The product is called MyGender Dolls. Paper dolls featuring children of different ages, shapes, and skin colors — with interchangeable internal and external genitals. The target audience is children ages 4 to 10.

Four.

The project comes out of the University of Minnesota's Eli Coleman Institute for Sexual and Gender Health, and it's marketed as a "therapeutic" resource for clinicians and educators, "grounded in gender-affirming clinical practices," according to The College Fix. The dolls launched in 2026 with their own website — mygenderdolls.com — where the Institute's 2024 annual report described them as "therapeutic tools intended for licensed therapists to use with patients."

Licensed therapists using them with patients is one thing. But the Institute's own social media told a different story. A 2024 Instagram post from the National Center for Gender Health offered payment to transgender and "gender-diverse" children ages 5 to 10 to test the dolls. They weren't just building therapeutic tools. They were recruiting kindergartners to try them out.

The money behind this isn't small. The Eli Coleman Institute pulled in $1.35 million in research grant funding in 2024 alone — a 35% increase year-over-year. The project received a MINCORPS Prize of up to $3,000, which Ashley Mahoney, the program director for I-Corps at UMinn, described as "solely funded through private donations." An Early Innovation Fund grant of up to $10,000 was also in the mix. And the broader NSF I-Corps program, which runs through the Great Lakes I-Corps Hub at UMinn, has received $16 million in total federal funding to date.

Dr. Quentin Van Meter, the immediate past president of the American College of Pediatricians, didn't mince words. He called the dolls "a grooming tool" that "have no place in an ethical medical care world." Van Meter pointed to basic developmental science: "A child will recognize their biological sex by age three." Children persuaded otherwise, he said, become "confused" and "vulnerable to anxiety."

The university's response to scrutiny has been telling. When the project was first exposed in December 2024, the university quietly removed project details from its website. The kind of move you make when you know the product can't survive public sunlight.

James Dickey, senior counsel at the Upper Midwest Law Center, framed the accountability question clearly: "University of Minnesota students, families and taxpayers have the right to know if their money is funding controversial programming." The private-donation claim on the MINCORPS Prize is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far when the institute housing the project runs on $1.35 million in grants and sits inside a public university funded by Minnesota taxpayers.

The stated purpose — therapeutic tools for licensed clinicians — might hold up if the project stayed in clinical settings with trained professionals and informed parental consent. But recruiting preschool-aged children to test interchangeable-genital dolls, then scrubbing your website when reporters start asking questions, doesn't look like careful clinical research. It looks like a project that knows its audience won't approve once they find out what's being built.

The dolls are designed for children who can't yet tie their shoes. The research is funded by an institute pulling seven figures a year. And the first instinct when the public found out was to hide the evidence.

That's not science. That's a product launch with a PR problem.