When I was 5 years old, my family happened to be staying at the hotel in California where Mattel was holding a closed-door meeting about the following year’s Barbie line. My parents caught wind of it and begged the meeting organizers to let us take a peek, because their daughter was an absolute Barbie fanatic. The woman we spoke to agreed under one condition: that only I, a child, would be allowed in.
The diverse casting of the new film underscores what every Barbie girl has always known to be true: that she was whoever you needed her to be at any given time.
Sure, it’s possible they thought my parents were spies from American Girl who wanted to snag trade secrets, but I like to think they also knew it meant the most to me, a young person just forming her ideas about the world and using Barbie as a conduit for self-discovery.
And that’s why it’s so scary to me now that, in light of the upcoming live-action Barbie movie, conservatives and religious fanatics are trying to limit what it means to be a Barbie girl.
A 275-word blurb on a Christian film review site titled “WARNING: DON’T TAKE YOUR DAUGHTER TO BARBIE” would most likely have gone unnoticed had it not been for Fox News’ celebration of the moral panicky take. Thanks to its insatiable need to pounce on anything related to the mere existence of transgender people, a much wider audience was introduced to unhinged thoughts like “The new BARBIE movie forgets its core audience of families and children while catering to nostalgic adults and pushing transgender character stories” and “These studios perform best when they make movies that promote pro-family and biblical values.”
Much of this anti-LGBTQ sentiment stems from the casting of trans actor Hari Nef as “Doctor Barbie” in director Greta Gerwig’s imagining of the iconic doll’s world. In a land of pure pink-hued fantasy, this was somehow a bridge too far.
Nef’s casting was met with little pushback or attention when it was revealed last year. It wasn’t until April, when she posted on Instagram about how much the role means to her, that the usual suspects crawled out of their bigot bunkers to crank the faux-outrage machine.
Right-wing sites like Breitbart and The Daily Signal disparaged her casting, and commentators like Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin purposely misgendered her. To them, Barbie is a cisgender, heterosexual woman, and any suggestion otherwise threatens to break their fragile world views.
“Me and my girlfriends — okay, yeah, me and my other transgender girlfriends — we started calling ourselves ‘the dolls’ a couple of years ago,” Nef wrote in her Instagram post, along with a photo of herself dressed as her Barbie character. “Maybe it’s a bid to ratify our femininity, to smile and sneer at the standards we’re held to as women. … ‘Doll’ is fraught, glamorous; she is, and she isn’t. We call ourselves ‘the dolls’ in the face of everything we know we are, never will be, hope to be. We yell the word because the word matters. And no doll matters more than Barbie.”
While the title character is played by white, thin, blond actor Margot Robbie, the naysayers are ignoring the fact that about a dozen other actors in the film have also been honored with the character name Barbie. “Saturday Night Live” alumna Kate McKinnon, a queer comic and actor; Issa Rae, a Black writer, actor and producer; Ritu Arya, a British actor of Indian descent: It’s no coincidence that these women were cast to play not Barbie’s friend but Barbie herself. Robbie is whom you might classically think of as the physical embodiment of Barbie, but these other actors are presumably treated as equally legitimate versions of the doll.
The inclusive casting is a direct result of Mattel’s objective of making Barbie more representative, not just the vision of some liberal Hollywood director: Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz told CNBC last year that the company very intentionally brought on Gerwig to create a fresh vision of Barbie based on the new brand direction, which came after some missteps, like creating a line of diverse “Role Models” for International Women’s Day in 2018 who were all impossibly thin.
“Barbie is very much more than a toy,” Kreiz said. “And more than a doll. Barbie is a cultural icon, a pop icon. And this movie is really shaping up to be what we believe would become a societal moment.”
Kreiz’s comments last year came in the weeks following the introduction of a Barbie in the likeness of trailblazing transgender actor and activist Laverne Cox.
In celebration of her very own Barbie, Cox explained to People magazine the doll’s importance in her journey to self-acceptance. “I begged my mother for a Barbie doll and she said no because I was assigned male at birth,” Cox said. “And when I was in my 30s, I was in therapy and telling my therapist that I was denied the opportunity to play with Barbie dolls. And my therapist said, ‘It’s never too late to have a happy childhood, and what you should do for your inner child is go out and buy yourself a Barbie doll.’”
So Cox went out and bought one and told her mother about her purchase. “And that first Christmas after that, my mom sent me a Barbie doll,” she said. “And she’s been sending me Barbies for Christmas and for my birthday.”
The diverse casting of the new film underscores what every Barbie girl has always known to be true: that she was whoever you needed her to be at any given time. She tried on different jobs for size, never put limits on her potential and always had a great time trying new things. She inspired kids to imagine their dream house, dream car, dream date and offered a blank canvas on which to project their fantasies, whether they be President Barbie presiding over a Cabinet meeting or making Ken and Barbie hump each other.
“One of the trailers said, ‘If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you.’ And it is so true,” plus-size actor Sharon Rooney, who plays Lawyer Barbie, recently told Glamour UK. “It’s for everyone. And Barbie’s for everyone because Barbie has everything. And that’s why I loved her growing up because I didn’t look like Barbie. Well, I do now.”
And that’s what kills Fox News and Ben Shapiro and all the other people looking for any reason to discourage people from seeing the film: that they can’t gatekeep something as culturally influential as Barbie. Unlike actual American women whose bodies they’ve managed to impose controls on, Barbie remains beyond their grasp.