My toddler daughter loves trucks; she’ll gleefully point them out on the street and in books until you’re sick of the word. So just before her birthday, there was me in the toy store looking at truck-related toys for her (trucks, trains, cars, other assorted toy vehicles) trying to pick out something that didn’t entirely duplicate what she already has. Behind me, I heard a customer ask the clerk for help. The conversation ran along these lines:
Customer: Hi, I’m looking for a toy for a two-year-old.
Clerk: boy or girl? Not that it should matter, of course.
Customer: it’s a girl.
At which the customer was taken over to some other aisle, far away from the trucks and trains and related toys, despite the claim that “it shouldn’t matter”. I was in the toy store for a while, and she never did make it over to what I guess was considered the “boy” side of the store. My daughter loved the trucks we got her, and likes having the truck book that her grandmother gave her for her birthday read to her (to cries of “truck! truck!”). I just hope she doesn’t notice that every driver of every truck in the book is a man.