I have not kept track of this officially, but I’m guessing that, of all the states in the country, California has been featured in the Daily Cancellation the most.
This is perhaps, these days, the only good thing about California. Yes the entire state is a degenerate cesspool covered in sewage, but at least it provides plenty of content for the last segment of my show. And today the good news is they have done something so stupid that it graduates to the first segment.
As the Daily Mail reports this week, in a little over a month from now a new law will go into effect in California. Is this a law to address the homeless problem? Is it a law meant to clean up the streets, tamp down on the rampant crime, and make communities safe and livable again? No, of course not. Why would California’s lawmakers care about any of that? No, this is a law that addresses a far more pressing concern: gender-neutral toy sections.
We know leftists see the toy industry like they see everything: an ideological battleground, another politicized arena to defeat traditional concepts of gender and usher in a new ambiguous dystopia where kids can live as amorphous, genderless blobs of nondescript matter.
The Daily Mail has more:
California retailers that refuse to have a gender-neutral section for children will be fined up to $500 under Gavin Newsom’s new bill. The ultra-woke governor signed legislation in 2021 that would require some retail stores in the Golden State to have a gender-neutral section for children. Retailers would have to do this ‘regardless of whether they have been traditionally marketed for either girls or for boys,’ the bill said. The legislation, Assembly Bill No. 10584, will be enacted on January 1, 2024, and if retail department stores choose not to comply, they will have to dish out a civil penalty of $250 or $500. Department stores that are subject to the new laws will have to have a total of 500 or more employees, be physically located in California and sell ‘childcare items or toys’… Californian Democratic Congressman Evan Low backed the bill to the Associated Press ‘We need to stop stigmatizing what’s acceptable for certain genders and just let kids be kids,’ he said. ‘My hope is this bill encourages more businesses across California and the U.S. to avoid reinforcing harmful and outdated stereotypes,’ Low said.
So, the law will end the segregated, Apartheid-like conditions in toy stores in the state, getting rid of gender labels and allowing toys to express their true, gender-fluid identities. This is all meant to reduce “harmful stereotypes.”
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You may be wondering, if you’re a sane person, how exactly does the average toy section in the average store “reinforce harmful stereotypes”? In fact, you may be wondering what a “harmful stereotype” even is, or how a stereotype can be harmful. Literally all gender stereotypes — and race stereotypes, and ethnic stereotypes — are grounded in truth. That’s how they became stereotypes. Which is why you have never in your life heard a stereotype about a group of people and said to yourself, “What? I’ve never seen anyone in that group act THAT way!” Stereotypes arise when we notice that certain groups of people tend to act certain ways, generally speaking. This isn’t harmful. It’s mostly neutral. It just is what it is.
Fortunately, California state Representative Evan Low goes into more detail about this issue, trying to explain how and why “gendered toys” are dangerous:
Part of it is to make sure if you’re a young girl that you can find a police car, fire truck, a periodic table or a dinosaur. And then similarly, if you’re a boy, if you’re more artistic and want to play with glitter, why not? Why should you feel the stigma of saying, ‘Oh, this should be shamed’ and going to a different location?
First of all, this is perhaps neither here nor there, but as a parent, I believe glitter should be shamed for both boys and girls. Glitter is a plague that has been banned from my house entirely. Glitter manufacturers should be raided by the FBI, forcibly shut down, and all of their employees thrown in federal prison. Even just one ounce of glitter will produce a mess in your house that can never be cleaned up. A glitter spill is like Chernobyl — you’ll still be dealing with the after-effects three decades later. The stuff is cursed, and should be banned.
Anyway, aside from that, it appears Evan Low is laboring under the impression that, without this law in place, girls were somehow physically prohibited from entering the aisles where fire trucks and dinosaurs are sold. Or maybe he thought these items were hidden down some deep labyrinthine corridor where only those with Y chromosomes were allowed to enter. But this was not the case. Without the gender-neutral toy law, girls were easily able to find fire trucks and police cars if they wanted them. And there was nobody stopping them, or standing there pointing and laughing at them and saying, “Why are you buying that? You’re a girl!” That literally has never happened in the history of toy purchases.
This bill is, at the very best, totally unnecessary. Which ironically is something the author of the bill basically admitted back when the legislation was first passed. Watch:
“Stores are already doing this, which is why we need a law requiring that they do it!” That appears to be the argument. Because it has to go one way or another. Either this is a law that will impose on retailers the burdensome and utterly pointless task of rearranging their stores to make the toy sections less organized and more difficult to navigate for customers, or it’s a law mandating something that has already happened. Either the law is cumbersome and pointless, or redundant and pointless. Or, I suppose, cumbersome and redundant and pointless. I think it’s likely in that third category. But there is no scenario where the law is necessary or good.
That’s because, among other reasons, the binary is one of the fundamental, defining, immutable realities of human existence. With it comes the obvious physical differences between the sexes. But also, as we’ve alluded to, the differences in tendencies and interests. That’s why we’ve come to associate baby dolls with girls and toy trucks with boys. They don’t gravitate to their respective toys because we have made this association. We have made the association because they gravitate that way.
Girls are natural nurturers and caretakers, boys are naturally builders and fighters. That’s why girls like the baby dolls and boys like the trucks and the action figures. If left to their own devices, almost all girls and boys will go in those separate directions. The Left doesn’t want to free boys to play with dolls or girls to play with trucks. They are already free to do that if they want to. Instead they want to engineer boys with feminine interests and girls with masculine interests. They are not actually trying to break outside of the binary at all. They’re trying instead to confuse the picture within it.
That’s because you can’t break outside of it. Which is why it’s always funny to make note of the fact that the Left inevitably ends up accidentally reinforcing the gender binary in their efforts to deconstruct it. After all, if you walk into a section of the store and see fire trucks and baby dolls next to each other, and you say, “Oh this must be a gender-neutral section,” you are affirming the gender binary just by saying that. And laws requiring such arrangements are also affirming it.
This is the terrible fact the Left can’t get around, no matter how hard it tries. The terrible fact — which is not terrible at all, in my view — is the gender binary. There are two sexes, and those two sexes have distinct features and functions, and they have certain tendencies and proclivities, and there is literally nothing you can do to escape that fact.
WATCH: “Lady Ballers” on DailyWire+
This is what happens when you try to make non-binary toy sections, or non-binary people for that matter. A person who identifies as non-binary will usually end up dressing in some weird, clashing combination of male and female clothing. This person — let’s say a woman, for example — will be very careful to incorporate feminine and masculine elements in the way that she dresses and comports herself. Or at least that’s what she’ll try to do. Usually she’ll still end up looking like a woman — just a woman with a goofy sense of style. But even if she succeeds in appearing like some kind of mismatched, jumbled Mrs Potato Head Doll — with male and female elements mixed together — still she has not escaped the binary. Because still she only has male and female elements to work with. There is no third or fourth category. You can be a woman who looks like a woman, or a woman who looks a little bit like a man, or a woman who looks like some sort of avant-garde combination, but no matter what you are still stuck in the binary.
In fact the more you try to escape the binary, the more you make yourself into a reminder of it.