an Iowa woman was killed when her family inadvertently built a pipe bomb as part of their gender-reveal party-a gathering at which expectant parents dramatically and colorfully announce the sex of their baby. At least one human life has already been lost as a direct result of the widespread obsession with turning the sex of one’s unborn child into an explosive (often literally) spectacle.

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