Lego just announced that they will be releasing a new LGBTQ playset just in time for Pride Month, with gender-indeterminate characters in all the colors of the rainbow flag, including the pink, white and pale blue stripes representing trans people.
I’m not going to lie; it’s a little weird and minimal, and the lack of faces on each of the little lego people is a tad surreal. But it’s certainly a well-intentioned product designed to push the message that “Everyone is Awesome,” regardless of skin color or gender or sexual orientation.
So naturally I expected to run across some detractors on the right yelling about “woke” capitalism and the supposed degeneracy of the the LEGO corporation. And there were in fact plenty of people who reacted in this oh-so-original way.
And there were some who thought the whole thing was rather crass, a simple money-grab on Lego’s part.
But what I wasn’t expecting, but probably should have been, was the response from the so-called “gender critical” trasnphobes who consider themselves radical feminists.
I’m not really seeing any pedophilia in the “Everyone is Awesome” playset. But thanks for resurrecting and updating the old homophobic lie that gay people are pedophiles.
While LEGO does gender some of its playsets in regressive ways, this is not one of them. The pink and blue characters in the “Everybody is Awesome” playset aren’t attached to particular genders; that’s kind of the whole point.
Then there were those who accused Lego of “grooming” kids — much in the way that homophobes used to accuse gay people of doing.
It’s easy to be cynical about “woke” capitalists embracing the LGBTQ community, to see it as an attempt to cash in on a market that hasn’t always been served very well. And clearly Lego, like every other company hoisting the pride flag for Pride Month in June, is hoping to make more money from LGBTQ customers — at least enough to offset the business they lose when homophobic and transphobic shoppers vow to never buy anything from Lego again.
But, as the reactions to Lego’s rainbow playset remind us, symbolism matters. And so I’m glad Lego is releasing this playset, and glad that it’s offending the right people.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
Karalora,
Oh, of course; I never thought it was anything sinister, just visually odd.
But then again, my kid likes to pop off the heads of his legos and rearrange them, so…make of that what you will. ?
My biggest problem with the girl-marketed Lego sets (which also include some wonderful fantasy lines like Dragons and Elves, as well as the Disney Princess license*) is the minidolls.
On their own, they’re great. They have even more customizability than the minifig.
But the fact that they are incompatible with the minifig doesn;t just segregate the “girl lines” from the minifig lines, it segregates the girls.
By saying “these few specific lines are for you, girls” and making them incompatible with 95% of the other Lego sets, they are saying “these sets are not for you, girls.”
*Where is my Gaston figure, Lego? I need one!
As far as LGBTQ+ support goes, this product seems only slightly more explicit than a pack of crayons.
Allandrel, thanks, you put that into more sensible words than I did! You can’t mix and match between the figurines from the various sets (to create, for example, something like my son’s gorgeous mix of Lego Wonder Woman torso and hairstyle with the head of a stubble-faced smirking crook from a Lego Police set). It ends up segregating the toy sets from each other. Though I do like the options for diffetent-coloured blocks*.
Honestly, though, we all know that those who are protesting *this* set aren’t doing so on feminist grounds.
Hmm, maybe this could be an Eid gift for my kids. Will have to acquire one if possible.
*when I typed “blocks” it originally typo’d itself as “bollocks”, btw.
@Jenora
So obviously I have no connection to that twitter account & could be wrong, but IMO it’s an obvious reference to Reviving Ophelia.
It’s a book that many thought important and useful, but got a good share of critique as well. I read only a small bit of it (it was borrowed, I never got into it, I gave it back mostly unread). It was directed mostly at parents, which I wasn’t at the time.
I don’t want to tar the book for sins it does not commit, but from what little I remember of the book and discussions of the book back then, I would find it completely unsurprising if it was anti trans and/or leant itself to that interpretation. There was a lot in there about things that make girls feel bad about their bodies, and the TERFs are committed to the idea (though it has no scientific support) that trans advocacy teaches girls to hate their own bodies. Since Reviving Ophelia was addressing social forces that teach girls to hate their own bodies, the connection might seem quite clear to a TERF whether or not the author is TERFy or otherwise anti trans.
Separately:
Well, yes. But that makes it all the more stupid for you to be complaining that someone made pastel widgets that look vaguely humanoid. If you believed your own ideology, then a purple plastic vaguely humanoid widget should be no more or less objectionable than a Black one or a taupe one or a paper white one or a pastel one.
To be upset about this is to reveal the incoherence of your own position.
Oddly enough, the lack of faces makes perfect sense to me in context. You can imagine any face you want on those, which is… sort of the point? Anyone could be any of those colors.
@Bookworm, Allandrel : you can mix and match hair and hand accessorie. You cannot mix and match legs between the two style of minifigs sadly 🙁 And yes, the elve line was super duper ultra cool.
@rabid Rabbit : agreed.
@book worm in a hijab
my niece has this doll you can dismember, her hands, feet, arms, legs, and head comes off and then you can snap them back on. It is the oddest thing but she loves the damn thing. she also has these two dolls that are like…. fish people. like teenage angsty versions of the fish guy from the shape of water. Toys have just got a lot weirder then when I was a kid I guess.
@ Bookworm in hijab
Am I missing some context here? Isn’t rearranging them the point?
… though I do seem to remember making totem poles out of the minifig heads, popping everything off the Belville figures and actually having to work slightly hard to pull the arms of a Technics figure, so maybe I should worry about my past self now.
Also, I remember some knock-off Barbie dolls had heads you could just take off and put back on without damaging anything, and that was great. If an actual Barbie lost its head amidst a battle, the neck joint was ruined and the head had to be pushed back and it would sit too low and not turn properly.
@WWTH
I noticed that too and had a sort of disappointed but not surprised kind of feeling.
