During one of our bi-weekly weekly far too often trips to McDonald’s, I had to deal with the one question I hate to hear:

“Is the Happy Meal for a boy or girl?”

I glanced at the toys available. A My Scene doll and a Matchbox car. One clearly intended for girls, and one intended for boys.

I sighed. “For a boy.” For the record, I haven’t gone all Angelina Jolie on you and quietly adopted a boy from some small African country while you weren’t looking. The toy was for Cordy – definitely a girl – but I knew she would play with the car, while the doll would be tossed aside, unnoticed.

I drove around to the window to pay for our trans-fat, and the woman who took my money saw Cordy and said, “Oh, wait. I need to fix your order. This says the Happy Meal is for a boy.”

Quickly snapping out of my amazement that they would ever voluntarily fix an order, I said, “No no – that is right. My daughter wants the car.”

You’d think I told her my daughter likes to read porn while shooting small animals in the backyard. It was a look of confusion mixed with a little repulsion. “Oh, OK then,” she said, with as much judgment as she could muster.

Why must we have “boy toys” and “girl toys”? Do we really need to start pushing gender roles on our children at such a young age?

Cordy happens to have little interest in dolls. She also doesn’t much care for toy vacuums, toy kitchen items (unless it’s food), or dress-up clothes and makeup. She loves cars – her favorite is a monster truck. She also likes rockets, construction blocks, and trains. Her favorite shirt features Little Einstein’s Rocket, and it was purchased from the boys section of Target, because the girls section only had shirts with June dancing on them.

It frustrates me that we impose gender labels on toys and teach our children that certain toys aren’t for them because they don’t possess the right reproductive anatomy to play with them. And while I hate the stares I get when requesting a boy toy for my daughter, I can’t imagine how hard it would be for the mom of a boy to request a doll toy. A girl getting a boy toy is weird, but can be dismissed by saying she’s a “tomboy”, but the gender rules aren’t as forgiving for boys. Boys who like girl things are often looked down on in testosterone fueled circles.

Back when I was a kid and they had the Barbie-Hot Wheels toys at McDonald’s, I never thought about the pressures being put on me to conform to my gender standard. But looking back, I remember I always chose the Barbie (or the employee looked at me and chose for me). I never liked Barbie, though – I got that toy because I was a girl, and that’s what girls were supposed to get. I think I would have liked the Hot Wheels car more.

I’m not trying to say that girls shouldn’t like dolls and boys shouldn’t like cars. But I think it’s time for us to stop assuming that each gender must like those items. A simple change at the drive-thru could be to ask people if they want a doll or a car, and not ask “boy or girl?” Asking which toy instead of which gender removes the overt gender references to each toy, making parents more comfortable to choose the toy their child will like the most. For older children, it also allows them to feel safe picking their favorite toy and not feel that they have to get their gender-assigned toy because it’s expected.

When Cordy is older, I want her to be able to request the toy she really wants, and not pick the doll just because she was forced to reaffirm her gender by being asked “girl or boy?”