The popular American Girl doll brand is facing backlash for a recent book that looks push kids into changing their gender
The popular American Girl doll brand is facing backlash for pushing kids into changing their gender in a recent book marketed to young girls.
The recently released book, titled A Smart Girl’s Guide: Body Image, contains lines that give advice to prepubescents on how to change their gender – seemingly without their guardians’ blessing.
Parents have since based the book’s contents as ‘deceptive and dangerous,’ citing the messages it looks to sending to its impressionable demographic.
The 96-page handbook – billed as a ‘guide’ – is marketed to girls aged 3 to 12, and instructs them on how to make permanent changes to their bodies, and to embrace that they may be unhappy in the bodies they were born with.
The book, penned by resident American Girl author Mel Hammond, is currently available on shelves in stores across the country and on the company’s website.
Its release comes amid a wave of increasingly woke content from the dollmaker.
Earlier this year, its parent company, recently put a transgender Barbie doll on the market. Before that, American Girl, which sells more than 30million dolls a year, shilled an Asian doll when anti-Asian hate crimes were skyrocketing across the US.
The company has yet to comment on the contentious content.
The 96-page handbook is marketed to girls aged 3 to 12, and instructs them on how to make permanent changes to their bodies – seemingly behind their parents’ backs
The book’s writer, Mel Hammond, graduated from university in 2014, and lists on her website that some of her ‘favorite things are trees, rainbows, and dairy-free ice cream.’
‘Parts of your body may make you feel uncomfortable and you may want to change the way you look,’ one excerpt deemed problematic by parents online reads, before asserting ‘That’s totally OK!’
It goes on to advise children: ‘You can appreciate your body for everything it allows you to experience and still want to change certain things about it.’
On the very same page, the book promotes the use of puberty blockers, telling girls to seek them out from their doctor if they feel confused about their gender but are not physically ready to undergo hormone therapy.
The book advises: ‘If you haven’t gone through puberty yet, the doctor might offer medicine to delay your body’s changes, giving you more time to think about your gender identity.’
The book then tells readers that ‘if you don’t have an adult you trust, there are organizations across the country that can help you. Turn to the resources on page 95 for more information.’
Parents have since expressed outrage over the book’s contents, with one mom saying that it is using the guise of being just another educational companion to tween girl to convey ‘deceptive and dangerous’ messages that convince girls to question their bodies.
She added that the company is ‘stripping away all innocence’ with the book’s content.
The book tells young readers that ‘if you don’t have an adult you trust, there are organizations across the country that can help you. Turn to the resources on page 95 for more information’
Meanwhile, the book’s resident writer and editor graduated from university in 2014, and lists on her website that some of her ‘favorite things are trees, rainbows, and dairy-free ice cream.’
Hammond, who lists her pronouns as ‘she/her’ on her LinkedIn profile, started working for the company in 2019, holding only one job at a small software company in her hometown of Wisconsin.
In her bio, she writes that she enjoys working at American Girl, which is also based in Wisconsin, citing how ‘last year for my birthday, my coworkers bought me a two-pound tub of rainbow marshmallows – which I named Marsh.’
The writer – whose oeuvre consists of the book in question and two others penned over the past two year – earned her master’s degree in children’s literature at Kansas State, where she says she ‘studied misplaced and giant food in picture books.’
DailyMail.com has reached out to American Girl for comment.
Parents have since expressed outrage over the book’s contents, with one mom saying that it is using the guise of being just another educational companion to tween girl to convey ‘ deceptive and dangerous’ messages that convince girls to question their bodies