The prospective father gearing up to knock out his knocked up wife (Screenshot: Daily Mail)
As straight people find yet more ways to tell the world about their child’s genitals, the latest excruciating ‘gender reveal’ shows a pregnant mother being struck in the face with a baseball bat.
The clip, which was shared on social media last week, was recorded by one of the guests who had gathered on the couple’s back porch for a party.
It begins with the prospective parents standing excitedly in front of a gender reveal baseball, with the father tightly gripping the bat in hand.
As he counts down from three it becomes clear that he’s forgotten he’s not about to hit a home run, and he strikes the ball with all his might – swinging it straight into his wife’s face with a sickening thwack.
The guests’ jubilation quickly turned to shock as they erupt in screams and one person wails: “Oh my God!”
A cloud of blue smoke emerges from the ball, but the moment is clearly overshadowed by the concussion-inducing blow inflicted upon the poor woman.
The clip ends with the mother holding her face in her hands, possibly wondering why she signed up for such an unnecessary, arbitrary and heteronormative stunt in the first place.
Gender reveal parties can be harmful in more ways than one.
Gender reveal parties – or the concept of celebrating your unborn child’s genitalia with family and friends – have been widely ridiculed as examples of ‘straight culture’.
The parties ignore the fact that there are more than two genders, and gender exists on a spectrum.
Although the concept of gender reveal parties originated less than ten years ago they soon became widespread – much to the regret of their creator, who’s now the proud mother of a gender non-conforming child.
The trend initially started with blue-and pink-coloured cakes celebrating outdated tropes of masculinity and femininity with slogans such as ‘Ruffles or rifles’, ‘Touchdowns or tutus’ and ‘Tractors or tiaras’.
But as people attempted outdo each other this rapidly escalated to special smoke-emitting tyres for cars, Jell-O-filled watermelons thrown into hippos’ mouths and, while less dramatic but still on the surreal spectrum, blue lasagne.
Some of the parties have even become life-threatening, with one resulting in a serious plane crash, another in a thousand-acre wildfire and another in a pipe bomb explosion that tragically killed a grandmother.
Aside from the obvious danger in creating your own homemade explosives, many LGBT+ people have pointed out that these parties are harmful because the gender norms they promote can be restrictive to the children as they grow up.
“Who cares what gender the baby is?” said Jenna Karvunidis, the parenting blogger credited with starting the craze and who is now begging for it to stop.
“I [cared] 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.”