The sad truth of today’s American Girl

The popular doll company, American Girl, wants to teach young girls to cultivate a healthy body image … by telling them their bodies might be a mistake.

The company was started in 1986 and produced daintily accessorized dolls and accompanying stories that introduced girls to different cultures and historical eras. Decades later, American Girl expanded its educational content to include the Smart Girl’s Guide book series. With a target age of 10-12 years old, the collection covers practical topics like manners, money, and middle school. 

Last fall, American Girl debuted the Smart Girl’s Guide, Body Image: How to Love Yourself, Live Life to the Fullest, and Celebrate All Kinds of Bodies. The book helps young readers develop body positivity—discerning between social media and real life, embracing their size, shape, and skin, and “appreciating their bodies for the life it allows them to live.”

For many girls who grew up in the 1990s, American Girl dolls evoke feelings of nostalgia. But those ’90s girls then grew up and had daughters of their own. And the company’s most recent product line was met with anything but warm and fuzzy feelings when it included concepts like transgender identity, preferred pronouns, and social transition.  

The section “Gender Joy” tells young readers that, as a newborn, a doctor looked at her body parts and assigned her a female identity. “Most kids grow up feeling comfortable in the sex the doctor assigned,” the book describes, “but for some that doesn’t match who they know they are inside.”

It’s worth noting that other sections in the book emphasize self-acceptance and choosing a positive self-image. But regarding gender, it’s about “joy.” The implication is that if a pubescent girl doesn’t feel “joy” as a girl, perhaps that’s because she isn’t one. Even more, if a pubescent girl knows (at 10-12 years old) that she is not, in fact, a girl, she is told there’s a pill for that—a puberty-blocking pill. 

Puberty blockers are hailed as a safe, fully reversible way to “press pause” on pubertal development. Medications like Lupron, Zoladex, and Triptorelin were created to treat aggressive forms of hormone-related cancers. They arrest the production of hormones, giving the patient a better chance of survival. 

The drugs were later prescribed to treat endometriosis, sometimes with devastating results. Among women who had taken Lupron a decade ago, one had osteoporosis and a cracked spine, another required a hip replacement, and another suffered from chronic pain and degenerative disc disease. They were all in their 20s. 

Within the last decade, doctors have increasingly prescribed these drugs off-label to halt puberty. While the long-term repercussions are unknown, one thing is certain: Puberty blockers are neither safe nor fully reversible. Among other side effects, they include a higher risk of stroke, higher risk of blood clots, prevention of brain maturation, and decreased bone density.

So prevalent are the reported side effects that prominent children’s hospitals and government entities are working to clarify—and in some cases, correct—the narrative so many therapists and pediatricians have peddled. 

In July 2022, the Food and Drug Administration found that puberty blockers can cause brain swelling and vision loss in children. Parents could be forgiven if they found this a shock, since the scarcity of media coverage only compounds the misinformation. Only a couple of local news stations and conservative outlets reporting the research even picked up the story. Major news outlets are quick to defend puberty blockers as a life-preserving treatment but give nary a word on their life-threatening effects. In addition, medical web outlets like Mayo Clinic haven’t updated their sites to reflect the data.

Yet, gender therapists, gender activists, and even government officials include puberty blockers as a medically necessary, life-saving aspect of gender-affirming care. Assistant Secretary for Health, Dr. Rachel Levine, regularly laments that medicine and science are being “politically perverted” to the detriment of trans people’s safety. Levine, a man who identifies as a woman, also claimed that children should be “supported and empowered to pursue gender-affirming care,” including, but not limited to, hormone-blocking medications. Anyone who objects to their use is pushing an agenda divorced from medicine and is rejecting “well-established science.”

In some cases, the suppression of information is even more sinister. For example, internal emails from the University of Washington revealed that children prescribed puberty blockers demonstrated no “genuine statistical improvement” in their mental health. Despite this, the school framed the results of their study as proof of success in gender-affirming care. The public would never have known if it was not for a leaked email. 

In the last two weeks, American Girl unceremoniously removed the Body Image book from its website. The scores of negative reviews from indignant mothers took effect. Yet, it is just one of many companies adopting and advocating the narratives of gender ideology in the name of self-acceptance. And, given the link between gender dysphoria and social influences among suggestible teen girls, it is just another culturally conforming source of deception—a deception that comes with damaging, potentially permanent consequences, a deception that convinces girls they’re better off being boys.