HASBRO TOY COMPANY JOINS THE CULTURE WAR ON SEXUAL IDENTITY

From HASBRO: Launching this Fall, the CREATE YOUR POTATO HEAD FAMILY is a celebration of the many faces of families allowing kids to imagine and create their own Potato Head family with 2 large potato bodies, 1 small potato body, and 42 accessories. The possibilities to create your own families are endless with mixing and mashing all the parts and pieces.

(The Slice): "Mr." Potato Head is changing with the times. Hasbro has made the classic toy gender neutral, removing "Mr." from the name. This is a branding adjustment, while the toys have no physical alterations. The new line will be called Create Your Potato Head Family and MR. and MRS. POTATO HEAD will remain.

America is adjusting to the demands of the LGBT-Q community in various contextual settings.

In keeping with inclusion practices, for instance, teachers are required to avoid using gender-specific language in schools. To avoid conflict and treat everyone equally, they must address both girls and boys as "students."

Both of these situations reflect how LGBT-Q rights and diversity and inclusion practices are affecting American sociology.

Earlier this week the Equality Act was passed to cement the sexual orientation rights of all Americans. Liberal lawmakers consider this legislation a matter of human rights. It was revisited to ensure protections for transgender people specifically. Knowing how to interact with transgender people publicly is especially important in any discourse on sexual identity. They represent the complexity of this subject that legislation can not necessarily resolve. A tranny may or may not be comfortable with being addressed by their biological sex, whereas gays and lesbians tend to accept it. Thus, applications in places of employment, doctors offices and schools must now have a pronouns preference section on them.

The law does not consider the tension in the personal, one-on-one encounters that Americans may have with members of the LGBT-Q community. Understanding how to address a person of an alrternative lifestyle is not easy because some masculine or feminine traits may be more dominant than others. In reality, in every day encounters, no one is walking around with an application or sexual identity radar to know exactly how to refer to a person who may be in transition form one sex to the other or are nt apparently male or female. Respect for all in light of sexual ambivalence can be complicated because sometimes there are no outward signs sexual preference.

For generations the common way of communicating respectfully when you do not know a person's name is to call them by the prefix "Mr." or "Mrs." or "ma'am" or "sir.' Naturally we refer to men and women as "he" or "she." Any of these usual practices are touchy around gay rights issues, particularly for those who do not want to make someone else's personal choice (or right) interfere with their personal choice to adjust to a legally imposed change to social norms.

But we all knew that Mr. Potato Head was a guy, regardless of the fact that he is not real. Un-like humans, Mr. Potato Head was not created by God and surely when the plastic "stud" was born its creators could not foresee that one day they would drop the pronoun from its name. We are in an inescapable timeframe where

Yet, Hasbro voluntarily joined this fight and now that it has we can all see how the controversial legislation can potentially make everyone face this change in norms. The Slice Report wants to know what does sexuality have to do with a personified vegetable toy? As a corporation, Hasbro is not oblivious to the amount of publicity controversial topics can generate. The toy will never have to contend with the controversy. It is afterall, just an inanimate object that has been thus into challenging discourse that is ultimately about freedom and equality. In the imaginations of countless children who have played with Mr. or Mrs. Potato head, it is hard ot believe that freedom and equality were ever bound.

Knowing this, it seems that Hasbro dropped the prefixes to capitalize on the controversy.