BoysToys

We discourage violent toys because we want to discourage violence. Both DD and DS do some of it anyway, and have received some as gifts. I don't see that as proof that we are wrong to convey our dislike of it. I don't like the way i see their friends play with those toys. People get hurt. Not okay in my book.

And if the buggy is loaded with a doll and the truck with a toy soldier, then both are now playing at transporting loads with their wheeled mechanical toys...

If a girl pushes a buggy and a boy pushes a truck, they are both playing with wheeled mechanical toys, are they not?

I like chess, my DM likes chess and so far my DD likes chess. I actually had no idea it was a traditionally male thing.

I grew up in the 70s where girls were girls

I grew up in the '70s, too. My favourite toys were Lego, Meccano and the Britain's toy farm. We had cap guns, and made bows and arrows. We made a go-kart from the base of the Silver Cross pram. I did crafty stuff, too, and read loads, including school, ballet and pony stories. I just wasn't keen on dolls. Not all girls were forced down a particular route. My sister played more with dolls than I did, but she also played chess. No one's ever taught me to play chess, which I suspect is one reason girls play less. We could do pretty much what we wanted, as long as we weren't getting under Mum's feet, eating poisonous plants or playing on the tractors.

I think nurture has more to do with it all than nature. It's pretty much impossible to prove, because you'd never get ethical sign off for an experiment to isolate children from society at birth and see how they grew up with different levels of different hormones. And keeping them away from society would also cause massive issues in itself, regardless of hormones.

To be honest I'm not really sure where all the rage towards my pov is coming from.

It's all the testosterone.

Having an interest in wheeled toys is not stereotypical play. It is a developmental milestone that should have been met by the age of three, as is an interest in playing imaginative games with dolls or toy animals.

OP, you asked for other people's views, but every time someone gives one, you seem to leap on it as wrong and then start going on about testosterone levels and aggression, which is not what your OP was about.

So my anecdote would be that I have a teenage son and daughter, and as children they both played with 'boys' and 'girls' toys, as did their friends. Perhaps though that is a case that people tend to be friends with people like them.

I do believe that not all of intelligence is down to environment. Intelligence is to some extent heritable. And my anecdotal evidence (and I'd love to see the scientific studies) is that both adults and children who behave in very gendered ways are not the most intelligent. Ultimately, a really clever and inventive child is going to a. spend a lot of time on imaginative play involving both empathy and abstraction, and b. engage with toys in ways that are much more complex than repetitively expressing a preference for wheeled toys or dolls.

Obviously (or at least I hope it is obvious) humans have not evolved to have many strong biologically driven preferences, nor to be so stupid that they fall for social conditioning all the time. What they have evolved to do is be intelligent enough to make vastly different decisions in vastly different environments in order to survive and thrive. If a child has 'zero interest in wheeled toys' there is something wrong with them. If a child has zero interest in dolls, there is something wrong with them. We would effectively be talking about children who lack some kind of basic cognitive ability to learn the skills required to cope with life in 21st century Britain.

Not in the least Slow, you appeared to be seeking feedback on how you were coming across. Explicitly requesting it, in fact, earlier in this thread. However, your response to actually getting that feedback seems to suggest that you really didn't want anyone to take you up on that. Are you actually trying to dismiss comments as invalid by a somewhat opaque method? Whatever. Have fun with that.

I've a definite pov formed by a lot of reading on this topic, and am very interested in hearing more from some of the obviously extremely well qualified posters on this thread. But, sadly, this doesn't seem to be the thread for it so I'll bow out, as no doubt will others soon.

See if <a class="break-all" href="https://www.google.pt/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=www.princeton.edu/~joha/publications/Eisenegger_et_al_TiCS_2011.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwjnpujNgvjKAhXJ1hQKHYd-AjEQFggyMAU&usg=AFQjCNHoypoEbTV5VKjyAs1dDJWZLexbdQ&sig2=5BMdViky9jJres5X1vMZJw" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> this works
It's supposed to be a pdf

You don't come across as the slightest bit curious, Slow. Curious would respond to differing opinions entirely differently.

Some more comments and articles showing testosterone is far from straight forward, and somewhat surprising:

www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201310/testosterone-fuels-both-competition-and-protectiveness
www.nature.com/scitable/blog/cognoculture/testosterone_and_human_aggression_or_180520

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25151053

www.princeton.edu/~joha/publications/Eisenegger_et_al_TiCS_2011.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwjnpujNgvjKAhXJ1hQKHYd-AjEQFggyMAU&usg=AFQjCNHoypoEbTV5VKjyAs1dDJWZLexbdQ&sig2=5BMdViky9jJres5X1vMZJw