Just let the kid paint his toenails

Conservative commentators have been up in arms recently because of a photo in clothing company J. Crew’s current online catalog that features a mother relaxing with her young boy, whose toenails are painted neon pink.

Near the picture, the mother in the photo, who is J. Crew’s president and creative director, is quoted as saying, “Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink. Toenail painting is way more fun in neon.”

Foremost among conservative critics has been the Media Research Center, which released a 280-word statement Friday that claimed the photo was “blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children” and accused the company of “exploiting (the boy in the photo) behind the facade of liberal, transgendered identity politics.”

Another prominent critic was Dr. Keith Ablow, a Fox News contributor, who said, “This is a dramatic example of the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity.”

Ablow went on to mention what he called “the fact that encouraging the choosing of gender identity, rather than suggesting our children become comfortable with the ones that they got at birth, can throw our species into real psychological turmoil.”

We think these sorts of concerns are completely overblown, and Ablow, as a psychiatrist, should be far less concerned with harmless childhood exploration than he is.

Perhaps instead, he should consider the damaging psychological effects of a culture that, despite gains in recent decades, still stigmatizes transgender identity and homosexuality so forcefully that numerous teenagers have been driven to suicide as a result. We’d like to hear from Dr. Ablow or the MRC about such concerns, but we won’t be holding our breath.