He's a dude. She's a dude. We're all dudes.

So, according to an article I was reading, children's game developers are currently trying pretty hard to make "disengendered" games and toys for kids. It cited as more or less irrefutable fact that Barbie and Tonka are preadolescent conceptual Nazis that forcibly brand boys and girls with certain pink/blue characteristics against their will. While I can appreciate the idea behind this opinion, is the total elimination of gender roles the answer to society's gender problems?

In past times, unequal and confining gender roles were certainly a huge problem. I hear the 50's were all about social conformity and intense ostracism for women if the Lucy Ricardo, bake-a-pie stereotype wasn't adhered to. I'd attest, though, that at this point gender roles, while still certainly around, are significantly less stifling. Girls are still put in pink dresses and boys are given construction hats, but at least most people acknowledge them as a fabricated convention and not divinely-ordained--we realize that the societal norms define gender norms, which gives us the freedom to treat them objectively. We can choose to which and to what extent we will conform. Certainly not everyone sees them that way, and there is still a lot of inequality derived from outdated gender assumptions, but if society finally reaches a point when we will be aware of gender distinctions but not of stereotypes that make us restricted by them or bounded by expectation, I'd think they may become a positive force more than a negative one. We can still happily admit that genders do, indeed, exist, but none will suffer for being aligned with one or the other.

If we were to attempt to live in a genderless world in which boys and girls are constantly presented as if they have no predisposed differentiating features, I feel like it could foster a sense of ignorance. There are, after all, still convincing arguments that at least a few basic differences exist between the genders, both physical and hormonal, and failing to address them would harbor confusion and lack of definition. There is a degree of comfort in gender relatability that would be eliminated in favor of total, all-encompassing neutrality. Children may not benefit much from being stripped of one of the ways they distinguish themselves from the rest of the world's population.

Genders, when treated with the correct objectivity as an available option as opposed to an end-all, be-all for acceptance, can be a good thing. Giving consideration to our differences will always be superior to either being blindly bound by them or blatantly ignoring them.