Texas Plane Crash Is the Latest Gender Reveal Party Disaster

Another gender reveal party has ended in a gigantic disaster, though fortunately this one did not result in any casualties.

A pilot in Texas crashed his plane during a flight in which he was to dump 350 gallons of pink water to help a couple reveal that they were having a girl.

According to the official report, he told investigators that the plane “got too slow,” resulting in its stalling out and crashing. He said there were no “preaccident mechanical failures or malfunctions with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.”

Whether all the extra weight — 350 gallons of “we’re having a girl!” along with an extra passenger in what is supposed to be a one-seater plane — had anything to do with the crash is unclear.

While gender reveal parties are reductive and reinforce both stereotypes and the idea of a gender binary at best, the disasters caused by people feeling the urge to make an unnecessarily large statement about their unborn child’s assigned gender seem to have been ramping up over the past couple years.

In 2017, a wildfire ravaged part of Arizona after a gender explosion went terribly wrong, a bunch of gender-themed fireworks aimed themselves at a crowd last year, and only a few weeks ago, a grandmother was killed after a DIY pipe bomb experiment for a gender reveal party set off a dangerous explosion of shrapnel. It was not the only gender reveal explosion that went wrong in October in Iowa.

Even the blogger who first popularized the idea of gender reveal party has recently expressed her regrets, saying that the craze has turned into something that puts “more emphasis on gender than has ever been necessary for a baby.”

Just because some crazy gender reveal stunts go off without a hitch doesn't mean they're a good idea. But it seems like no number of crashes and fires and even fatalities will convince some people to just wait and celebrate at the baby shower.