Gendered Toys

Because of culture and because of the perceived need of manufacturers to expand markets, toys have become gendered. Clinicians use this difference to diagnose trans children as having a pathological illness that needs treatment. Some clinicians have also encouraged play with cisgender toys and discouraged play with gender congruent toys as part of reparative/conversion therapy. Although toys may seem trivial, they contribute to play behavior which is necessary for human development.

The drive for gendered toys started long ago, right after pink and blue were established as gendered colors. As a child I do not remember wanting to play with dolls, even though they were in our house. I was interested in all things electric, especially electric trains. Train sets started out to be faithful miniatures of the real thing with black engines, brown boxcars and red cabooses. At some point Lionel, the leading train manufacturer at the time, decided to gender its trains to appeal to female children and preclude hand-me-downs to males. My wife played with and loved these train sets that featured pink engines and pastel-colored boxcars. We still have some of these pastel beauties in our basement.

Play is an important part of brain development. We tend to think that children are born with a completely developed nervous system but nothing could be farther from the truth. Soon after birth, brain cells destined for the cerebral cortex proliferate and start migrating to the cortex. There are many more cells than the brain needs. Those cells that are not used, delete themselves. This use-it or lose-it process starts in puberty and is complete by the early twenties. Males tend to complete the process a little later than females. Play “exercises” brain cells that are needed and therefore contributes to development.

Our culture considers play with dolls to be a gendered, feminine behavior. A recent study showed that children of both sexes like to play with dolls until about age 2 1/2. It stands to reason that they do this because studies with newborns have shown that humans have an innate attraction to human faces from the moment that they can see clearly. This seems to be one of the hardwired human predispositions (like the predisposition for gender behavior.) This innate attraction to human faces has obvious evolutionary survival value. At age 2 ½, males generally stop playing with dolls. Their parents start to discourage them from doing so because of cultural gender rules. Presumably male children might want to continue to play with dolls. The toys that males play with after 2 ½ probably reflect cultural gender rules, parental interest as well as child interest.

My wife tells me that her oldest male child played with dolls until he was 8 years old. It is a good thing that he was not discouraged from such play because he now is a well-adjusted world-class research pediatrician. Until age 8, he pretended to listen to doll hearts and take their vital signs. He now works on finding ways to treat cancers of the blood in children. Who knows, he might have become a research pediatrician because of some other interest, like playing with a chemistry set or growing flowers because of a biology interest, but why discourage a child from their play interests?

There seems to be an effort to make toys less gendered. This has been attributed to the influence of younger people that are involved in toy marketing. Surveys show that younger people are less interested in gender. Instead of pink and blue versions of plastic toys, we are now seeing purple and green versions. In the past decades, we have seen an increase in “action figure” toys aligned with movies and comic books. Action figures may be a substitute for dolls for males. Unfortunately many of them are used to tell stories of violence rather than the care of children.

There is a dark side to toys. Although we are doing the best we can to stamp out child reparative/conversion “therapy” with laws, it still continues in some places. Such “therapy” usually encourages play with culturally appropriate gendered toys and punishes play with toys congruent with a trans child’s gender predisposition. Supporting insurance classification categories still exist in the International Classification of Disease (ICD) which pathologizes trans children. This morning I received a petition fresh from the ongoing WPATH convention in Amsterdam to move this supporting category to the non-disease portion of the document. Hopefully the next step is to eliminate this category entirely. Children can still get the counseling and medical help they need under non-transgender categories.

Another example of the dark side involves administration of drugs to pregnant women whose female fetuses show signs of congenital adrenal hyperplasia. This genetic anomaly greatly increases the amount of testosterone in the fetus. The drug given to the pregnant mother reduces these levels but has suspected side effects. The U.S. researcher doing this “therapy” indicates that she does it because she does not approve of the behavior of these children in rejecting doll play and embracing rough-and-tumble play which she thinks does not encourage future motherhood or domestic activity. Although she, herself, is a career women, it is clear that she thinks that “a women’s place is in the home.” The longstanding rational by some European endocrinologists for such “therapy” is that it would prevent FtM transsexualism. However, the scientific evidence does not support this contention. It is clear that these endocrinologists believe that being transsexual is somehow undesirable. However they have hesitated to advocate prenatal administration of testosterone to male fetuses to eliminate homosexuality because of the societal contributions by homosexuals. These are examples of how the prevailing culture influences science, something that enlightened scientists are wary of.

The bottom line is that children should have access to a diverse set of toys that span both gender behavior categories as long as those toys are safe. (That does not mean that effective toys need to be expensive. Dolls made of wood, stone and corn husks have performed well in the past.)

Play is self-regulating and a child will play with those toys which interest them. As their interests’ changes, the time spent with various toys will adjust accordingly. Parents should be supportive of the interests of their children and not try to force their own interests on them. Parents who force participation in football on unwilling males rather than letting them take art lessons are indulging their own interests. This is likely to make for mediocre quarterbacks who never get to be the superlative Picassos and architects they could have been. Each human is born with individual differences that may not fit parental interests. It is up to parents to be supportive of their children’s interests and which are often revealed in their choice of toys.

Tags: featured, gendered toys, Reparative therapy, Transgender

Category: Transgender Body & Soul