Yeah I still don't get why people don't understand that gender is a social construct and totally different to biological sex, it's really not hard to understand

Gender, much like sexuality is a sliding scale spectrum and various people fall into different places along the line. Humans are not either/or and black and white entities, we're quite complex

Yeah, I don't see the problem with using the names of the toys instead of "boys" toys and "girls" toys. I look after kids all the time and it really does bother them if someone says something like like is for another gender, unfortunately, I know when I was a child I would have definitely preferred a skylanders toy rather than my little pony. :joker:

I don't think it matters which toy a boy or girl receives but a parent should still be able to say "a girls toy" and for the person behind the desk to know which one she is referring to.

Exactly! Finally someone else on here who gets it. :lovedup:

But yeah I was just thinking, and an example of gender being a social construct is dresses. 200/300 years ago in the aristocracy it was entirely normal for young boys to be put in dresses similar to those worn by girls. Nothing was thought of it. Flip forward to today and now dresses have shifted into becoming something that's strictly feminine. That is gender. It's fluid, it changes, and it's entirely determined by society.

again, like most social justice bloggers, you're assuming that the girls and boys toys will ONLY been seen as girls and boys toys and ONLY given to children of the 'correct' gender.

I very much doubt in the day in age, if a boy wants to play with the barbie toy rather than a car from a happy meal, a parent is going to say 'NO YOU ARE A BOY, YOU CAN'T HAVE THE GIRLS TOY!!! its the rules!!!!!'

seriously, people make on that these problems are so much worse than they are

yes, girls toys arent always just for girls and vice versa, i wont deny that

but things saying 'you must say this' or 'you cannot say that' are stupid because you are assuming things which quite often arent true

Anyone can wear a dress if they want to, doesn't matter if you're male or female. Look at Gary Levy from Big Brother Canada, he wears "female" clothes all the time but still identifies as male, because he is. Even Eddie Izzard wears dresses -- he's still male.

I imagine most of the 7 billion people on this planet have far more pressing concerns like poverty than "I'm not sure if I'm a boy or a girl". It's no coincidence that pretty much everyone who's involved in this movement is white and middle class... I just can't shake the attention-seeking air about it all.

And I get what you mean about toys/clothing, but if someone asked me what "gender" I was I'd take it to mean the same thing as what sex I was. All of this is to do with gender stereotypes, not gender itself.

Also I think a lot of the terms just alienate people and are thrown around to give the impression of research or expertise. I still have no idea what "cis" means and where it came from, and words ending in '____phobia' are banded about too much that it makes it seem a constantly aggressive and uncompromising movement.

I'm willing to admit I'm a total n00b about it all though.

It's also all influenced by the internet. If one person says "I refuse to be male or female" someone else is like "oh same" and it just follows in a pattern like dominoes.

I don't know what cis means, and I don't care enough to look it up.

I'm going to reply properly now, because childrens toys and 'wrong labelling' is something I'm pretty interested in.

I get that some people take offense to toys being named after certain genders.

But seriously, in this day in age, especially in the UK and other parts of Europe, it is not ANYTHING like what you hear social justice bloggers complaining about.

Schools and nurseries arent even allowed to tell children what toys to play with. I don't understand how it is wrong to say 'girls toys' or 'boys toys' when it is clear what toys are being spoken about.

I understand that some boys are going to play with barbies and some girls will play with monster trucks, ETC... but the truth is, the majority of children still play with toys, related to their gender.

Of all the schools I've been to, of all the nurseries I've worked in, I've rarely ever seen kids playing with toys of the 'opposite' gender. Most kids just like playing with toy animals, bricks/lego, dressing up and playing outside.

It is seriously not as bad as people make on.

Never have I once year a parent say, 'Oh no Timothy, you cant play with that! It's a girls toy!!!!"

Once we had a little boy wear a dress-up dress outside to his parents and his dad laughed and said he looked beautiful.

SJBs seem to have this problem with making the world so much worse than it is... I just don't get it.

It does not make me small-minded to think that toys can still be called 'girls toys' or 'boys toys'. To me, being small-minded is not accepting that other people have opinions too.

I know. But walk into any clothing store and you can't buy a dress for a man, right? That's what I'm getting at. It's clothing completely encoded throughout society is something that's female, even though it's just a piece of cloth with one hole instead of two. That assumption that society (or, western society rather) makes of it being women's clothing is something entirely superfluous when you think about it really.

