No, Mr. Potato Head isn’t going “gender neutral”

Thursday’s moral panic stemmed from a poorly worded AP report and ended with conservatives punching trans people again

Katelyn Burns
4 min readFeb 26, 2021
(Credit: JB Lacroix/Getty)

Another week, another viral thread panicking over another issue related to trans people. It’s become a sick pastime for some of Twitter’s most annoying assholes to flip their shit over some gender-related bullshit they’ve invented on their own.

This time, it was Mr. Potato Head, a literal plastic spud toy that’s been around for decades. An Associated Press wire story Thursday kicked off the ridiculousness, misleadingly claiming that Mr. Potato Head would be going “gender neutral” and be known going forward simply as “Potato Head.”

Of course, this was too much for many on the right and those in the center who profit off of criticizing the left. Thousands of tweets went out complaining that Hasbro was “neutering” a beloved toy, implying that trans people were ruining yet another cultural symbol on the altar of gender-neutrality.

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Katelyn Burns

Political journalist. The first openly trans Capitol Hill reporter in US history. Writing about more than just trans issues. Follow her on Twitter @transscribe