An amusing exchange on Twitter shows several progressive parents lamenting how their daughters are enjoying feminine toys and the color pink despite their best efforts to stop them.

The exchange was begun by Shannon Proudfoot, a writer for the magazine Macleans’s who lamented that a dress-up toy for boys showed more adventurous roles (superhero, pirate) than the toy for girls, which just had several different princess outfits.

Please see: boys can be pirates, construction workers, firefighters. Girls can be: seven varieties of princess. pic.twitter.com/3OVT1v2wpj — Shannon Proudfoot (@sproudfoot) September 1, 2016

Proudfoot’s tweet caused some other users to come out of the woodwork, who joined Proudfoot in lamenting that, no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t get their girls to dislike the color pink or to prefer boy toys.

The frustration of Proudfoot and the rest may be because they are feuding not just with human society, but also biology. Researchers have found that male and female monkeys have the same toy preferences as human boys and girls, indicating those preferences are biological and not merely social. Color preferences appear to be more socially constructed, though it’s unclear why Proudfoot and the rest consider a preference for the color pink such a devastating outcome in and of itself.

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