Why Not Start at a Young Age..?

Well...Let me start of by admitting to you a guilty pleasure of mine: going to toy stores. I never outgrew the Nerf guns and balls and building objects and EVERYTHING that a toy store sells. I'm a six foot four inch tall twenty year young man and I can't get enough of shooting my brothers in the face with toys meant for ten year olds. Anyway...
Today I actually had to go into the local toy store for the first time in a few months, as I needed a football to throw around with my brothers. Now I hadn't been there in a while, but the changes kind of shocked me, in particular the note of sexism in the selections of toys.
The shop was literally divided into two sides: boy's toys and girl's toys. The right side of the shop was brutally pink, with dolls, ponies, and anything one might have a girl play with.The left side was chock full of weapons made of spongy stuff, footballs, baseballs, blocks and anything a little man would want to destroy. Even the pictures of kids playing with the toys on the boxes were separated by gender: the boys were having fun with toy pistols and the girls were being taught how to be mommies with their dolls.
All of us (dear god, I HOPE so...) know this sort of thing happens, and most of us (again...) know to work against this broken system of inequality. Unfortunately, even toy stores aren't safe from such things, as my blatant example illustrates.

Some of you may read this and say "so..? Why is it so bad to so easily be able to buy a toy either for a girl or a boy?", and to that I say this: one should not buy a toy based on gender. This sets a child up to feel there are certain mandatory ways of being based solely on gender. Why can't a little girl grow up wanted to stab her friends in the eye with a fake sword, or playing sports? Couldn't a boy play with a small representation of  a young human (doll)..? Can't a boy be a fan of small horses?

As I sit here being one of those people typing away on a laptop in Starbucks, I think about all the questions EVERYONE has. There's just so much to write on this subject, and I don't plan on doing it all here, as I am an avid fan of sleeping. However, I urge you all to continue questioning these things we ALL take for granted: things we might not realize are wrong, and things we know are wrong but do nothing to counteract. It's like the Science Channel says: Question everything.

Normalcy and Ignorance

I just wanted to put in a few words on something I heard while I was on vacation recently.
A lesbian friend of mine asked if a woman at a shop was a lesbian as well. Her answer was something like this:
"Oh, I'm just sort of normal. The everyday girl."
I cringed when I heard this.
Normal..?
The correct term would have been heterosexual. Straight works too. But "normal"?
This implies that heterosexuality is the norm. This implication is wrong.
Heteronormativity is mostly related to ignorance. I'm sure the woman at the shop was just ignorant, and didn't mean any harm, but unfortunately such ignorance is always harmful. Any LGBT person who encounters a subtle situation like this is very likely to internalize that heterosexuality is "normal", and that they are themselves abnormal.
Sexuality isn't a subject of normativity. You cannot apply normalcy to one sexuality over another.
It's unfortunate how many people don't even consider this in passing while interacting with other individuals. Would it that they would, society would become a little bit easier to tolerate.