What do you think of when you think of a gender reveal party? Images of a pregnant mom probably come to mind. Perhaps there are pink and blue balloons. There would be some clever way to announce whether the baby to be is either a boy or a girl. Perhaps the mom cuts into the cake to find that it is pink or blue. Perhaps she opens a box and pink or blue balloons pop out.

Love Gwaltney is pregnant. She is in several mom’s groups online, and she has seen multiple posts about gender reveal parties. That gave her an idea. She decided to have a gender reveal party of her own.

Love is also a photography, so she made sure to get some beautiful shots from the backyard family gender reveal party to share with family and friends online. In fact, the whole point of this gender reveal party was to share very special news with family and friends; it just wasn’t the news they were expecting.

We can only assume that family and friends wanted to know if the new baby was going to be a boy or a girl. Instead, after reading the post and looking at the pictures, they would quickly realize that the party was actually for a teenager.

Seventeen years ago, Love gave birth to a baby girl who she named McKenzie. Love shared that sometimes the gender label we put on a child is wrong. She wrote that sometimes this can lead to low self-esteem. She went on to say, “Other times, that child grows up feeling like a completely different person, and if you’re really lucky, they open up and tell you the truth, no matter how scary or daunting that could be.”

Then she broke the news that was sure to surprise her family.

“We wanted to announce that we got it wrong 17 years ago when we told the world we were having a little girl, and named that child McKenzie. So, we’d like to introduce you to our SON: Grey.”

Scrolling through the pictures, which start out looking like those of a typical gender reveal party, family and friends would soon realize that pink or blue balloons were not hiding in the box. Grey was hiding in the box. This was his family’s clever way of reintroducing him to the world.

 

Many comments on the post have been very positive, and Love shares that she chose not to make the post private because Grey is handing the negative comments very well. Her family is also overwhelmed by the attention the post has gotten. She wrote an update to the post explaining, “We did not post this in hopes of so much attention, but for each LGBTQ person out there who has connected with this or who has in anyway felt seen by this post, we are proud to have brought that recognition to you, even briefly.”