So boys and girls do not exist, only kids? Because kids gendering is also stupid and inane?
And later we will have only persons, not men and women?
It is sad to see how people fail to see the difference between racism and merely acknowledging the race, the difference between sexism and acknowledging the gender.
Or did I miss some new research which shows that we are all indeed unixes creatures with minor differences in dangling parts?
Equality does not mean uniformity.
You seem to have missed some old research about how damaging it is for kids to be told the things they are into are "not for them", based on their gender.
How would we react here if somebody said "yeah, Vim is for women only", made a pink version of Vim and marketed it solely at women, in women's magazines? That's what Lego is doing.
Gendering toys is as stupid as gendering software. Sure, some toys may appeal to one gender more than the other, just like some software might. But that's no excuse for ever being exclusionary about it.
I think the sillyness of your comment comes from the imaginary line between, one the one hand, making toys that "may appeal to one gender more than the other" and "being exclusionary about it."
Is the fact that there's an aisle at Target full of pink stuff and dolls exclusionary, or simply grouping by appeal? If my niece wants to go down the Hotwheels aisle, she's certainly not going to be kept away.
And if the daughter I'm going to have here in a couple months wants to play with "boy" LEGOs, great! But I'm also grateful that if she doesn't, LEGO is trying to help me out in my quest to get her interested in their wonderful toys by making sets that appeal to typically more "girl'ish" sensibilities.
The line is not imaginary. See this very thread for examples of people bullied for choosing the "wrong" toys. If you build a toy that more girls than boys like, that's one thing. If your marketing says (either implicitly or explicitly) "this toy is for Girls", kids will pick up on that, and they will enforce it too.
The results last lifetimes. It results in adults unable to even see the exclusion as anything more than "grouping by appeal to typical girlish sensibilities". Which views they in turn pass on to their children, continuing the cycle.
Think about the world you want your daughter to live in. Do you want her to be told that "hacking is for boys" because tech appeals to more "typically boyish sensibilities"? No? Then look for the fundamental gender discriminations bullshit like that rests upon.
LEGO is the opposite of uniformity. A kid can build any world with basic bricks: cute bedroom, lunar station, farm, torture chamber… whatever. And the torture chamber will be different from kid to kid. Just like with normal construction material, really.
Luckily, once the initial model is built and destroyed, all your son/daughter has is a pile of random bricks with which to build whatever he/she wants.