@Masse_Mysteria
I had those dolls! they were fun, i also had a doll that when you pressed a button on her, her face changed through different expressions.
Laughing wildly while popping them off and flicking them at his sister. And THEN rearranging them. That’s the context. Eight year olds…?
I’d thought that name looked familiar too. When was she posting? I think it was before my time, but I like reading old threads so I thought I’d seen the name.
@Crip Dyke:
Ahh, thanks! I figured it was more likely there was some other reference I was unaware of. I’m glad to know there was, even though it sounds like it’s also being co-opted for purposes not in its original remit like so many other anti-trans arguments that claim to start from feminist principles.
(You could write the following ‘feminism is not a monolith’ argument much better than I could anyway.)
The packaging is black and according to CNN, the set designer “said the set was also a celebration of the LGBTQ community within Lego and among the company’s adult fans.” So this is probably a collector set? It’s the Black Canary Barbie bullshit* all over again, only now with TERFiness on top. *sigh*
@.45 I’ve heard “own the cons” as a liberal equivalent of “own the libs”.
@Elaine The Witch The dolls you’re talking about sound a lot like Monster High. They are indeed weird, but also very cool.
*Quick primer for anyone who never heard about this: when I was about 13, Mattel made a collector Barbie of DC superhero Black Canary. She was wearing the character’s most iconic costume: leather jacket, leotard, fishnet tights, and knee-high boots. Parents had conniptions about her encouraging young girls to sexualize themselves, despite the fact that her box was clearly marked with “for the adult collector”. My 13-year-old self (and, I gathered, most kids) didn’t even bat an eye-from what little I heard of the general kid consensus, it was “Eh, a female superhero in a skimpy costume. Nothing new here.”
What about children who NEVER felt comfortable in the “skin” of the gender they were assigned at birth? Those children need to be respected as well
Also, I don’t think the size incompatibility between LEGO Friends and regular LEGO is nefarious antifeminism so much as trying to make sure every LEGO parent has to buy every set, or as many sets as possible. It’s just a marketing tactic.
Aren’t classic mini figures genderless anyway? ans you can already mix “boy” bits and “girl” bits and even unicorn or draggon bits to create whatever gender identity you want. but the new set is cool and im glad its pissing of the terfs
Speaking of dolls (sort of, I’ll get there eventually)…
This is Scooby. He’s a raccoon. Unfortunately he has something called cerebellar hypoplasia. He’s in good hands though and I follow his progress as he adapts to his condition.
Anyway, he now has a back brace. It seems to be helping him. But, to get to dolls as promised.
You may be wondering where you get a back brace for a raccoon. Well, the guy who sent it to him makes back braces and similar aids for dolls. They’re for kids who have to wear such things. So they can have their dolls and teddy bears etc wear them too. As well as having a doll or bear they can identify with, the aids are fully functional, so they can better understand how they work.
There’s a lot of crap in the world, but thing like this reassure me that, generally, people are intrinsically nice.
I, personally, am very glad that bigots, transphobes, and racists, lack the imagination to come up with brand new reasons to hate other human beings, and insist on using the same sorry excuses, interchangeably, for every group, that have never worked to prevent social progress.
I mean, imagine how much worse things would be, if they were able to imagine brand new reasons every single time. All of the excuses have all been done, over, and over, again, dropped on top of whatever group such people decided needed to be marginalized at the time.But fortunately, a complete lack of imagination is one of the side effects, or perhaps, the cause of that kind of ugliness.
She was definitely a regular at one point, but I don’t think she’s been around for a while – like early-mid ’10s or so. Which makes some sense because trans issues hadn’t assumed the salience they now hold in feminist spaces.
@Nikki : [lego nerdism start] the two incompatibility is head and torso.
Torso is a real shame, albeit understandable if you want the mini doll to have a human general shape. That’s definitely the worse problem of them in my opinion.
The head is interesting, because it’s the size of a regular axe on mini dolls, instead of a very strange diameter used nowhere else. So you can much more easily put mini dolls heads on axis to do strange effect, like sci-fi dioramas with heads in machines.
Hair are compatible between both, as are hand-held objects.
Also, the marketing strategy to push people to buy everyone is compatible torso/heads between models, with people buying set for specific head / torso / legs to mix & matchs and have a more disparate set of individuals.
I personally think the marketing argument for mini dolls is that they can have many more kind of clothes (molded on legs/torso). Regular mini dolls cannot give a decent impression of skirt (who don’t go up to ankle) nor of different shape of leggings. Mini dolls allow them to sell more different clothing type.
There’s all sorts of weird legal reasons for Lego changing the design of the figures.
I won’t bore you with the details but it all relates to how Lego was seen as patentable, but not copyrightable.
But Lego have a big issue with knock-offs. So they keep tweaking the figures in the hope they count as creative works rather than designs. That gives them more protection. Also, even if they’re held to be designs nor creations; there’s still a 20 year protection. So they just need to change every two decades.
One problem for Lego is that you now can’t copyright or patent a connector. That was to stop car manufacturers rigging it so you could only buy their own brand oil filters and the like. And the argument was that Lego is really just a series of connectors. Whatever rights they had have now expired though, so feel free to make your own bricks; and generic figures. But not the figures with identifiable features!
More here on the Lego legal in case anyone is interested.
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=eac7fe44-cdec-4fe2-b278-50ad34a7f6c6
This was an interesting case about the Star Wars helmets. If you click the ‘appendices’ link at the end there are some nice early production sketches. But that all hinged on what’s a creation and what’s a design.
https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2008/1878.html
Incidentally, this is why action figure makers do a lot of monsters/aliens/robots etc. It’s easier to classify them as creative works rather than with the human figures which are just seen as sculptures. And you have more protection for the former.