The website is called mygenderdolls.com. The product is a set of paper dolls with interchangeable body parts — including genitals — designed for children as young as four years old. The institution behind it is the University of Minnesota Medical School.
Somewhere a preschooler just wanted a fire truck.
The project comes out of UMinn's Eli Coleman Institute for Sexual and Gender Health. The dolls include a base figure, an expansion pack, and training materials. They feature swappable clothes, accessories, and yes — interchangeable genitalia — all marketed as tools for children ages 4 to 10.
The funding pipeline tells you everything about how seriously the university takes this. The project received up to $3,000 through the MINCORPS Prize in 2024 and up to $10,000 from the Early Innovation Fund. The Eli Coleman Institute awarded $1.35 million in research grants in 2024 — a 35% increase from the prior year. The broader NSF I-Corps Hub grant that houses the program totals $16 million.
Ashley Mahoney, program director for I-Corps at UMinn, oversees the pipeline that helped commercialize the project. The institute's own annual report describes the dolls as "therapeutic tools intended for licensed therapists to use with patients." That framing — clinical, careful, professional — is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a product available on a public website targeting children who still believe in the tooth fairy.
Dr. Quentin Van Meter, immediate past president of the American College of Pediatricians, wasn't buying the therapeutic framing. He called the dolls "just a grooming tool" that "have no place in an ethical medical care world."
James Dickey, senior counsel at the Upper Midwest Law Center, has also raised concerns about the project's implications for parental rights and childhood development.
The university's defense rests on the idea that these are clinical instruments for licensed professionals. But the product has a consumer-facing website. The target demographic is listed as ages 4 to 10. The recruitment materials reference children as young as five. If this is a tightly controlled therapeutic intervention, it has an awfully public marketing strategy.
This is the same University of Minnesota that receives state and federal taxpayer funding. The same institution parents trust to educate their kids in biology, engineering, and medicine. The Eli Coleman Institute is housed within the medical school — lending the full weight of academic credibility to a paper doll with removable genitals aimed at preschoolers.
Four years old. That's the age when most children are learning to tie their shoes and share toys at recess. UMinn looked at that developmental stage and decided what was missing was an anatomically interchangeable paper doll with a training guide.
The institute's grants grew 35% in a single year. Sixteen million dollars flows through the broader program. And the output is a product that the American College of Pediatricians calls a grooming tool.
That's not a research university. That's a production line.