How do you know you’re really jacking up the gender norm at an institution?

They have to specially commission your uniform.

Britain’s prestigious Norland College, famous as the first school to offer formal training for nannies, has accepted its first male student to pursue a degree. Michael Kenny is studying for an honor’s B.A. in early childhood studies on his way to becoming a nursery or prep school teacher.

Kenny wasn’t sure he’d even be admitted to the school, so he called ahead before applying. As it turns out, the school accepts applicants of both genders, but Kenny is the first male student to try for a degree and only the third male to attend the school at all. When Kenny was accepted, Norland had to scramble to craft a male version of its distinctive uniform.

Now that’s how you break a gender barrier with style.

Here’s the real barrier, though: Yahoo! News’ coverage of the story begins with the headline, “Norland College Admits Its First Male Student. Would You Hire a Male Nanny?” It seems the real problem isn’t allowing men into childcare training, but accepting them as possible caregivers and overcoming a nonsensical bias against them.

And the bias is indeed nonsensical. A few regrettably vocal commenters on the article insist up and down that hiring a man to care for children is dangerous, that all men who want to work with children are strange insane pedophiles and the penis is a hostile weapon. But when confronted with stories of the many qualified men in nurturing roles—kindergarten teachers, stay-at-home fathers, etc.—the dissenters have only two arguments that they repeat with surprising uniformity.

One: “Some things just aren’t meant to be; men just aren’t meant to be nannies.”

Two: “Being cautious around men because they might be pedophiles isn’t prejudice; it’s a reality.”

Let’s take these on in order. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more blatant statement of unfounded, indefensible bias than “it’s not meant to be.” Are they calling on some higher power or ambiguous truism about the way the world works? Instead of, you know, actual facts and reasoning?

Because the actual facts are these: men can be great nurturers just like women can be great providers. Peter Cummins, Norland’s first male nanny several years before Kenny, cares for children with a mix of his thorough Norland education and the kind of natural intuition some narrow-minded people think only women possess. That intuition, the gift of patience and understanding, is present in some men just like it’s absent in some women. Kindness, compassion, and tenderness are all human traits, not strictly male or female.

Moreover, Cummins believes that children benefit from both male and female non-threatening role models, and Norland’s principal Liz Hunt agrees. The key word is “non-threatening”: trained and vetted nannies of either gender, especially those from a tried-and-true institution like Norland, can be trusted. At least, they can be trusted by reasonable people who don’t live their lives in fear that everyone around them is secretly a pedophile murderer rapist bigot zombie.

Which brings us to the second standard objection. This “reality” that some of these people live in, where all men are to be feared and kept away from our children at all costs because they wield the power of the almighty penis, is a pretty sad place to live. It’s the same place where people assume that all men are rapists, or chauvinist pigs, or football junkies… or that all women are motherly, or good cooks, or ball-busting bra-burning feminists. It’s a reality in which the traits of the few define the identity of an entire group.

That’s kinda the definition of overgeneralization.

It’s true that there are criminals out there, and some of them are good at seeming normal and could potentially slip unnoticed through a nanny certification program. But we can’t be so scared of them that we refuse to give any human a chance to earn our trust. And we certainly can’t let our fear corner us into tired old gender stereotypes for convenience’s sake, when good, capable people want to break out of them.

And break out of them with style.