A blogger who helped to popularise the gender reveal party has said that she now has "mixed feelings" about spreading the trend.
Jenna Karvunidis and her husband threw a gender reveal party in July 2008 to celebrate reaching a "milestone" stage in their pregnancy after previously suffering several miscarriages.
Karvunidis, of Pasadena in California, wrote about the party on her blog, and was interviewed for a magazine article that helped to bring the idea of throwing a gender reveal party to a wider audience.
However, in a Facebook post shared earlier this week, the mum-of-three said that she has since "felt a lot of mixed feelings about my random contribution to the culture."
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"It just exploded into crazy after [the magazine article]," she wrote. "Literally - guns firing, forest fires, more emphasis on gender than has ever been necessary for a baby."
"Who cares what gender the baby is?" she continued. "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."
Sharing a photo of her family, Karvunidis added: "PLOT TWIST, the world's first gender-reveal party baby is a girl who wears suits!"
Explaining why she decided to write the post, which has now been shared more than 10,000 times, Karvunidis told HuffPost: "I’m glad gender reveal parties brought joy to some people, but that joy has been at the expense of nonbinary and trans people. Even if you say a problem doesn’t affect ‘me’ personally, we should all have enough humanity to realize we don’t have to cause pain for marginalized people to have joy for ourselves.”
Last year, a YouGov poll suggested that many other people have "mixed feelings" about gender reveal parties. While 20 percent of people called them "joyous" and 25 percent said they were "fun", 28 percent branded them "a fad" and 35 percent described them as "unnecessary".