As a member of Gen X, I remember a time long ago, as in the very late 60s and early 70s, when toys were still worth something. Cap guns were made of metal. There was that great game, "Voice of the Mummy." I had a castle complete with knights and a horde of attacking Vikings. And, of course, the original 12-inch tall G.I. Joe. He even had a beard. I had one G.I Joe and three accessory sets. One came with a skin diver outfit and a rubber tiger shark for Joe to fight. Another featured a deep-sea diving outfit, complete with a helmet and a menacing octopus. The best one gave Joe a helicopter to fly and a king cobra he had to fight to get to an idol. The idol had a false back that contained jewels.
That was before toy manufacturers realized they could make shoddy products at higher prices, and someone would still buy the stuff. Nowadays, if I have to buy toys for Christmas or a birthday, I have no idea what the hell I'm looking at in the store. The problem with the toys mentioned above is that they are/were toys for boys. This made sense since I was a boy at the time. However, the California legislature decided that laws are like potato chips: you can't just stop. You have to finish the whole bag.
Traditionally, with the arrival of a new year comes new laws across the land. Starting in 2024, stores that sell toys in California had darn well better have a gender-neutral section or face a fine. AB-1084 states in part:
This bill would require a retail department store that is physically located in California that has a total of 500 or more employees across all California retail department store locations that sells childcare items or toys to maintain a gender neutral section or area, to be labeled at the discretion of the retailer, in which a reasonable selection of the items and toys for children that it sells shall be displayed, regardless of whether they have been traditionally marketed for either girls or for boys.
Beginning on January 1, 2024, the bill would make a retail department store that fails to comply with these provisions liable for a civil penalty not to exceed $250 for a first violation or $500 for a subsequent violation, as provided.
The bill even goes so far as to define children as "persons 12 years of age or less" and a toy as "a product designed or intended by the manufacturer to be used by children when they play." Thanks, California. There is no way anyone would have solved those mysteries on their own.
What is the rationale for this bill? Apparently, there is a problem with "unjustified differences" in products marketed for boys or girls, which can be easily identified by consumers if said toys are not separated by gender. The California Assembly also maintains that dividing toys by their target genders makes it harder for a consumer to compare prices "and incorrectly implies that their use by one gender is inappropriate."
In other words, the California Assembly can't rest until it neuters the daylights out of everything in the state. And who cares? If your daughter wants Hot Wheels, buy her the Hot Wheels. Quit overthinking this stuff. When I was a kid, I wanted an Easy-Bake Oven. Not because I wanted to explore different gender roles: I figured out that if I could make my own cookies, I could do an end-run around my mom. I never got my oven. I never got the NFL football game with the individual players that vibrated all over the field, either.
This, of course, raises the question: what is a gender-neutral toy? I guess Legos are still good. You can always build a college with a building for gender studies classes and a quad for protests. How about Lincoln Logs? Well, Abe was a part of the patriarchy. We know this because a group of people wanted to get rid of the statue of him commemorating the Emancipation Proclamation, which was paid for by the people Lincoln freed from slavery. And "log" implies "log cabin," which implies settlers, which implies colonialism, which…well, crap. Of course, we could fall back on the original G.I. Joe mentioned above. After all, who are we to misgender him just because he has a beard? And anyone who owned an original G.I. Joe had to change his uniform for whatever his new mission was. Once you started swapping out the trousers, there was no doubt that G.I. Joe was gender-neutral.
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I guess I'm okay this year if I dole out gendered presents around the Christmas tree. But we have 13 grandchildren. So if, heaven forfend, this law becomes a nationwide trend, here is next year's gender-neutral Christmas list for the grandkids:
- A paperclip
- An interesting-looking rock that dinged up my mower blade this past summer
- A pinecone
- A AA battery I found on the floor of the pantry
- A bottle cap
- A box of random power and electronics cords I've been hanging onto for God-knows-why
- A stick of spearmint gum
- An actual stick
- Coffee filters
- An ice cube tray
- A roll of "Hello-My-Name-Is" tags
- A toothbrush
- A lint roller
I will probably be out of the running for "Grandfather of the Year," but at least I'll be legal.
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