The USA’s second biggest discount retailer, Target, announced on 7 August that it was doing away with gender-based signs in store. Phasing out where inappropriate and where needs had changed is more the case, as the corporate press release says:
Target stores logo
“…shopping preferences and needs change and, as guests have pointed out, in some departments like Toys, Home or Entertainment, suggesting products by gender is unnecessary.
We heard you, and we agree. Right now, our teams are working across the store to identify areas where we can phase out gender-based signage to help strike a better balance. For example, in the kids’ Bedding area, signs will no longer feature suggestions for boys or girls, just kids. In the Toys aisles, we’ll also remove reference to gender, including the use of pink, blue, yellow or green paper on the back walls of our shelves.”
Historic criticism of Target’s gendered products
A tweet by Abi Bechtel, 2 months ago showing a Target store with separate signage for “Building Sets” and “Girls’ Building Sets” went viral on Twitter with over 3,000 retweets to date:
In an interview at the weekend Bechtel said she hadn’t expected to be at the centre of the discussion about gender:
“I didn’t expect it to become the center of this entire discussion about gender and the way toys are marketed. But Caitlyn Jenner’s pictures had just come out. And the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage came out soon after. So there was a whole lot of discussion about gender and gender roles anyway. The tweet just landed at the right time.”
Furthermore, last year, they were criticised for their gendered pajamas range – superheroes for boys and “I only date heroes” for girls. If this is Target’s PR response, great. Change often comes about after being caught red-handed in some way.
“We are done. No more Target.
To remove one of the very thing that makes us all unique . To stuff all children into the same box. What’s next we all get a number instead of a name? Part of our beautiful God given identity is in our gender.
You are losing a lot of people with your madness.”
Clearly not getting that offering children only 2 gendered boxes hardly makes them unique whereas offering no boxes or labels at all gives them infinite beautiful freedom to be creative in their expression, play, and development. Sigh!
Positive Reactions
For every shopper they lose they’ll gain one like Tonya Hardin:
“Thank you, Target. Thank you for being you, and for reminding the rest of us (especially our children) that it’s okay for them to be themselves, too. In the face of adversity, you’ve stood up for what you believe, and I respect that wholeheartedly. I rarely ever shopped at Target before, but I plan to start now. You may have lost some people, but that’s one customer gained in exchange. Thanks, again. My girls can’t wait to see the new toy section!”
“Fourteen UK retailers have agreed to drop boys and girls signs since our campaign began in late 2012. It’s heartening to see that stores in the US are now following suit.
This change is part of an overall shift in retailers’ approach. Our research found a 60% drop in the use of ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ signs in UK toy stores between 2012 and 2013, and a 46% drop in the use of gender categories for toys on websites between 2012 and 2014.”
A US blog that aims to educate people on”how marketing, sexualization, gender stereotypes, and body image impact childhood” was very pleased to hear the news:
“all it will take is one of the retailing giants to be bold enough to deviate from status quo and the rest will fall like dominoes”
A parent and writer for TIME Magazine called it “just the tip of the iceberg” and suggested to parents that:
“Just because your son wants a My Little Pony bedspread does not mean he’s gay. Just because your daughter wants a bug collecting kit doesn’t mean she’s transgender. And if your children don’t identify with the gender binary, that’s OK. Gender identity has nothing to do with signage in a store. Maybe you should consider backing off and loving the wonderful being you created whether they are homosexual, or queer, or transgender, or straight. Whether they like pink or blue or yellow or polka dots.”
For Him For Her Greetings Cards
“For Him, For Her” product labeling is binary and patronising, and in an age that has accepted transgender Big Brother winners and TV-series stars, same-sex marriage and intersex athletes, it’s time we stopped the pseudo-division between his and her, boys and girls, and let life be life, and stuff, well… be simply stuff.
Earlier this year, the UK department store Selfridges began trialling agender clothing. Moves across everything from toys to clothes are needed to both ease and keep up with the gender-free and genderqueer nature of many growing up in these more enlightened times. That said, narrow-minded binary responses such as “boys are boys and girls are girls” still abound, but are slowly being drowned out by progress.
‘He, She, Me’: an exclusive track by Devonté Hynes and Neneh Cherry, commissioned by Selfridges who launched their agender clothing range in 2015:
Century-old Oxford Street department store Selfridges, second only to Harrods in size, and bought by Sears in 1965, has made history again. In 1911 it was the biggest bookshop in the world. In 2013 ITV dramatised its early story in the TV series “Mr Selfridge”, currently on its third series.
Only now, 106 years after it was founded, Mr Selfridge is becoming Mx Selfridge. Gender neutral, agender and non-binary is the way at least 3 floors of the store are going in 2015 to include 5 unisex brands and other individual agendered clothing items drawn from dozens of other makers. One wonders whether they will additionally introduce unisex toilets?
This will affect not only clothing but beauty products as well. Clothing ranges are also said to be going mannequin free. Selfridges contains the world’s largest shoe department, will it now be sporting size 10 stilettos and size 3 Oxfords and Brogues?
Selfridges was a supporter of universal women’s suffrage and ran adverts in the movement’s magazine “Votes for Women”. The early feminist radicals repaid that patronage by both shopping at Selfridges and sometimes organising from there.
The irony of increased freedom alongside commercial consumerism has not been lost on some, and yet,
“there was a healthy emancipatory element in the empowered shopper’s gift of choice… Because for good or bad choice and freedom are fundamentally connected. The greater choice women gained the more power they also had over how they were able to live their lives… What those early feminists realised was that popular culture could be subversive.” – Network Norwich opinion
In the 1930s Selfridges was ahead of the times, again, with an all-female Gun Club on its roof, something copied by others later in the decade.
In 1966 Selfridges launched Miss Selfridge as a youthful spin-off brand, which was subsequently acquired from Sears by Philip Green and the Arcadia Group in 1999. Initially, their mannequins were modeled on 1960s fashion icon Twiggy. As a result of its independent ownership and brand Miss Selfridge remains gendered.
A Selfridges statement, as reported in The Times, said:
“We want to take our customers on a journey where they can shop and dress without limitations or stereotypes… A space where clothing is no longer imbued with directive gender values, enabling fashion to exist as a purer expression of ‘self.”’
The phrase “the customer is always right” originated with Selfridges, and gender neutral shopping, where clothes can be clothes, has been requested by many a feminist and/or LGBTI shopper.
I well remember buying a pair of Levi’s in the 1980s from the “wrong” gender display because the ones that fitted were 29″ waisted in a fit for the ‘the other’ gender label – as was politely pointed out to me at the till. Not only that, but they were also £5 cheaper for exactly the same style. To buy the pair meant for my then gender meant paying more and suffering from a baggy waist as they didn’t even begin until a size larger than I actually was.
Gender neutral shopping and clothing will aid many LGBTI, non-binary, and genderqueer, youth explore and express themselves with less fear and embarrassment.
Routine gender is thus being thrown away. Whether this is a cultural or commercial experiment, or both, one hopes it will inspire other stores to become less gendered. That doesn’t mean no more gender, but rather more genders and none, since those happy with his and her are not being replaced but supplemented by hes and hir, xe and ze etc. This is a welcome addition, not a total replacement. I don’t want to see gender disappear like some Star Trek jumpsuit identity, but I do want people to see that identities outside or across the so-called binary do exist, and options for those people, an increasingly visual and vocal section of society, be made.
