The absence of gendered toys would threaten the toy industry

The argument

The case rests on how the toy industry actually makes its money. The industry is lucrative, and it is lucrative partly because of gender-specific toy popularity, a popularity that shapes not only what gets made but how much of it households buy. The mechanism is in the purchasing. A family with children of different genders currently buys for each of them separately, because toys marketed to boys and toys marketed to girls are understood as distinct products that do not substitute for one another. Multiple sets are bought where one would otherwise do. If gender-neutral toys became a standard, that distinction would disappear and with it the reason to buy twice: families would not feel inclined to buy multiple sets of toys for their children of different genders, and the same household would meet the same need with fewer purchases. Demand would contract, not because children wanted less but because the product categories had merged. What follows from contracting demand is the point of the argument. The toy industry would make less money and its profits would decrease, and an industry whose revenue falls does not absorb the loss without consequence; it employs fewer people. The result would be the loss of countless jobs among the workers who design, manufacture, distribute and sell toys, none of whom are party to the dispute about how toys should be marketed but all of whom depend on the volume the current arrangement sustains. That is why proponents frame this as an economic question rather than only a cultural one. Whatever is said for or against gendered marketing on other grounds, eliminating the practice would hurt the economy and the people employed by it. Because the absence of gendered toys would threaten the toy industry, the toy industry should continue marketing gender-specific toys.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The toy industry does not have to stop producing gender-specific toys. They can continue making toys that appeal to traditionally masculine and feminine sensibilities. The toy industry merely needs to stop advertising their toys in such a rigidly gendered way. In this way, toy manufacturers could profit from gender-specific toys, while refraining from limiting a child's ability to choose their toys freely.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That gendered marketing is what makes the industry lucrative is asserted without figures, and the popularity of particular toys is not the same as the popularity of the way they are labelled. [Rejecting P2] Families buying one set instead of two is a change in what is bought, not necessarily a fall in what is spent — and the counter-argument notes that manufacturers can keep making the same toys while changing only how they are advertised. [Rejecting P3] Even granting the commercial harm, an industry's revenue is not a reason a practice ought to continue. The argument as stated would license any profitable practice whatever its effect on children, which is the question the position is supposed to answer.