Abi Bechtel, a mother of three, was shopping at Target two years ago when she spotted a sign in a toy aisle that advertised “building sets,” and, separately, “girls’ building sets.” Bechtel rolled her eyes, took a photo and posted it on Twitter. “Don’t do this, Target,” wrote Bechtel, an Ohio university instructor. Two months and 3,000 retweets later, Target responded to the swell of customer criticism with a promise that its stores would begin phasing out signs that categorize toys by gender.The 2015 move was applauded by researchers and parents concerned that labelling toys for “girls” or “boys” reinforces harmful gender stereotypes. But a backlash soon erupted on social media, with some customers decrying “political correctness” and fearing the world was headed toward “the end of boys and girls.”“I think Target may be forgetting who has made their stores strong,” Franklin Graham, the head of a prominent American Evangelical organization, wrote in a Facebook post that was shared nearly 50,000 times. “It’s not gender-neutral people out there — it’s working American families, fathers and mothers with boys and girls they love.”As calls to end the gendered marketing of toys have gained momentum in recent years — the White House hosted a conference on toys and gender just before President Barack Obama left office, and the U.K.’s Let Toys Be Toys campaign has convinced 14 companies to remove gender labels — each step forward has been hotly debated. Fighting for change are parents who want to see a world in which toys come in a rainbow of colours and are divided by interest and age, rather than gender. Detractors like Graham believe the push to remove labels from toys is part of a broader movement to create genderless children. Many online comments criticizing Target’s move were steeped in homophobia and tra ...
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