Taking the kids to McDonald’s may be a bigger decision now than ever, particularly if Happy Meals are involved.

Happy Meal toys for the latest promotion are classified into rigid categories based on the gender of the tiny children for whom they are intended. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important to assign your child a gender identity at an early age to avoid an embarrassing Happy Meal incident.

I suffered such an incident recently at the local McDonald’s, which I visited for the express purpose of getting a Hello Kitty toy. Being a big fan of beef, I ordered the double cheeseburger Mighty Kids meal, which comes with a Happy Meal toy. So, one could say I was mighty happy. Ha ha.

But my mighty happiness faded when the cashier asked if I wanted “a girl toy or a boy toy.” I said I wanted a Hello Kitty toy, secretly elaborating that I would not allow McDonald’s to decide my gender identity.

Luckily, I’m 20 years old and able to make up my own mind about my gender without having to analyze my love for Hello Kitty sticker dispensers. Consumers at whom Happy Meal toys are aimed, however, do not have that luxury.

In theory, the average 4- to 8-year-old is blissfully unaware of gender and free to wander down the path of Hello Kitty, Transformers, basket weaving, Irish step dance or whatever else may happen along.

But they aren’t. As soon as babies are born in this country, they’re sorted according to gender roles that, at infancy, correspond to little besides genitalia. Newborns wail from hospital cribs marked with pink or blue cards, and the process of imposing a gender role on a child begins before they’ve even made it home.

We treat this mechanical gendering of children as if it were nature’s course, but a gender identity imposed by a family or society is as false as any identity that a person does not develop for oneself.

Do little girls have a natural tendency toward Barbies and dresses and boys toward sports and short hair? I would argue that they don’t. It’s impossible to form an objective analysis of this behavior. The root of behavior within a culturally-defined gender role is in a gendered society and how it alters our development.

Girls and boys are taught through example and fictional presentations of human activity what is appropriate and consider their gender identity something that naturally rises from their biological sex. If a child sees that adult women do some things and adult men do others, their naivete leads them to believe it is part of the order of the world.

But gender does not arise chemically from our chromosomes into the order that we, and in turn our children, see as normal. As children enter puberty, which they do among groups of other children entering puberty, they experience things they cannot explain. Some of these things can include basic rites of passage, but others happen in direct conflict with what society has told them will happen.

Children at this age my start realizing they have homosexual inclinations. Girls may grow facial hair or develop a female figure late or not at all. Others may simply feel like their outer sex is a misrepresentation of their true gender.

Our culture has done nothing to allow a child in these situations to feel comfortable talking to anyone about what he or she is going through. Sadly, adults are often as repulsed by these deviations as the children themselves, and unable to provide any moral support.

To give children the freedom to develop into who they may actually be, we must remove the pressures of our gendered world. We can’t tie a bow in our daughter’s hair to make us happy. We can’t toss our son onto the football field when he’s afraid. And we have to lead by example, embracing the parts of ourselves that fall within our gender role and those that don’t.

And we can’t let a corporate monster like McDonald’s or Disney force our children to choose pink or blue before they’re old enough to care.

Jamie Fetty is news editor and semi-monthly columnist for The Daily Eastern News. Fetty also is a junior journalism major.

She can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected]