“Would you like a girl’s toy or a boy’s toy in your kids meal?” It’s a seemingly simple question that fast food employees ask multiple times a day. But what happens when the little boy you’re ordering for wants a girl’s toy?

        Toys have almost always been segregated by gender: boys play with matchbox cars, girls play with dolls. However, Target is taking a step to change that by ditching gender-based signs on all their toys.

        “Right now, our teams are working across the store to identify areas where we can phase out gender-based signage to strike a better balance.  In the Toy aisles, we’ll remove reference to gender, including the use of pink, blue, yellow or green paper on the back walls of our shelves,” said Target in a statement.

        The company has gotten mixed responses about the change, opening the door to discussion about gender in American society. At Plainfield North, twenty eight percent of students said they felt pressured to look or act a certain way because of their gender.

        “My mom always wanted me to look like a girl,” said Senior Abbi Wood.

        Abbi, who has played with the Plainfield Rugby Club and the Illinois All-Star Team and intends to apply to the United States Naval Academy, says she’s never let society’s standards for gender stop her from doing what she wanted to do.

        “I was never allowed to play football with my brothers or dress how I wanted to dress. But now I play rugby and dress however I want to,” said Wood.

        Wood believes that there will definitely be some people who oppose Target’s decision, but it will help ultimately help all children.

        “I remember that my little brother Tate wanted a baby stroller for Christmas one year, so [my mom] bought one for him. He was always pushing his little pink stroller around after that. I feel like all kids should be able to play with what they want, even if [that toy] doesn’t match up with their gender,” said Wood.

        Gender labels go beyond someone’s activities and appearance. People often subconsciously assign moral values and personality traits to specific genders. Psychology Today’s Adam Alter says that labels can actually determine how someone perceives something.

        In his article, he cites a study in which teachers were told that a group of their students had scored in the top twenty percent of a test designed to identify “academic bloomers”. However, the students were selected randomly and actually scored the same on the test as their peers. By the end of the year, however, the selected students outperformed their unselected classmates by 10-15 IQ points.

        “The teachers fostered the intellectual development of the ‘bloomers’, producing a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the students who were baselessly expected to bloom actually outperformed their peers,” said Alter.

        Rebecca Bigler- a reporter for Teaching Today, a magazine that discusses teachers’ interactions with students- believes gender labels do more harm than good.

        “This practice leads children to believe that teachers are intentionally signaling the existence of important differences between genders-even when they are not,” Bigler said.

        Target seems to agree with these professionals. By deeming gender-based signs “unnecessary”, they are taking a stand against the gender labels that seem to define Americans today.

        “I’m not sure if it will help or hurt Target because some people are stuck in their ways. But I think children will now be guided by what toys they want, not what toys specific to gender,” said Wood.