Underwear and sexism and toddlers, oh my!

Lyra's been mostly potty trained for about a month now, so yesterday I took her to pick out some new underwear. There were two racks in the store: one had underwear in mostly primary colors and prints of rockets, cars, and dinosaurs. The other rack was pastels--pink, purple, and turquoise mostly--and prints of flowers and hearts. I showed them all to Lyra who gleefully picked out rockets and dinosaurs.

Then we got to the register. The young woman looked at what we had and asked me, "Oh, didn't you see? We have a rack of girls underwear too."

"But in the training pants, the cut's the same, right? The only difference is the colors and the prints?" I figured I had better made sure, since Adriana had never been interested in colors and prints on the "boys" racks, or even the ones on the "girls" racks that weren't pink.

"They're the same," the woman said. And then she turned to Lyra, "Did you see the pretty underwear? You're a pretty girl. Don't you want some with flowers? You don't want boy underwear."

"Those are not boy underwear. Those are my big girl underwear. For me. Boys can't have my underwear," Lyra said. Loudly.

I kept my mouth shut, but you know what? I was proud.