My point is that gender is social construct. Something determined by human thought and ideas. Sex is obviously something biological, but gender? Nope, that's much more complex.

You can buy a dress, there doesn't need to be dresses for men. Yes stores are targeted to specific genders but it doesn't mean that the opposite gender can't buy anything from it. Most of the population have no problem with the types of clothing available to them. It's a minority. I understand that some people may want to wear something that is not of their gender and I think that's fine.

It doesn't matter. If you have a form to fill out and it asks you for your sex, there are two options (or three if you include third gender).

EDIT: I know gender is a social construct, I studied sociology.

Hm, fair enough. I mean I'm white and painfully middle class, but looking at the toxicity of gender within society today I like to think being progressive about it might help in the future. I don't know.

Well that's the thing. You have to separate gender and sex. Sex is the biological definition of whether you're male or female, and that's something that obviously can't be argued against. Gender however, is your mental identification and that can go from cisgendered, to transgender, or genderfluid etc.

Cisgendered means you identify with the gender you were assigned with at birth. It was created as a neutral and inoffensive term over 'normal'/'regular people' or something like that.

I don't think the labelling of toys is a big deal, I had loads of Action Man figures as a kid and I remember one time taking one of my sister's Barbies and using some of my old Action Man clothes to turn her into an Action Woman and no one batted an eyelid at me essentially playing with a Barbie. In fact my dad, who is as masculine as you can be without wrestling a bear and is a bit of a casual homophobe, liked the fact that I was using my imagination.

I don't think it's a real concern, girls who play with barbies aren't always going to grow up to be typically girly girls and boys that play with army toys and such won't always grow up to a typical man's man. The choice of toys as a child won't change who the child will become. It's just a case of being painfully oversensitive.

i had hot wheels, power rangers & thunderbirds and i grew up to be a total lad's lad

tbh i blame my love for polly pockets and barbie dolls for making me ghey

Likewise! Good to see you posting more recently, I've been fighting a lone battle on these issues for a while now :p

Well Munchkins helps but she's rarely online

I'm not saying girls toys aren't given to boys and vice versa, but the very problem with labelling them as gender specific is that you socialise people into the belief that 'this toy is for boys and this toy is for girls', meaning that it doesn't matter whether you let your children play with opposite toys or not, they're going to be seen as 'weird'/'different'/'abnormal' etc. By giving them the labels in the first place you're creating a problem where kids will be looked upon as weird if they don't play with the toys they're 'supposed' to

Not only that but the gender stereotypes encoded within the toys are appalling, so girls are meant to have dolls houses, mini kitchens and Barbies because that's where they will be spending their life and their appearance is what they need to concentrate on because it's oh so important, meanwhile guys need to get their action toys out, cars and toys which symbolise strength, power and authority because they need to 'be a man' (so much wrong and damaging with that saying in itself but that's a different debate entirely)

Separating toys into specific genders just perpetuates gender stereotypes which are wholly untrue and also runs the risk of outcasting children that don't wish to play with the toys assigned to their gender

Toys don't need to be given a gender specific audience, they're just objects. I don't actually see any reason to label them as such

Well of course, I'm far more interested and worried about economic policies and the ridiculously vast and unequal gaps in wealth but that doesn't mean we can forget about other issues. Obviously different things are going to be important to different people but inequality is inequality, it all needs to be sorted

@ Ninastar's other post, the reason the kids are generally playing with the toys that have been assigned to their gender is because they've been socialised that way. That's the very point, by having 'girls toys' and 'boys toys' whether people like or not that then is seen as the norm and so children will just gravitate to those toys because that's what they feel is right to them

Girls don't pop out the vag searching for dolls houses and boys aren't eager to play with toy cars, this behaviour has to be taught. It isn't natural, it's socialisation

You can't say backward people don't still exist though. :joker: I posted this on facebook recently. http://puu.sh/7WcHI.png

omg edited the wrong post i fail

Rofl well I'll help when I can! :tongue: I honestly think gender is such a stupid thing I mean gender roles are just so constraining. It's silly.

Some people :facepalm:

I wish we could all get along like we used to in middle school.
I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat and be happy.

SHE DOESN'T EVEN GO HERe

You don't even go here, **** off.

I live here. :)

:amazed:

But if they are happy then what is the big deal?

