It’s done all the time, but it’s best done before the duplicate thread(s) have gotten very long. Since the other one had gone dormant before your OP appeared, the chrono sequence of posts would still be sensible: all of the other threads’ posts, then all of your threads’ posts.
Right now we have 5 threads (that I counted) about Justice Ginsburg’s recent unexpected death. Putting those together might be too much of a Gordian knot by now.
Nevertheless, the Mods can make that decision only if they know the issue exists. Whether you or they care enough about these 2 gender reveal fire threads to do something is not my concern.
I just point out the merge-by-Mod capability is available, and that as a general matter multiple simultaneous threads on the same topic is mildly discouraged in our local culture.
Now that we’re in IMHO… I do think it is a little creepy. Up until recently I spent an inordinate amount of time on Mommy boards and some of them seem quite obsessive long before the baby is ever born. For some people their whole world rises and sets on their status as parents. The over-the-top biological sex reveal is just one aspect of that.
But having recently been pregnant, I can sort of see the appeal. At 14 weeks we found out the baby’s sex as a side-effect of genetic testing. Knowing that he was a boy really made something abstract and theoretical suddenly seem a lot more concrete and tangible. Even though I knew intellectually it didn’t really mean anything, it meant something in the sense that I was gestating a person. A person who had a sex and would eventually have a gender identity. None of that compelled me to set off fireworks or anything, but I can at least see why someone would want to know the sex of their baby.
I feel like the first time I ever heard of a gender reveal party was a couple years ago, and back then it struck me as some silly thing that rich(?) or young (?) or newagey (?) parents did. Is this a new phenomenon? Some sort of conservative backlash to transgender rights?
I don’t understand why anyone would care to celebrate a newborn’s gender before they even hit puberty. How does it affect anyone?
And what the heck is the link between them and wildfires?
There are a number of things happening. First off, the only problem, for strangers, is the wilderness fire. It could have been started by a cigarette, an overheating auto transmission in dry grass, or some drunken fool. Or kids who think flaming arrows shot into the wilderness is “fun”, as was descried above. Or a regular pyrotechnic used irresponsibly. So dumping on this particular party is at least a little bit petty.
So this is a new type of party – added on to the baby shower, birth, christening, first birthday., So what, a party’s a party. I always tell people, who don’t want to come to a party – you have to eat that day anyway, why not eat with us, we’ll have cake, and fireworks, isn’t that fun enough? A woman has something growing inside her that we want there. She has to eat too, so lets celebrate any trivial milestone.
The whole “gender” reveal when we really mean “sex” reveal is cringy enough 'tho. Basically, people seem to be trying to co-opt the use of “gender identity” by making it a synonym for “sex organs” like it used to be. Well, that concept is gone, and pink and blue pyrotechnics aren’t going to bring it back. And what’s the point – so once we know the gender, we can now buy presents to reinforce the gender? I haven’t cared about that in years – onesies in pink, blue, yellow or pastel green all end up poked on and shat in. So why bother?
Here’s another wrinkle – suppose you’ve got an assholeish in-law, or maybe even a snooty friend, who’d take offense if they weren’t that absolute first to be given the gender. Or more than one. The gender reveal party may be to address this problem – everyone finds out at once, parents included.
One main issue is the asshats want an explosion, big badaboom … in general it tends to be illegal to cook off fireworks, explosions or gunfire inside many town and city limits … so they hie out to some park in the country side somewhere, set up a party and cook off fireworks, explosions and shoot shit. Asshats.
I was there for a cake one, and it was one of the more ridiculous, overblown things I’ve been to - like throwing a parade because you got a C+. Congratulations on accomplishing something completely mundane, and all that. I get that it’s cool that you learned something new about your kid, but as one of the non-parents, I really don’t care.
It’s also, at that point, literally it’s only characteristic. Having a baby is a huge deal, and people want to talk about things that are a huge deal. But there’s almost nothing you can say about the actual baby, other than, “It’s a boy/girl.” I don’t blame parents for putting a lot of emphasis on it. I figure it’s just part of that “Every aspect of my child is fascinating and important!” phase a lot of new parents go through.
But, y’know, colored frosting is more than enough to get the point across, and doesn’t generally lead to billion-dollar wildfires.
It’s gotten to the point I saw a clip online of some “Ripped from the headlines” Law and Order style show where a Gender Reveal party turns deadly when a family pulls a lever unleashing a bunch of fine pink powder into the air revealing it’s a girl, only for the pink powder to fly over the nearby grill, immediately catch on fire and proceed to light up the poor grillmaker and cause him to run around on fire screaming.
FWIW, people care a lot more about their babies’ sex/gender than they did when I was a kid. And it could have been that my childhood was an outlier, but I don’t think so.
Once upon a time, when babies still grew as fast as they do now, but clothes were painstakingly sewn by hand, all babies were dressed pretty much in the same gowns, and looked the same, boy or girl. No one cared whether you referred to a baby as “it,” even when you knew the baby’s gender (sex, whatever).
By the time clothes came off the rack, and I was around, people were dressing babies in gender-specific clothing more often, but also still putting kids in cheap hand-me-downs, and not caring very much if you got the gender of their newborn wrong, since it was mostly in blankets.
It seems like a 21st century, or maybe a 1990s & 21st century thing, but parents really CARE that you know whether they have a boy or a girl. They put those bands on girls’ heads to make sure you know they are girls, and do everything in pink or blue, now that they can know in advance what to buy. If you call someone’s week-old boy “she” they are livid-- my gawd, it’s in a BLUE BLANKET! Would they do that to a girl?
Yeah, when I heard about gender reveal parties my first thought was “Cute, but nobody but your parents really cares about the gender of your child, and I’m not sure they really do.”
I don’t think parents actually care more. Scans are simply more accurate, so it’s more likely that you’ll be able to tell, and it’s one of the few things you can tell people about the baby other than it’s still alive and is now the size of a grapefruit. That doesn’t excuse the parties, of course.
Gone for who? I suspect the vast majority of new parents are still raising their female assigned at birth babies as girls and their male assigned at birth babies as boys. I don’t see that going away any time soon.
But more and more of us are choosing not to cram our children into gender stereotyped boxes based solely on their sex. And these elaborate sex - based rituals are, I think, predictable backlash to the flexibility of gender norms in many families.
Here’s the thing, even if you are a cisgender person, like the vast majority of us are, many of us are beginning to see that gender- and sex-related stereotypes don’t serve individuals or society well.
Why do we have to teach girls from infancy to like pink and frilly things? Why do we have to teach them to aspire to be princesses, who get their status from their fathers and husbands, not from their own accomplishments and skills?
As cisgender heterosexual man who is trying to meet women to date, I’m interested in cisgender women, but I’m not interested in a woman who wants to be treated like a “princess” or “queen” or who is looking for someone to “take care of her.”
A society that is more accepting and accommodating to people who are in the minority, such as homosexual or transgender will certainly be beneficial to people who are in those minorities.
However, the biggest beneficiaries will be those in the majority—cisgender heterosexual people will be freer to be what they want to be, rather than what societal stereotypes demand from them.
