Add the Mattel toy-making company to the increasing list of entities that conflate political indoctrination with “inclusiveness.”

Last week, the creators of Barbie and Ken launched their new line of gender neutral dolls called Creatable World. The company’s website explains that it’s “a doll line designed to keep labels out and invite everyone in — giving kids the freedom to create their own customizable characters again and again.”

The dolls retail for $29.99, and each one comes with long hair, short hair, pants, skirts, shoes, and accessories that can be mixed and matched to create hundreds of different styles. “Toys are a reflection of culture and as the world continues to celebrate the positive impact of inclusivity, we felt it was time to create a doll line free of labels,” Kim Culmone, senior vice president of Mattel Fashion Doll Design, said in a statement. “Through research, we heard that kids don’t want their toys dictated by gender norms. This line allows all kids to express themselves freely which is why it resonates so strongly with them.”

The world is celebrating transgenderism as inclusivity? “To be fair, gender-neutral dolls aren’t a ridiculous idea,” columnist Madeline Fry asserts. “Kids often experiment with different forms of expression when they’re young, and some don’t even lean into gender expression until after puberty. But this isn’t just about creating a doll that looks like its owners. It’s an attempt to make a statement that gender isn’t what it was once thought to be, and we all ought to change our minds about it.”

Change our minds about what, exactly? Transgender dogma force-fed to a recalcitrant American public, via steady doses of indoctrination beginning as early as pre-kindergarten — stripping away parental rights in the process? How about “celebrating” doctors performing double-mastectomies on healthy 13-year-old girls, or the administering of puberty blockers to otherwise healthy children, including Leuprolide Acetate (Lupron) that resulted in 40,764 adverse reactions and more than 6,300 deaths over the last seven years? Should we celebrate giving potentially dangerous cross-sex hormones to children as young as 10 — hormones that could lead to permanent sterility?

The American College of Pediatricians reveals the game afoot here, noting that the “new paradigm” regarding gender dysphoria is “founded upon an unscientific gender ideology, lacks an evidence base, and violates the long-standing ethical principle of ‘First do no harm.’” Far more important, the ACP notes that the “vast majority” of pre-pubertal children resolve their confusion on their own by “late adolescence” — as in 80% to 95% of them, according to multiple studies.

For Mattel, the dolls themselves are only part of the equation. “Mattel’s first promotional spot for the $29.99 product features a series of kids who go by various pronouns — him, her, them, xem — and the slogan ‘A doll line designed to keep labels out and invite everyone in,’” Time Magazine reports.

As with most forms of indoctrination, language plays a critical part. And in places like New York City, refusing to kowtow to leftist dogma can engender fines as high as $250,000 against those who refuse to address a transgender person by their preferred pronoun, such as “ze,” “hir,” “they,” or them.“ The federal government is also pushing this agenda, courtesy of a "Department of Education policy that allows the federal government to investigate schools for not calling gender-confused students by their preferred ‘transgender’ pronoun as opposed to the one matching their innate biology,” Life Site News reports.

Thus the notion that “everyone is being invited in” — as opposed to being threatened — is a complete crock. Moreover the Transgender Trend website created in 2016 by those who describe themselves as “psychologists, social workers, doctors, medical ethicists, and academics,” who are “left-leaning, open-minded, and pro-gay rights,” not only expresses concerns about “unnecessary surgeries and/or hormonal treatments which have not been proven safe [that] in the long-term represent significant risks for young people,” but the overt recruitment and the coaching of children to believe they are non-conforming.

“In many cases, these young people come to identify as trans after binges on social media sites such as tumblr, reddit, or YouTube,” these professionals explain. “There is evidence that vulnerable young people are being actively recruited and coached on such sites to believe that they are trans. Social contagion is almost certainly playing a role as well. In many schools and communities, there are entire peer groups ‘coming out’ as trans at the same time. In many cases, these young people may be suffering from mental health problems such as anxiety or depression that leave them easy prey to the cult-like tactics of these online trans activists.”

Perhaps this explains why there’s been a 4,000% increase over 10 years in the number of kids requesting transition in the UK, or why a recent UCLA study reveals that 27% of California children identify as “gender nonconforming.”

Nonconforming? Politically intimidated is more likely, as in children who have received the message they either conform to the transgender agenda or face social ostracization.

Mattel tested the doll with 250 families across seven states, including 15 children who identify as trans, gender-nonbinary, gender-fluid or avoided defining themselves altogether. “Anyone complaining that these dolls are just about pandering to gender-bending liberals is missing the larger point,” insists New York Post columnist Hannah Sparks. “Creatable World is fundamentally about embracing individuality and — for pre-pubescent kids across the world — the awkwardness and confusion of growing up.”

Embracing awkwardness and confusion or fostering it by telling a pre-pubescent child that gender is “fluid” and that chromosomal and biological reality take a back seat to political correctness?

As the recent UN conference on global warming revealed, leftists everywhere have no problem whatsoever exploiting vulnerable children as foot soldiers for their causes. Children who have been thoroughly convinced their lives are being “stolen” by anyone who does not embrace the progressive agenda.

What’s really being stolen is innocence itself. It is no longer enough to allow children to be silly, imaginative or, at the very least, apolitical. For leftists and their transgender activist allies, no child is too young to be indoctrinated, deliberately confused, or made to feel insecure about not having the “correct” ideological perspective.

Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that Mattel has never produced an anatomically correct doll of any kind. In fact, Barbie and Ken were gross exaggerations of the male and female form that the company has toned down after blowback from parents.

Thus, promoting gender-neutral dolls is a marketing strategy. Mattel is betting that a profit-producing percentage of parents are willing to expose their own children to virtue-signaling and “wokeness,” before they’re even old enough to understand the terms. The bet in our humble shop is that most parents want their children to be exposed to something far more important:

Childhood.