Let’s Leave The Gingerbread Person Controversy In 2024

A smattering of MPs have got on their high horses about “gingerbread people” in a Parliament House cafe, and I am absolutely bloody over it.

Clearly feeling the festive spirit, the Queen’s Terrace cafe is selling gender-neutral “gingerbread people”, and it seems to have caused some MPs genuine distress, with Nationals senator Matt Canavan calling for the cafe to “leave Christmas alone”.

As Barnaby Joyce eloquently told news.com.au, “it’s just like, all this stuff has been forced on me, just leave it.”

“The more you do this the more you piss people off and the more you encourage a Trump type snapback.”

Absolutely cutting political analysis from a man who’s paid over $200,000 a year to bumble around like some sort of Parks and Recreation-type parody of a politician.

Wait, haven’t we done this before?

If this story sounds familiar to you, it’s because some version of this happens practically every single year, around the world.

The cursed woke gingerbread person has been haunting us since 2010, when a Daily Mail article reported Lancashire councils had “stripped gingerbread men of their gender and renamed them gingerbread ‘persons’ on menus for 400 primary schools.”

Since then, trashy publications have been wheeling out the story again and again, in as many different formats possible, to harvest your clicks and boost the number of people seeing their ads.

Let it be known that I am not above the odd bit of nonsense from time to time, but this is ridiculous. Surely we are above such blatant clickbait by now?

As much as they love to pretend they’re above all the gender and pronoun nonsense, Matt Canavan and Barnaby Joyce-types rely on these gendered power dynamics to keep their positions in the world. They can’t see past the whimsy of a gingerbread person because they’re so terrified of any little change to the system.

In a whitewashed, capitalist hellscape of a holiday, the gingerbread person is a little symbol of resistance.

So go forth this holiday season, and bake your gingerbread people. Give them funny little hats and overalls and whacky hair. Share them with your friends and family, and relish in the joy of knowing that gender isn’t all that serious.