During a debate at the Annandale Campus of Northern Virginia Community College, one student claimed that pink is seen as a girl color because Hitler forced homosexuals to wear pink triangles during World War II.

The topic of the debate, which was sponsored by the the Olympia Academy, was “feminism and men’s rights.” During a heated discussion over the socialization of gender, the students began to argue over whether gender is learned or innate. At one point, a female debater erupted at a male student who had been unsupportive of the socialization theory, exclaiming, “[y]ou were taught to be a boy!”

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Later in the discussion, a student spoke about the color pink, arguing that society viewed it as a feminine color only because Adolf Hitler had forced homosexuals to wear pink triangles during World War II.

The theory is somewhat widespread online. While historical sources document homosexuals were made to wear pink triangle badges in concentration camps, the claim that this policy is the root of modern society’s perception of pink as a feminine color is nothing more than a myth.

When contacted by Campus Reform, University of Maryland Professor Jo Paoletti, an expert on the historical associations between gender and color, referred to her earlier writings on the topic. Paoletti reaffirmed, “the dots between the Nazi pink triangle and pink as a little girls' color are strictly imaginary.”

“The use of pink badges was more common in the middle and later years of the war, and the general American public knew very little about the realities and details of the concentration camps until later,” Paoletti wrote in 2012. “My research places the ‘tipping point’ for pink being considered a feminine color in most of the U.S. sometime in the 1930s, later rather than earlier.”

“The pink triangle did not really emerge in the American symbolic lexicon until the late 1970s at the earliest, and for many straight Americans was unknown until the 1990s. This makes it unlikely that parents and manufacturers associated pink with the Nazi symbolism in the 1940s.”

In an email to Campus Reform, Natasha Mirza, the president of the the Olympia Academy at NOVA Annandale, defended the debate.

“I make every attempt to make sure each side is equally represented however, because the debates do not have a formal structure and there is no way to guarantee an equal number of students on each side, they can become one sided,” Mirza said.

“The debates rarely descend into raised voices or loud objections the way the feminism one did,” she said.

Follow the author of this article: @emilyjashinksy