This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Oh my goodness they’re transing the genders of dolls in Minnesota! No, sorry, not the dolls, just like… dolls, in general.
Okay, here’s the skinny: The Department of Education is investigating Minnesota schools for allegedly planning to use “MyGender Dolls” in schools. These dolls, the ED claims, were created using taxpayer funding and feature “removable, interchangeable internal and external genitalia, gender-neutral names, and clothing (including undergarments) for both sexes.”
In particular, the ED is concerned with these dolls supposedly being used with students as young as four years old! That would make them pre-K enrollees, per the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families’ guidelines. Further, the ED claims that Minnesota may be in violation of the 1978 Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, justifying their completely unbiased investigation.
Let’s clear some stuff up.
To start, the PPRA applies to ED-funded programs and protects students by ensuring that parents are given an opportunity to review course materials for any sensitive programs their kids might be involved in, and requiring parental consent for the collection of certain sensitive information, including sexual behavior or attitudes. Here’s the thing: the Minnesota Department of Education and Governor Tim Walz have denied any involvement in the dolls’ creation and use.
The dolls were created as part of a program at the University of Minnesota, who say they are “firmly committed to supporting the innovative research of our faculty and students,” and have clarified that the program never even received ED funds. They said that MyGender Dolls “participated in privately funded review competitions and received no state or federal dollars to support the development of the dolls or commercialization efforts.”
So, nobody in state government was involved in the dolls’ production, the university responsible for helping create them never used federal funds to do so, and there exists absolutely no evidence that the dolls will be distributed to or used by Minnesota schools public or private. It is exceedingly unlikely, then, that UMN has violated the PPRA, or any other laws by working alongside MyGender Dolls.
Furthermore, it’s pretty obvious that the chucklefucks behind this are paid agitators. Far right news publication The College Fix kicked off reporting on the dolls by quoting former president of hate group American College of Pediatricians, Quentin Van Meter, who described them as “a grooming tool.” Last week, extremist hate group Moms for Liberty posted about the dolls on X, propagating the lie that there are plans to use them in Minnesota schools.
We also know that a complaint was filed with the ED from another hate group, Defending Education, who publish an “IndoctriNation Map” charting instances of schools accepting people who are not cishet and white all across America. Both M4L and Defending Ed claim to be grassroots organizations. Interestingly, M4L maintains countless chapters all across the country, in my humble opinion so that they can obfuscate the hundreds of thousands of dollars they make from mysterious shadow donors by filing vague Form 990-N e-postcards meant for nonprofit organizations that take in less than $50,000 from donations each year. Defending Ed, meanwhile, publicly lists their revenue of more than $5 million annually from unnamed donors, and salaries in excess of $100,000 a year for most of their board members.
Grassroots, indeed!
So, what are these dolls actually for? Their website is barebones, to say the least, but it appears to be a new and unfinished project, so that isn’t surprising. They describe their product as a “play-based therapeutic approach for trans and gender diverse children … and the clinicians who support them.” Designed for kids who are four to 10 years old, they claim to “help children tell their stories and see themselves represented,” and “promote resilience, confidence, and joy through structured, engaging play.”
Cool! Sounds great. Why is everybody upset again? Oh, right, because they believe that trans people are mentally ill delusional weirdos, and that even if the gender binary is a lie, young children couldn’t possibly know that they’re trans before or during puberty.
Well, they’re wrong, and they should shut the hell up. I’m sick to death of these organizations that, to my eye, appear to be bigoted fronts of money laundering lobbying our fascist government to harass people who haven’t done anything wrong.
This baseless investigation isn’t going to turn up anything, so if the government is looking for misappropriated federal funds, maybe they could start by reconsidering Linda McMahon’s salary.
