This post is SO important!! Resteemed.
It starts so young. My family is 100% about breaking down the male/female gender roles in both how we act in our daily lives and how we raise our children. My brother is the primary care taker of his children. We encourage the boys to play house, diaper the dolls, dress barbies. We encourage the girls to build legos and play with dinosaurs. But it's so much more than that. Media is teaching them so much of this. My 5 year old niece will ask me often "is that a girl toy or a boy toy?" and no matter how many times I tell her there is no such thing, everything she sees outside of her own home tells her otherwise.
One of the boys looks like he's really going to enjoy and excel in gymnastics. Many, ok ALL, of my brother's male friends keep sending apologies. Why? Because he's potentially going to spend his time doing something he enjoys and does well? How about congratulations? But then behind closed doors we do talk about whether or not we'll have to help him deal with ridicule later in life because of it.
Fantastic post and I hope everyone reads and understands the gravity of the issue.
And for fun...here is what the boys in our house often look like :)
Love the picture! Yeah, my youngest has been ridiculed for liking My Little Pony and now doesn't really want to admit publicly that he likes it. But we try to teach him to be proud of who he is.
I am with you on the gender specific marketing of toys: the Tesco Christmas catalogue had a few pages with popular toys without any gendering and that's how my son asked for loads of MLP toys for Christmas. I do find that online shopping is very helpful in that respect as shops like Amazon usually just have the toys without showing a boy or girl playing with it.
When my youngest chose his pink pencil case he said, "There are no boy colours or girl colours, so I can like pink." So happy he learnt that lesson.