Is it nature or nurture? Do boys naturally play with soldiers but girls prefer dolls? Or is it culture and successive ignorant generations of parents that foist the colour and toy preferences on their kids?

Does anyone else feel like the family is under attack at the moment?

Marriage isn’t the natural right of heterosexual unions but anyone regardless of gender or preference of sexual orientation. As parents we are being asked to encourage gender neutrality in the way we bring up our girls or boys.

I’ve already tried this little experiment and I encourage you to do so if you have the opportunity. It is this: put your child in a room with a pink toy and a dark blue one, see which one they go for. Take them to the shops and see what clothes they gravitate to. Give them a car or train and some soldiers plus a dolly and a potty and see what holds their attention most.

I did this little experiment when my kids were very young just to see what they might choose. I have 3 girls, the youngest showed some promising gender neutrality when she began playing with cars and climbing all over my car when I came over for work. So I got her a toy car garage with lift, helicopter the whole bit. She played energetically with it initially but pretty soon lost interest in favour of pink. In favour of dolls and in favour of stuffed toys. It was like holding back the tide every time I put that car garage out, trying to encourage the tom boy in her, I did more of the playing, crashing the cars while she and the other girls watched like I was weird. Then they’d take over and the toy garage became a doll house and all the cars behaved like they were in a doll house. I tried sitting down and zooming the cars around, creating sound effects and explosions and car accidents just to ‘boy it up’ and show the girls how boys play. But it didn’t take, instead the cars started talking to each other, going to the hairdresser and having play dates.

Oh well ‘that’s your older daughters culture putting peer pressure on the younger child to conform’, I hear you say. Maybe. Except the youngest was the pinkest from the beginning. Without warning, without genealogy, my youngest chose pink. Her comfort rug she adopted was actually a pink jump suit, now it’s just a torn hideous rag of a thing, but it was pink, not blue, and not grey.

Television was another watershed for our family. I experimented as best I could, forcing them to sit through Thomas the Tank and The Wiggles. But they spurned both shows very quickly. ‘Dumb boy shows!’ they’d ridicule. The Wiggles have recently tried to correct their one sided appeal by giving the lead to a lady. Good call, but overdue I think. Dora the Explorer was the house favourite for my youngest. A lead girl. See it doesn’t have to be all about passive roles ladies! Dora is the hero. But she is a girl and she has lots of pink in her colour palette.

So some girls don’t choose pink. Some boys don’t play with tanks. Sure. So be prepared to learn your child’s interests and not assume each child will be the same as the last. But it doesn’t mean we should encourage the confusion of the sexes. It doesn’t logically or evidentially follow that boys can be girls and girls can be boys. Just because a kid shows interest in craft doesn’t mean we should encourage him to be gay. He’s a boy.

Equality is determined by ‘natural right’, both sexes being made in God’s image, ‘male and female he created them’ (Gen 1:26). Natural right also gives us the bedrock of complimentarity in the sexes (Genesis 2). The wonderful differences between male and female should be explored and celebrated not muted and dissolved. We are one, but not the same. A man is not a woman and a woman is not a man. The differences are not just in genitals and reproductive roles.

Watch carefully as the bedrock and flourishing of human existence is continually being challenged. We are heading into a fog, a blur to satisfy the consciences of those who wish to reject life’s bedrock. But in doing so we are not enlightened, we are not a fairer society. For when we reject reality and choose to make up our own, we have no compass, no map and we don’t know what’s what.

Equal is in the eye of the beholder.

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