Parents thought they’d seen everything from Tim Walz.
They hadn’t.
And what’s headed to government school classrooms this fall has a lot of moms and dads asking who gave anyone permission to do this to their four-year-olds.
What’s Actually Coming to Minnesota Classrooms
“First-of-their-kind” transgender-identified paper dolls featuring removable genitalia are expected to be introduced this fall in some classrooms for children as young as four years old, according to the University of Minnesota researchers who developed the project. The dolls, which have gender-neutral names including “Sam,” “Rory,” “Avery,” and “Parker,” include removable internal and external genitalia and more than 100 interchangeable clothing, hairstyle, and accessory pieces designed to facilitate conversations about gender and anatomy, according to the MyGender Dolls website.
The project originated at the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Health after more than six years of research. Six years. That’s how long a publicly funded university spent developing paper dolls with swappable genitals for kindergartners.
They come with interchangeable accessories and removable and swappable genitalia to help children “realize all the different options that exist for who they can be — regardless of their body parts,” University of Minnesota postdoctoral fellow Ben Parchem said in a now-deleted article in the University of Minnesota Foundation’s magazine.
The dolls are expected to be made available to teachers, school counselors, pediatricians, and mental health professionals. It remains unclear whether they will also be sold directly to parents or if schools will offer families an opportunity to opt out.
That last part is worth sitting with. Nobody seems to know whether parents get a say.
Walz’s Fingerprints Are All Over This
The University of Minnesota Medical School receives approximately $15 million annually in state funding appropriated to expand research capacity. That money flows directly from Tim Walz’s administration into the same institution that spent years building these dolls.
University officials, however, told the New York Post that no public money was used to commercialize MyGender Dolls. The institute’s total research budget is approximately $1.4 billion, according to its 2025 annual report. So the university is asking the public to believe that $15 million in annual state money somehow never touched a six-year research project conducted by its own faculty. That’s a creative accounting argument.
The transgender doll project also received funding from the university’s Early Innovation Fund, which offers awards of up to $10,000.
And then there’s Walz himself.
In 2023, the University of Minnesota’s ISGH presented Walz with the Distinguished Sexual and Gender Health Champion Award “for his outstanding efforts in protecting sexual and reproductive health care (PRO Act, HF 1) and gender-affirming health care (Executive Order 23-03) in Minnesota,” the school wrote in its annual report in 2023.
Of the three faculty members presenting him his award, one was Rider, a co-creator of MyGenderDolls. So the governor collected an award from the same people building the dolls, and the university now wants to insist there’s no connection worth examining.
The governor’s office reportedly did not respond to the New York Post’s request for comment.
Of course it didn’t.
Medical Professionals Are Pushing Back Hard
Dr Quentin Van Meter, immediate past president of the American College of Pediatricians, told The College Fix via email that the dolls are “just a grooming tool” and “have no place in an ethical medical care world.”
That’s a physician saying this. Not a politician. Not a pundit. A doctor who has spent a career working with children.
The Upper Midwest Law Center has also been investigating how the university funds the program. That investigation is ongoing, which means the full picture of where the money came from may not be known yet.
But the project is already on the launch pad. The MyGender Dolls website offered the message, “Join the waitlist,” and, “Launching 2026.” Whatever questions remain about funding, the dolls themselves are real and the rollout is happening now.
What This Means for Parents Everywhere
The people running this program frame it as therapy. They use words like “resilience” and “evidence-informed” and “developmentally appropriate.” But when you strip away the clinical language, what you’re left with is a state-funded university producing paper dolls with detachable genitalia for four-year-olds, and a governor who collected an award from the project’s creators and then went quiet when reporters came calling.
Parental rights aren’t a talking point. They’re the bedrock of how American families are supposed to work. A parent has the right to know what their child is being shown in a classroom, and the right to say no. Right now, nobody running this program has given a straight answer about whether that right will be honored.
And this isn’t a Minnesota-only story. The University of Minnesota’s program is a taxpayer-funded institution pushing a product it plans to make available to “clinicians and educators” across the country. The trans dolls, which promise to “make gender fun,” will be made available to teachers, school counselors, pediatricians and mental health providers. That network reaches well beyond one state.
The project has been scrubbing things too. The postdoctoral fellow’s quote about helping children understand their options “regardless of their body parts” appeared in a university magazine article that has since been deleted. A 2024 summary of the project from the Eli Coleman Institute has also been taken down. When institutions start quietly removing their own promotional material right before a product launch, that’s not a communications strategy. That’s a tell.
Tim Walz ran for Vice President last year pitching himself as a folksy Midwestern dad who understood regular American families. He lost. And now, back in Minnesota, the university his administration has bankrolled for years is preparing to hand four-year-olds paper dolls with removable genitals — with no clear answer on whether parents can stop it.
The voters who rejected Walz in November 2024 had good instincts. This is why.
University officials maintain that taxpayer dollars were not used to commercialize the dolls, though they have not disclosed how much public funding supported the underlying research. That gap between what they’re saying and what they’re not saying is exactly where the real answer lives.
Parents in Minnesota — and every other state where this program eventually lands — deserve a straight answer before these dolls show up in a classroom near them. Not after.
Sources: New York Post; The College Fix; Daily Caller News Foundation; Fox News Digital; Washington Examiner; Alpha News