Barbie Website Rewords Its 'Gender Confusing' Poll

The Barbie website recently changed an online poll that asked visitors for their gender, offering three choices to choose from – ''I am a Girl,'' ''I am a Boy,'' and ''I don't know.''

The Barbie website recently changed an online poll that asked visitors for their gender, offering three choices to choose from – "I am a Girl," "I am a Boy,” and “I don't know."

On Wednesday, the third option was changed to "Don't want to say."

Mattel, the toy company that manufactures Barbie, was criticized for allowing children the original third option, which conservative Christian groups such as Concerned Women for America say only promotes gender confusion.

Get Our Latest News for FREE

Subscribe to get daily/weekly email with the top stories (plus special offers!) from The Christian Post. Be the first to know.

Subscribe

"It's the idea that well, maybe people aren't born a particular biological sex, or they are but that shouldn't determine their gender identity," said Bob Knight, director of CWA’s Culture & Family Institute. "And that's a very big component of the homosexual activist agenda now."

Mattel released a statement Wednesday stating that they had meant the third option to be "Don’t Want to Say" all along.

"Barbie.com often provides children with a neutral or a 'non response' option. In this particular case, it was an innocent mistake and should have read 'I don't want to say,' as it does now," said spokesperson Lauren Bruksch. "To suggest anything otherwise is absolutely ridiculous and irresponsible."

Despite the announcement, Knight remained unconvinced that the change was an improvement.

"Do they think it's less offensive this way, or did they want to create a situation in which critics were made to appear factually inaccurate?" he said, after receiving a deluge of emails criticizing the Christian organization for being inaccurate.

His main concern was that homosexual activists are promoting the notion that gender is not a physical reality and they're feeding this idea to children, who are the most impressionable.

"What they're doing is contribution to the idea that gender is not a physical reality," said Knight. "And so they are sowing gender confusion even among young children."

Mattel had also recently come under fire from Christian organizations for donating to Girls Inc., a group that has been accused of promoting abortion, lesbianism and easy access to birth control for teens.

Knight stated he did not know whether Mattel is an outright part of the homosexual activist camp or whether they are only revealing "misguided compassion" based on information fed to them by others.

The concern that Christians have is against the "destructive lie" that emotions and feelings are reality and that there's nothing a person can do about it because they are meant to be that way.

"For one reason or another people experience powerful desires, and if these desires are cultivated and encouraged, they could lead to a person believing that they have a particular identity," said Knight. "But if they are discovered early, and the person gets compassionate counseling, they can learn to overcome these unwanted desires and to channel them into constructive places such as finding a mate for marriage."

Revealing that there is hope for those who wish to change, Knight said, "There are a lot of people walking around today who once believed they were born gay or born the wrong gender, but when they were shown the truth that can set you free – namely that God will change your heart – they threw off this burden."

The poll can be found here: barbie.everythinggirl.com/activities/btv/poll/

[Editor's Note: Some time after this article was published, the Barbie Poll erased the third option completely.