Culture

Everyone’s Done With Gender Reveal Parties After One Caused A Devastating Wildfire In California

"Imagine being so basic that you destroy an entire ecosystem."

by Michelle Rennex  9 September 2020
gender reveal party wildfire memes

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Earlier in the week, it was reported that a gender reveal gone-wrong was to blame for the massive El Dorado wildfire that continues to burn throughout California.

The fire began at 10.30am on Saturday (local time) in El Dorado Ranch Park in Yucaipa, and firefighters are still trying to control the blaze. Since September 5, the fires have burned through approximately 11,000 acres and have forced nearby residents to evacuate their homes for safety.

In a statement, the local fire department shared that the fire was started by “a smoke-generating pyrotechnic device, used during a gender reveal party”.

As the smoke device went off in dry area during a heatwave, this made for the perfect conditions for a wildfire. But while the wildfires and their impacts are very serious, the origin of the fire itself is bonkers to say the least.

The sheer stupidity of setting off a smoke device, in a grassy park, during a heatwave is laughable. In fact, the need for a gender reveal party at all in 2020 is already ridiculous enough – especially when these ~reveals~ have a proven history of causing wildfires in the US.

So when the internet caught wind of the fire’s very trivial origin, people quickly turned the whole thing into one giant meme to help cope with, yet another, painfully 2020 event.

Poking fun at the family’s strange need to so desperately know whether their child has a penis or not, people begun to make memes about how cis-normativity literally caused the world to burn.

Beyond the wildfires themselves, the wildest part of this whole gender-reveal-gone-wrong is that we still don’t even know what the gender of the child is. Some kind of gender reveal party that was.