An ominous development for the makers of blue and pink tat

The slurry of Hallowe’en tat currently infesting the supermarket shelves is testament to two irrepressible human traits. The first is our endearing tendency to seize any opportunity, however tenuous, for a celebration. The second is our compulsion to monetise the hell out of these joyful moments.

Once the djinn of commerce is out of the bottle, there is no persuading it back, however inconvenient the consequences. No one knows this better than Jenna Myers Karvunidis, a Los Angeles-based blogger with a passion for parties. In 2008, pregnant with her first child, she came up with a plan to celebrate her 20-week scan.

Asking the midwife not to tell her the baby’s sex, but to seal the result in an envelope, Jenna baked a couple of cakes, iced one in pink and one in blue, invited her family round, opened the envelope and plunged a knife into the pink-iced cake to announce that her unborn infant was a girl.

So far, so adorably quirky – until Jenna’s blog about her gender-reveal party was picked up by the pregnancy magazine, The

Bump, and her moment of private joy morphed into an unstoppable global trend. The contagion has reached the sedate maternity department of John Lewis, which now stocks a genderreveal balloon; and last year saw the first gender-reveal environmental catastrophe, when an Arizona fatherto-be shot at a “boy or girl” target. The ensuing explosion revealed that his future offspring was a boy, and started a wildfire that consumed some 47,000 acres of forest.

Curiosity about the sex of an unborn child is as old as pregnancy itself, and the politicisation of gender is scarcely less ancient. Prince Charles’s birth was almost the first royal accouchement since 1688 not attended by a public official; and it is only since 2013 that absolute primogeniture has replaced male primogeniture in the royal succession.

Yet the decade in which gender-reveal parties have become big business has also seen the concept of gender fluidity enter the mainstream. Celebrities such as the Olympian Bruce (now Caitlyn) Jenner, television dramas such as Transparent and Euphoria, and the Telegraph’s own transgender columnist, David Thomas, have made the notion of a binary “gender reveal” seem quaintly outmoded.

The idea that expectant parents might now want to celebrate their unborn baby as a person-in-waiting, rather than a set of genitalia, is ominous news for the makers of pink and blue trinkets. Still, I suppose the more savvy among them might start producing their wares in a fetching shade of gender-neutral mauve.

Today is Apple Day in the UK and, as the National Farmers’ Union reports that 16 million British apples remain unpicked because of a labour shortage, there comes news from Washington, where the state university’s snappily named Tree Fruit Research and Extension Centre has produced a super-apple, the Cosmic Crisp, which boasts Leroy Chiao, a former Nasa astronaut, as a brand ambassador.

Thanks to its superpower of staying fresh for up to a year, the Cosmic Crisp will doubtless join the drear supermarket line-up of Golden Delicious, Granny Smith, Pink Lady and Jazz. What better day to celebrate a resistance movement dedicated to the neglected glory of our home-grown apples, from Acklam Russet to Young’s Pinello?