Nothing? I don't get what you're trying to say? Yes if kids are happy playing with the toys that have been assigned to their gender then that's great, but there will be some whom don't wish to play with those toys and because of the gender labelling that exists there's a risk that those children will be outcasted and seen as 'weird' because they wish to play with a toy which doesn't conform with their gender and that's both stupid and appalling. The fact that toys are labelled by gender is what creates that problem in the first place, if you just create toys and stick them in a massive toy shop and don't divide them up into genders for absolutely no reason at all (like I said I can't actually think of one good logical reason for doing so, it's such a pointless yet damaging procedure) and therefore teach kids that toys are just objects and you can play with what you want, then any potential issues that I brought up in this thread are removed. What's wrong with that?

Forcing people to not recognize gender sounds intolerant. There are difference between boys and girls, deal with it. Imaging that the differences will go away if we live in some gender neutral world won't happen. What's next, sending kids to some gender neutral re-education camp? And what's after that, how about banning our hormones?

I'm not sure that it'll be a utopia at all, plus these toy stores would be a complete mess, toys of all sorts stacked together, sounds like a shopping nightmare.

Way to over-exaggerate issues that aren't even there, the hyperbole wasn't really necessary

There are no natural personality differences other than biological ones between male and females, gender is a socially constructed concept. Deal with it.

Toys can be categorised by purpose, action/soft toys/dress up/cars/dolls, just like books are categorised into genres like romance/horror/thriller etc you don't need to separate them into gender specific categories so no it wouldn't be a 'shopping nightmare' it would be a shop without a girls and boys section, wow how will the world cope?!?!

kinda ironic given the whole argument

"gender is a socially constructed concept. Deal with it."

I am, I can deal with the world the way it is. You're the one who is "fighting a lone battle on these issues".

And if you believe that books aren't marketed to boys or girls then you haven't been in a bookstore or are totally naive.

And having all the dolls together is what's done in toy stores already, so what you want is to have all the dolls together, but if someone calls it a section for girls toys, they get fined or kicked out of your gender neutral world?

One thing I will never understand about all of this is why some people care so much about an issue that doesn't affect them in the slightest

I realise I'm saying this as a person who has no experience or contact with any transgender person which is somewhat hypocritical but I've been fascinated by gender for a while now so I have reason to take an interest in it. But for those people who it doesn't affect, they have no experience of and they don't understand...I genuinely don't get why you care so much? Things like allowing the legal recognition of genders outside of the binary is not going to have any effect on your life, so why do you care? Most of the issues effect transgenders and any kind of liberation they're searching for is going to have very little impact on your lives so you caring seems pretty pointless to me. Some of these social justice people seem a little bizarre admittedly but well...don't search for it then? I'd get pissed off if I read a load of white nationalist stuff which I've come across on Twitter before...so...I don't look for it. Are you all just trying to rile yourselves up or something?

You don't have to understand it, but if it doesn't have an impact on your lives in any profound way what's there to care about? All that's going to happen is some people are going to feel accepted and liberated meanwhile your life continues as normal, what's wrong with that?

Except the issues I raised are there, so...not really

This whole thread got real heavy real fast

LOL @ that typo

people are making an issue, because as said in the thread, it's literally everywhere on tumblr

people are making you feel like ****, for not believing in something that you have a right to not believe in

its just all so hypocritical

I'm a casual observer in this heavy thread..

When I were a lad there were just heterosexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals and asexuals. Then they started introducing Leaf Greensexuals and suddenly your Pikachus and asexuals weren't enough anymore

Yes you can deal with the world the way it is because it doesn't affect your wonderful liberated life, how lovely of you. These issues don't affect me personally, female inequality doesn't affect me, gay rights inequality doesn't affect me, a lot of economic inequality doesn't affect me...but they're all still issues which I care about, funnily enough I don't just think because the world is fine and dandy for me that I should forget about everyone else that faces injustice and inequality

I never said that either, I was using an example of how books are categorised into genres so you could have a similar process for toys

And why are you making up bizarre policies and hysterically putting words into my mouth? Why does a section of dolls need to be for girls - I actually don't understand that. What is it about a doll that means a girl should play with it? Do girls emerge from the womb desperate to play with Barbies or something? I didn't know that was part of our natural psych to be automatically attracted to plastic objects that look a certain way, I've been so mistaken all these years

Jack if you want a Barbie just go and get one I'm honestly not judging