Rocking Godzilla Like a Baby

Gender and Toys This Holiday Season

Last week I was shopping for my niece’s birthday present at a local toy store when an older man walked in with a three-year-old, probably his grandchild. He loudly and gruffly steered the little boy away from the section I was in, telling him that was all “girl stuff” and he wasn’t going to buy him any of those things. The way he said it, and then the loud conversation he proceeded to have about Biden’s presidency with the store employees, led me to believe he was probably on board with the GOP’s stance on essentialized gender identity.

The idea that gender identity is binary (girl/boy, man/woman), unchanging, or specific to the body doesn’t hold up to any kind of historical, social, or anthropological study. What it means to be a man, for example, changes over time and across cultures (consider the Founding Fathers, decked out in high heels, wigs and makeup). The performance of womanhood is similarly malleable: now American women can add participating in the capitalist economy or playing professional sports to their long list of acceptable roles (partially explaining why it sucks to be a woman in America now: we get to do all the housework, have all the kids, and work full time).

The textbook I use for my Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies course explains that the idea that biological sex determines gender identity is the “the standard story”: if you’re born biologically female, you will express feminine traits, and then be attracted to the “opposite sex.” What scientists, sociologists, psychologists, historians, really, everyone, have found is that the standard story doesn’t hold up to empirical evidence and that the traits we see as “feminine” or “masculine” are not fixed (in India, for example, pink was a masculine color).

Since the 1970s, queer theorists and feminist scholars have been challenging the way the “standard story” affects academic inquiry. Thanks to these scholars, we now have a much more complex paradigm to approach the study of biological sex (Anne Fausto-Sterling suggested there are at least five sexes), gender identity and sexuality. Scholars now see these identity categories as existing on a spectrum, and while they often intersect, no one category constitutes the other. I use the Genderbread Person on a slide in my lectures to illustrate.

I was surprised to see this same image appear with Ron DeSantis when he signed the law in Florida prohibiting the recognition of LGBTQ identities in classrooms. The GOP is desperately trying to militarize the standard story to demonize the left, labeling activists who fight back against book banning and laws like the one in Florida as “groomers” and “perverts.” In a twisted rhetoric that they also use to justify transphobia and discrimination, they claim to be protecting children.

But we know that this strict gendering of children and toys is harmful to child development, and not only for the kids that identify as gender queer. Insisting that “girl stuff” is undesirable or gross, as that grandfather in the toy store implied with his tone of voice, is an early primer on misogyny because it connects femininity with weakness. While U.S. culture often encourages girls to play with toys we gender as masculine, we often violently prohibit boys playing with toys gendered as feminine.

When Alex was a toddler, I gave him a baby doll to play with and he threw it in the hallway and slammed the door. The most nurturing I’ve seen him be is when he wrapped a robot T-rex in a blanket and rocked the monster like it was a little baby. Ellie, on the other hand, has been fascinated with dolls and babies, and told me the other day to please stop talking because she was trying to get the babies to sleep. For Christmas this year, we’re giving Ellie a dollhouse and Alex a remote-controlled car that can jump off of obstacles and fly through the air. I wouldn’t give us top marks for avoiding the gender factory in our own house, clearly, but I struggle as a parent with how to meet the kids where they are and encourage their interests while also helping them to improve in areas where they don’t excel (see: Alex taking care of human children). I want our kids, and all kids, to have the freedom to be what they most want to be, either in their professions, or gender expression, or in who they chose to love.

Alex with his “baby,” October 2021.

The gendering of toys may seem relatively innocuous but it sets our children up to repeat the patterns of bias and exclusion that keeps the patriarchy humming along. Pushing girls to worship princesses tells them that what is most important is being nice (even when everyone is treating you like shit, i.e. the plot of Cinderella and Snow White) and looking pretty. Giving boys STEM toys might literally make them better at math and science, setting them up to be the superior wage earners that perpetuates the gender pay gap.

For our final in WGST, I ask students what they would imagine for a utopic society, and many of them argue that the best approach would be to eliminate gender all together, because it makes people more free. Getting rid of gender doesn’t mean eliminating the traits we associate with masculinities and femininities. It would just mean that anyone could wear sparkly clothes, try to be nice when people are being assholes, learn how to rock a baby or solve complex spatial puzzles. It might also mean we could banish the dominant notions of American masculinity that celebrate violence, greed and physical prowess as the best ways to be a man or the alarming pressures of American femininity pushing women to get Botox in their 20s and undergo major cosmetic surgeries.

So this holiday season, after all the presents have been unwrapped and the kids are quietly playing with all their new toys, be on the lookout for gender shaming, and see if you can’t help the kids in your life expand their possibilities with some sparkly toys and baby dolls, or by sharing those brain-building STEM toys. We’ll all be better off for it.