I was a LEGO kid. I delighted in the toy company’s own brands, such as Bionicle, as well as its licensed products of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and others. I enjoyed both constructing the pre-made sets, and just dumping all the plastic bricks out on the floor to let my imagination guide me. I even played the computer games: Either LEGO Island or LEGO Loco (real ones know) were the first such games of any kind I ever experienced.
Little did I know that all of this was just heteronormative propaganda. Or so London’s Science Museum would have us believe. Per the Telegraph:
A self-guided museum tour on “stories of queer communities, experiences and identities” includes a display of Lego bricks alongside a guide stating the plastic blocks may reinforce the idea that heterosexuality “is the norm”.
The tour, devised by a Gender and Sexuality Network at the museum, also claims in the “Seeing Things Queerly” guide that Lego adds credence to the view that there are only two genders.
This is because people supposedly describe Lego bricks as having male or female parts that are made to “mate” with each other.
This is “heteronormative”, the guide states, which is the idea that “heterosexuality and the male/female gender binary are the norm and everything that falls outside is unusual”.
The Science Museum guide claims that people think “the top of the brick with sticking out pins is male, the bottom of the brick with holes to receive the pins is female, and the process of the two sides being put together is called mating”.
As a self-proclaimed LEGO kid, I can state authoritatively that none of this occurred to me a single time during my play. I struggle to imagine why or how anyone playing with LEGO would think it. The kind of totalizing woke madness that sees not just politics but oppression in the everyday seems to be somewhat on the backfoot in the U.S. But it appears still to be in full swing across the Atlantic.
Just let the kids play with the bricks. But be careful not to step on them . . .