She doesn't really raise a lot of gender questions, though - the sleight of hand is in quotes such as this one:

It’s tough, because as a creative person myself, I’d love to see much more open-ended creative play, but that’s not financially sound for a large toy company. When the choice is My Little Pony or an open-ended toy, which one are they going to choose? They’re going to choose My Little Pony. If you want to be involved with more open-ended creative play, you’re going to have to look in the specialty toy market, with educational toys or small mom-and-pop companies or maybe European companies. They don’t have the big numbers, so they don’t have anything to prove.

My daughter is still pooping her drawers. Gender roles are of much lower importance than at TNG's house, for example. That said, I'm much more concerned about shielding my daughter against the media onslaught than the toys she plays with. It's funny - my sister's kid is eight months older than mine. She watches a lot of TV. Ariel is the best thing in the world for her - Disney princesses really matter. By contrast, my daughter has seen three things on TV in her entire short life: Super Bowl XLVII, Super Bowl XLVIII and 30 minutes of Winged Migration when she was fighting a 105 degree fever from teething. She doesn't know from Disney princesses. Her favorite toy in all the world is an Afrin bottle, followed by blocks, followed by a box of Hot Wheels cars.

As a screenwriter that has friends who write children's programming, I'm acutely aware of how little psychological training the average children's television writer has and how inexpert they are at propagating positive gender roles. Keeping her aware that the Idiot Box is looking to sell her something is Priority One. Helping her understand the stories she hears aren't reality is Priority Two. After that, if she wants a barbie doll she'll get one.

I'll be honest. I'd be totally into building her a dollhouse. That sounds like fun. But I'd be just as into building her a train set. She does dig on the Hotwheels.

My daughter is 26 months. We do make a conscious effort to limit those toys explicitly 'made for girls', but we won't prevent her from playing with something that she likes. We have LEGOS, and the ones that I have purchased for her have been gender neutral. She has a train set and a kitchen, and she probably spends equal time playing with each.

That said, anyone that thinks that gender is purely a cultural construct likely hasn't had kids. Watching my daughter, her cousins, and my friend's kids grow from birth, it's pretty obvious that they each start with their own seed of preferential interests, and there are some generalities, and yet plenty of exceptions. Speaking personally, I am not much of a jock, and no degree of training or exposure would have made me interested in playing sports. I am a straight guy that can crochet but cannot juggle a soccer ball.

At about 14 months old, my daughter became fascinated with shoes. One of her favorite things to do is to try on her shoes, or other people's shoes, and walk about. Neither my wife or I pay much interest in our shoes. My daughter looks like she might be the child of a shopaholic with a shoe fetish, but that's not where her interest came from. I have no idea where her interest in shoes came from. She also loves babies and hovers around them whenever they are about. That's just her.

I do find the gender divide in toys to be absurd. However, I find most broad-based cultural movements to be absurd. I don't worry about my daughter's interest, but do worry about her freedom to pursue them without the influence of social pressure whether or not they align with, or run counter to, her own. Like most things, I think that's where leading by example is one effective approach.

Not a parent, but thinking back on it, my parents were pretty gender-neutral with their approach to toys. They got us legos for a large part of our childhood, which my older brother, younger sister, and I, enjoyed greatly. We all liked Arthur books, which weren't really gender-based, minus, perhaps, Arthur's sister getting on his nerves - not that you have to be a boy to relate to that! Magic School Bus was taught by an intelligent Ms. Frizzle...my sister really liked Teletubbies, something neither my brother, nor I, understood. I don't know if Teletubbies had a gender, but I still think it's terrifying and stupid. Ain't nothin beat Sesame Street...that being said, we were only allowed large amounts of TV when we were sick, or it was a Saturday morning, otherwise it wasn't allowed to be turned on.

When we got into videogames, my parents didn't ever specify that it was a toy for boys, even though that's always what's been considered the norm. To that end, my sister played them along with us, (or thought she was playing, as was the case when I wanted to get into an extra long, single-player RPG without being bothered).

The older I get, the more nonsensical gender divides become.

Penises and vaginas are parts that when combined tend to make babies and the babies come out of the people with the vaginas, but none of that follows from it.

Also, flagamuffin, there's an explanation for that; somewhere in your brain you still see 'female' as weak and inferior and thus that your son would be 'stepping down' and 'weakening'.

It's the same reason conservatives hate gays more than lesbians.

It's a separate question whether kids should even have all these plastic toys and representations of transient fashions -- I think it encourages materialism, envy and other qualities that parents should avoid cultivating in their children. So when I say "toys associated with both genders," I mean Lincoln logs, legos, children's books that might be thought of as "for boys" -- things that allow creativity and play at the same time.