The numbers come first: Minnesota schoolchildren as young as four will have access to so-called MyGenderDolls starting this fall, under a program developed at the University of Minnesota's Medical School and supported in part by the university's Early Innovation Fund — a taxpayer-backed grant mechanism tied to an institution governed under an administration led by Gov. Tim Walz, according to a report first published by the New York Post.
The dolls, designed for children ages 4 to 10, come with interchangeable accessories and removable, swappable genitalia. According to the product's website, they are intended for use by 'clinicians and educators.' The stated purpose, per a now-deleted article in the University of Minnesota Foundation's magazine, is to help children 'realize all the different options that exist for who they can be — regardless of their body parts,' as University of Minnesota postdoctoral fellow Ben Parchem, Ph.D., was quoted saying.
The project originated in the university's Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, spearheaded by faculty members Dianne Berg, Ph.D., and G. Nic Rider, Ph.D. Berg, in the same now-deleted article, described the dolls as tools for helping children 'develop tools to cope with messages in society that could lead to shame.'
The concept was initially conceived by Rachel Becker-Warner, PsyD, a psychologist at the university's Institute for Sexual and Gender Health. Berg and communications specialist Ashley Finch are credited with developing the dolls into what the program describes as a 'therapeutic tool for transgender and gender diverse children.'
The dolls are set to be distributed to clinicians and educators beginning this year, according to the MyGenderDolls website.
What this means for Minnesota families — and the taxpayer
This is not a private company selling a product in the open market. This program was incubated inside a public university's medical school, seeded by an institutional innovation fund, and is now being channeled into schools and clinical settings where children as young as four are the intended audience. The parents of those children had no vote on the curriculum, no line-item in a budget they approved, and — given that the original article describing the dolls' purpose has since been deleted — arguably no transparency either.
Free enterprise has no objection to any private company producing any legal product. The objection here is narrower and more principled: when public university resources and state-adjacent funding are used to develop ideological materials for young children, and when the rollout targets classrooms and clinics rather than the open market, the taxpayer is not a bystander. He is the investor — one who was never asked. Minnesota parents deserve a full accounting of which public funds flowed into this program, and school administrators owe families an explicit opt-in, not a quiet deployment.
