A couple recently set fire to 47,000 acres of southern Arizona, at a cost of $8m (£6.3m), what with firefighting and whatnot, but it wasn’t with a barbecue gone wrong or a candle, or any of those things that could happen to any of us. They razed their environs to the ground by shooting at a target full of coloured explosive as a means of announcing the gender of their forthcoming baby. This is exactly the kind of thing – recklessness and pointlessness vying to define it – you would expect a gender-revealing parent-to-be to do.

In Australia, the main high-risk behaviour associated with the gender-reveal event is called the “burnout”, where you somehow – the technicalities escape me – send plumes of blue or pink smoke out of the back of your vehicle. Here in the UK, we have adapted to the new normal with cake: blue and pink iced muffins with swirling question marks, which all solidifies at some point into the answer, sometimes via a larger cake. Like the baby shower at which it typically occurs, this practice is deeply alien to the British; we have only adopted it because we heard there were baked goods involved.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘You blew it’ ... a still from a video of the Arizona gender-reveal party gone wrong. Photograph: HO/AFP/Getty Images

It’s a peculiar time in human history for this to flare up: in the wider culture, gender-essentialism – the pink-for-a-girl, blue-for-a-boy stuff – has slipped completely out of mode, recognised for what it is, a straitjacket. In fact, the whole idea of defining an individual by its sex has gone by the wayside, and with it any great excitement at finding out what that sex is. We’re reaching a point of non-compartmentalisation where you wouldn’t even ask whether it was a boy or a girl once it was out, let alone while it was still cooking. And this is the moment they choose, those Arizona explosive fans, those Canberra drag-car racers, those British cake-eaters, to go completely tonto about it. So you have to ask, is this a coincidence? Or have the forces of conservatism, in invidious but predictable collaboration with the forces of commerce, got together to stop the progressive rot? “You think you can evolve into a more complex, less binary, more fluid understanding of the human condition? Well, eat this, liberal! I’ve just set fire to all your grass! BECAUSE IT’S A BOY.”