Ad With Boy's Pink Toenails Rankles Some

NEW YORK - A J. Crew advertisement depicting a 5-year-old boy with hot pink toenail polish has some conservatives seeing red.

Jenna Lyons, president and creative director for the clothing company, appears in the ad with her son Beckett over the caption, "Lucky for me I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink. Toenail painting is way more fun in neon."

That didn't sit well with social conservatives such as Erin Brown of the Media Research Center, who called the ad "blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children," ABC News reported Wednesday.

Dr. Keith Ablow of Fox News Channel wrote an opinion piece that such nail painting "could make life hard for the boy in the future" and faulted J. Crew for "exploiting Beckett behind the facade of liberal, transgendered identity politics."

Such criticism was called small-minded by others.

"This is not how the world works and not how children work, and not even how trans advocacy works," said Mara Keisling, executive director of National Center for Transgender Equality. "Complaints about the ad are totally blown out of proportion. It's just a cute ad with a cute mom-and-son scene and the kid wants to wear pink nail polish ... . It could be the kids just wants to spend time with his mom."

ABC said the Williams Institute, a UCLA think tank focusing on lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender issues, estimates 4 percent of Americans are homosexual and about 0.3 percent of homosexuals are transgender.