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As the father of a gaggle of kids who cannot get enough of the ingenious Denmark-based LEGO toys, I always assumed that the only danger presented by the tiny, interlocking plastic blocks is to a parent’s bare foot. Apparently I have been shamefully ignorant of the threat they pose to my children’s gender fluidity.

The UK Telegraph reports that the group of UK museums known as the Science Museum offers a self-guided tour called “Seeing Things Queerly” in which one can explore “stories of queer communities, experiences and identities.” The tour is the creation of a group of staff and volunteers called the Gender and Sexuality Network at the museum. It’s unclear why a museum needs a Gender and Sexuality Network, or for that matter why such a network is necessary in any institution, but in any case, the “Seeing Things Queerly” exhibit includes, in part, the following:

• a Billy Doll from the 1990s, intended to depict a gay man and marketed to gay adults. It never achieved the popularity of, say, the GI Joe doll, partly because adults don’t play with dolls and partly because no self-respecting gay man would be caught dead wearing such an ill-fitting, unstylish suit;
• a Spitfire fighter plane hanging from the ceiling of the museum’s Flight Gallery. Why, because it was integral to Britain’s front-line air defense in WWII? No, because a pilot who flew one later became “the first British trans woman to undergo gender-affirming surgery and change her birth certificate,” according to the guide;

• models of a pair of Bantam chickens which represent a 1933 scientific investigation into the role chromosomes play in heredity. Visitors are told, “While a biological human female usually has XX sex chromosomes and a biological human male generally has XY, we now know there is diversity in the presence and combinations of sex-determining features.” It’s hard to imagine that museum-goers would find the spectacularly uninteresting chicken models to be anything but a tenuous excuse for the Gender and Sexuality Network to lecture visitors about people’s sexual “markers”;
• a floor-to-ceiling prototype beam splitter for the Advanced LIGO gravitational wave detector. It is included because a member of the team that first used it to directly detect gravitational waves was an “openly lesbian woman of colour and ground-breaking astrophysicist” who was awarded LGBTQ+ Scientist of the Year in 2014.

The part of the tour that has generated the most attention, however, is simply a bucket of LEGO bricks presented alongside a warning that the toy may reinforce, in the impressionable minds of youngsters, the loony, insidious notion that heterosexuality is “the norm”:

Like other connectors and fasteners, Lego bricks are often described in a gendered way. 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.

This is an example of applying heteronormative language to topics unrelated to gender, sex and reproduction. It illustrates how heteronormativity (the idea that heterosexuality and the male/female gender binary are the norm and everything that falls outside is unusual) shapes the way we speak about science, technology, and the world in general.

My kids have never once described LEGO parts as male or female, much less as “mating,” but they’re homeschooled, so hey, maybe they are out of touch with what other kids these days are doing and saying (indeed, I hope they are).

Fiona McAnena, director of advocacy at the charity Sex Matters, which campaigns for women’s-only spaces and sex-specific services, correctly criticized the LEGO display as being “completely bonkers”:

The idea that Lego is “heteronormative” because the blocks are described as “male” and ‘female’ is ridiculous.

Children who play with Lego don’t need to be told that some people say fitting Lego blocks together is “mating.”

People expect to be informed, educated and inspired when visiting the Science Museum, not to have dubious claims rooted in gender ideology forced on them.

The Telegraph notes that the chairman of the Science Museum is Sir Ian Blatchford, a former banker who has been outspoken against wokeness and who has declared that museums must “steer clear of political activism.” Apparently he isn’t paying enough attention to the museum’s exhibits, however, because this isn’t the first time gender diversity and sexual identity controversies at the Science Museum have arisen.

Two years ago the museum was compelled to remove a controversial trans-inclusive display due to complaints that the information provided was “not science, but propaganda.” The display, which featured a fake penis and chest-binding equipment, also presented quotes describing the transition from the “wrong body” as a “hero’s journey,” and labeled “gender” as something “difficult to define” which “may not match your biological sex.”

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne wrote to Sir Blatchford to complain that the display promoted “social and medical transition in a way that is not neutral.” She wrote that educational material needed to be “age-appropriate and evidence-based” and argued that the fake penis and chest binding exhibits were not.

As Sex Matters director Fiona McAnena noted, visitors to the Science Museum are eager to be “informed, educated and inspired.” No one – especially children – wants to, or should have to, plod through a stunningly boring exercise in anti-science propaganda. Sir Blatchford needs to take a page from the current Trump administration notebook and clean house in his museum group, beginning with the firing of the gender activists among his staff and volunteers.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior