Love the picture! Yeah, my youngest has been ridiculed for liking My Little Pony and now doesn't really want to admit publicly that he likes it. But we try to teach him to be proud of who he is.
I am with you on the gender specific marketing of toys: the Tesco Christmas catalogue had a few pages with popular toys without any gendering and that's how my son asked for loads of MLP toys for Christmas. I do find that online shopping is very helpful in that respect as shops like Amazon usually just have the toys without showing a boy or girl playing with it.
When my youngest chose his pink pencil case he said, "There are no boy colours or girl colours, so I can like pink." So happy he learnt that lesson.