One Million Moms urges American Girl to pull book promoting puberty blockers to children

By Samantha Kamman, Christian Post Reporter Thursday, December 22, 2022

An organization of Christian mothers that regularly launches campaigns against questionable content is calling on American Girl to discontinue its distribution of a book that promotes puberty blockers for girls questioning their gender identity. 

The conservative activist group One Million Moms has launched a pressure campaign urging the doll company to discontinue selling the book A Smart Girl's Guide: Body Image and encourages people to stop purchasing from American Girl or its parent company, Mattel.

One Million Moms highlights how the book seemingly directs girls to organizations that will help them transition if the adults in their lives don't support their decision. The group also accused the doll brand of attempting to “brainwash” girls by promoting the idea of identifying as the opposite sex. 

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"This is disgusting! American Girl is encouraging children to go behind their parents’ backs with life-altering issues," the campaign website reads. 

As The Christian Post reported, a section in the book about gender identity advises girls to talk with a doctor about wearing clothes or using pronouns to resemble the opposite sex. If a girl has not experienced puberty yet, then the book claims a doctor may provide “medicine” to delay bodily changes. 

"Parts of your body may make you feel uncomfortable and you may want to change the way you look. That's totally OK," one excerpt of the book reads. "You can appreciate your body for everything it allows you to experience and still want to change certain things about it."

The “medicine” promoted in the book likely alludes to puberty-blocking drugs, which the U.S. government has not approved for the purpose that the book describes. In addition, the American College of Pediatricians has warned that temporary use of puberty-blocking drugs has "been associated with and may be the cause of many serious permanent side effects including osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment and, when combined with cross-sex hormones, sterility."

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration also issued a warning in July, stating that gonadotropin-releasing hormone drugs can cause brain swelling and vision loss in children who take them, citing six cases of children between ages 5 and 12 who exhibited "a plausible association between GnRH agonist use and pseudotumor cerebri.”

In a December op-ed published by CP,  Anne Young, an American mother of two young daughters, noted that the book’s author, Mel Hammond, recognizes Dr. Carly Guss on her website as a person who helped "bring this book to life."

Guss is an adolescent medicine specialist at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The doctor advocated for using puberty blockers on gender dysphoric children in a Nov. 1 article published in the JAMA Pediatrics medical journal. 

She argues that puberty blockers, in some cases, eliminate "the need for subsequent surgery." Guss contends that the use of gonadotropin-releasing hormone "delays the development of irreversible pubertal changes and, in some cases, eliminates the need for subsequent surgery." 

This is not the first time that One Million Moms, a division of the American Family Association, has taken issue with the content distributed by the American Girl brand. 

In 2021, the group launched an online campaign after Mattel named the 10-year-old Kira Bailey doll from Michigan the “2021 Girl of the Year” in December. The doll came with a book titled Kira Down Under, which depicts Kira visiting an animal sanctuary in Australia operated by her aunts, who are in a same-sex marriage. 

The book also describes how the aunts married after the laws surrounding same-sex marriage changed in 2017. 

One Million Moms launched a petition in response, which garnered over 20,000 signatures. The group called on parents to prevent their daughters from seeing the doll to avoid “a premature conversation that she is far too young to understand.”

“American Girl could have chosen another storyline or characters to write about and remained neutral in the culture war,” One Million Moms stated. “American Girl is attempting to desensitize our youth by featuring a storyline with two lesbian aunts.”