Target no longer listing toys as being for boys or girls.

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Just last year, Target no longer listed specific toys as being for boys or girls. I wonder if McDonald's will eventually do the same thing. Instead of asking "For a boy or a girl?" when a parent orders a happy meal they'll ask for example "Hotwheels or Barbie?".

I see that as a step in the right direction. I think listing toys as for boys and for girls is very backwards.

Gendering toys is a relatively new thing. Up until the 70s "girl" toys and "boy" toys were rare. Pretty much the only gendered toys were dolls, and it's perfectly okay for a boy to play with a Barbie or a girl to play with an Action Man.

I remember a father trying to convince his son that he should not want a Barbie. I recall I was in the Boy's department looking for clothes.

When I was about 10 me and my cousin (same age) played with a neighbor girl's Barbie.
Liam had made a catapult using a board and a rock and we keep launching the doll with it.
It was hilarious. But man was her dad pissed. "You know how much those damn things cost?!" lulz.

I think it's a good thing but I'm not that strongly a supporter of it. Most kids would want to play with toys for their gender & a few places not using gender won't change the culture & stigma attached to playing with a nongender appropriate toy. I used to play with girls at recess sometimes because they tended to be nicer to me than the boys & the boys were playing sports which I HATED. The girls played with barbies & it was kind of similar to action figures but I was teased abit for it.

Kisses and hugs from East Europe where most of the toys are considered not gendered!
Except for dolls. But if a boy wants a doll stroller, it is ok as long as he puts a teddy bear inside. Girls playing with cars are perfectly ok.
I was rather terrified when my friend told me that when a friend of him tried to buy Lego Mindstorms for her daughter in the US, she was strongly discouraged by the shopkeeper who almost refused the order. What? Unbelievable here.
When I read about those desegregating of toys, I was wondering, where simple building bricks, balls, board games, stuffed animals and sandbox sets had been placed before?

From what I see in department stores here, it depends on the colour - if they are bright pink and covered in glitter, then, "obviously" , they go in the all-pink "girl's toy section"! Very strange, as from the 1910's to the 1940's, pink was considered the "boys colour", and before that, there was no colour distinction at all (as it should be.)

Work for a company that serves retail chains, usually by counting their inventory, but sometimes other tasks like merchandising, or stocking.

We stocked a toy chain for a while. The chain had internal lingo for departments. War stuff would be under "male...action". Not for customer. Just internal. Overhead a divorced lady coworker quip to another divorced lady coworker "that's what I could use right now....some male action!"

^^

You can still see that if you go in any British newsagent. All of the magazines about music technology, photography, science, current affairs etc. will be in the same section as 'GQ', 'Esquire', 'Men's Health' etc. The section containing 'Vogue', 'Marie-Claire' etc. will include all of the magazines about cooking, home decor, sewing, knitting etc. And it's not unusual to see the first section publicly labelled as "Men's interests" or similar.

And then journalists wonder why so little girls in STEM in the West...

It's all political correctness. The way it's going, I can see a future where gender will only be used to make babies. I can see a future of boys wearing pink dresses. Call me old-fashioned but I am against all this.

But that's the rub. Like my example a few posts up about the pink/blue colour thing, there's nothing particularly "old-fashioned" or "traditional" about segregating toys or clothes by gender, it's mostly a 20th Century thing instigated by department stores. In Victorian times, seeing a boy wearing a dress would have been totally unremarkable, and there are even childhood photo's of famous US presidents and UK princes wearing dresses. Apart from formal occasions or school uniforms, it just wasn't considered important what kids wore (they're only going to get mucky and tear holes in things anyway.) If you were working class and poor, even more so. If there was no money to buy new clothes, your next kid got the hand-me-down clothes from the previous one, even if they were different genders. People would have seen this all the time and not batted an eyelid over it, it's just that we've passed the point where anyone still alive can remember it - but not by very much at all.

This thread reminds me of a Christmas movie with a plot kinda like Groundhog Day(I forget the name of the movie). The dad is shopping for his son at the last minute & there's a boy throwing a tantrum at toy store/toy department about how he wanted something & his dad kept saying no so the the main dad tells the shopkeeper that he wanted what that boy wanted & to giftwrap it. He gets to his ex wife's place & they're unwrapping presents & the son unwraps his dad's & it's something like an Easy Bake Oven. The son is disappointed & everyone is upset with his dad over getting it & he says something like the boy at the store really wanted it. The dad starts reliving the same day over & over again & after a while & starts turning the oven into some kind of monster maker machine & his son liked it.

If it is appropriate for boys why shouldn't it be appropriate for girls as well? Or vice versa?

That's a very good thing. Let the kids play with the toys that appeal to them.
I was a girl who would most definitely have picked the Hotwheels. Toy cars and plushies were my favorites.

We went to Legoland when I was a kid, and we visited the Wild West part of it where we could get dressed up in era type clothes. I drooled after cowboy shirts and boots which I thought (and think) are cool, but the biatch that brought us clothes paid no attention to my protests and I was put in godawful dress which I hated. I didn't (and don't) wear that kind of clothes. We were photographed there by staff and I have the most sour expression on my face. I looked every bit as "happy" as I was.
That was obviously about clothes and not toys, but it's part of the same argument. Backwards BS!