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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
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.
The problem was that Mr. Potato Head isn’t going anywhere and isn’t being changed. According to the original Hasbro press release about the name change, it was the product line, which consists of both Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, that was getting a rebrand. So Mr. Potato Head still theoretically has a dick, although I think it’s very weird that allegedly serious political thinkers spend time thinking about the potential genital shape of an inanimate plastic potato toy.
But don’t worry, Mr. Potato Head is keep his metaphorical tater dick.
The name change makes logical sense. If Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head are a family, they wouldn’t be the Mr. Potato Head family, they’d be the…
