Because the biggest terror in our times is to be declared not “woke,” gender reveal parties are dead as a doornail. Oh, they’ll lumber along for a while more till the faithful all get the memo, but honestly, what were the originators thinking a decade ago! A gathering to announce whether your newborn is a boy or a girl? Who are you to make that call? What is anatomy to make that call? Consult the child himself—around age 4 is good.

Once again a cultural fad has come and gone and I have missed it altogether. In the ’90s it was the Macarena dance craze, which caught me flat-footed at a party in Italy where every other American tourist knew the steps but me. And I find that anyone my age can reminisce about their Sony Walkmans but yours truly.

This time it’s the “gender reveal party.” Even as I was invited to one last month, the inviter was slightly defensive about asking me to a phenomenon that’s “not so popular anymore,” she said, “because of, you know, all the gender fluid stuff going on.” In fact, the affair was later renamed, clunkily enough, a “biological sex reveal party.”

The parents are expecting a baby in six months but expecting to know the baby’s gender in weeks, a latter-day prerogative of the tech age. As I understand it, a trusted friend will extract from the doc the gender of the utero occupant, bring the top secret info to a baker, and on the appointed day deliver a fondant-covered cake that Mom and Dad will slice into, hand over hand, to learn, along with their excited guests, a pink or blue verdict.

Because the biggest terror in our times is to be declared not “woke,” gender reveal parties are dead as a doornail. Oh, they’ll lumber along for a while more till the faithful all get the memo, but honestly, what were the originators thinking a decade ago! A gathering to announce whether your newborn is a boy or a girl? Who are you to make that call? What is anatomy to make that call? Consult the child himself—around age 4 is good.

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