Imagine you wanted to confuse kids about their sex at a young age, and introduce the destructive idea that a boy can become a girl and vice versa. Kids learn best through play, and tactile sensations often reinforce basic ideas. When you teach a toddler that a cow says, “Moo,” it helps to have a picture or a plastic toy of a cow. Your little boy holds a cow in his hand and makes the sound, and he slowly learns to make other sounds and communicate. Nefarious academics know this. That’s why some researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Eli Coleman Institute for Sexual and Gender Health developed the “MyGender Doll.” The “paper” doll comes with removable and replaceable genitalia, suggesting sex organs are just another accessory. Dianne Berg, a therapist at the university, developed the dolls explicitly for kids between the ages of 5 and 11 to assist in “gender-affirming” therapy. The “MyGender Doll” website—where you can get on the waitlist to order the monstrosities—says the dolls are “designed for gender diverse children ages 4-10.” “It’s really important to address the belief, ‘I’m not a ‘real’ boy because I don’t have these parts,'” Berg told the university’s Discovery magazine, in a 2020 article that has since been deleted from the university’s website. Berg said the addition of sex organs is key, and it makes the dolls unique. “I think everyone should be learning that there’s diversity [in gender identity] and that what makes you ‘real’ is not what your body parts are, but how you think and feel,” the therapist said. “It’s about helping children develop tools to cope with messages in society that could lead to shame.” You know the real shame? This therapist seems to think it’s a good idea to “affirm” a kid’s mistaken belief that he or she is “really,” on some indeterminate metaphysical plane, a member of the opposite sex. This therapist seems to think it’s better for a gender-confused boy to take experimental injections to make him appear female than to tell him the honest truth that he’s actually a boy and no amount of physical alteration can change that. Psychiatrist Dr. Stephen Levine has warned that the sort of “social transition” Berg uses these dolls to promote is itself a “powerful psychotherapeutic intervention” that sets kids on the path to lifelong drugs, and often surgeries. Such surgeries are the logical conclusion of the dolls’ message. The dolls come equipped with the “feature” of removable internal and external genitalia, so a boy can remove his genitalia and put in a woman’s organs and claim to be a “real” girl. It’s a concrete example of transgender ideology, packaged for a defenseless child who can have no idea that he’s being signed up for a lifetime of misery. These “MyGender Dolls” are sick, and they should cause controversy even if they never leave Berg’s “mental health” offices. ‘MyGender Dolls’ in Schools? Yet The New York Post drew attention to the dolls for two other reasons, claiming that taxpayers foot the bill and that the dolls will be entering classrooms this fall. A local ABC News affiliate reached out to Minnesota school districts and found that no district plans to use the dolls. Berg and her co-lead G. Nic Rider reportedly said the dolls won’t be in schools this year. “The MyGender Dolls are a therapeutic tool for use by licensed professionals,” the two added. “All licensed professionals will undergo a required training before being able to use the MyGender Dolls in their therapeutic practice. There is no set launch date determined at this time.” Taxpayer Funding? As for the taxpayer funding, the University of Minnesota receives taxpayer funds as a state land-grant university, though the grants awarded to the MyGender Dolls program do not derive from taxpayer funds. The California Institute of Contemporary Art, a private foundation, funded the prototypes. The University of Minnesota Early Innovation Fund bankrolled the program, but its money comes from selling the university’s research. A university spokesperson told the College Fix that a third funding stream—the MINCORPS program—only used “private donations” for the dolls. Even if not one cent of taxpayer funds bankrolled this program, it’s beyond the pale that academics think it’s a good idea to brainwash defenseless kids in this way. The Early Innovation Fund grant states the money will test “a novel and culturally-responsive intervention for transgender and gender diverse children and their caregivers to advance health equity and justice.” Let’s cut through the confusion. It doesn’t “advance health equity” to put kids on drugs that will leave them stunted, scarred, and infertile. Such a program systematically victimizes kids, introducing inequity by saddling them with psychological and physical disadvantages. As for “justice,” I’m glad to say that some of the adults who had been harmed by this toxic ideology have taken their cases to court. Some have received multi-million-dollar judgments because the “doctors” who “affirmed” their delusions engaged in medical malpractice. The real “gender justice” involves tossing these “MyGender Dolls” into the dustbin of history where they belong.