A woke, taxpayer-funded exhibit in England claims the Care Bears toys are LGBT icons, describing one of the beloved children’s characters as “transgender or gender fluid.”
“Funshine Bear is our yellow bear with a smiling sun in his belly, and is considered to be transgender or gender fluid,” the exhibit claimed, arguing that the character was voiced by female actors before 2004 and by male actors afterward.
“Bears like True Love Bear … and others, disrupt gender norms through their expression of their true selves but are accepted regardless,” the museum stated. “This enables children and adults to realize that regardless of their identity, sexuality, or self-expression — they are loved.”
The Care Bears were also praised for their “deep association with symbols such as the rainbow — which became a symbol for the queer community in 1978.”
The exhibit drew criticism from family advocacy organizations.
“Taxpayers should not be funding such blatant attempts to sexualize children’s toys and promote false gender ideology,” the Family Education Trust said in an X post.
The Care Bear display was part of a larger exhibition exploring historical figures and artifacts through a modern LGBT lens, including George Villiers, whom the exhibition claimed would be considered “queer” today because he was the “favorite” gay lover of King James I.
The exhibit claimed Villiers is a “reminder that LGBTQ+ life and love isn’t a side story in history, but it shapes history. A history we all inherit and can explore together,” and promoted a “powerful exploration” of reclaiming queer icons that experienced “bi and pan erasure” throughout history by the British Empire.
The Care Bears were in the Villiers Revealed Student Gallery, where University of Nottingham student volunteers found objects in the museum collections “having queer resonance.” Among the other selections were coins of Emperor Hadrian, whom the museum described as “an openly queer figure,” a portrait of a mermaid, praised by transgender-identifying people for their “ability to transform,” and dolls, criticized because they “uphold patriarchal values and are either forced upon or forbidden to gender non-conforming children.”
The Telegraph notes that the display has been made digital because, according to its creator John Sleigh, “some people simply aren’t ready or able to access queer spaces physically.”
Elena Kucharik, the American illustrator who created the original Care Bears, has never confirmed the characters as transgender or LGBT symbols. After creating the franchise, she went on to illustrate Tyndale House’s Christian children’s series “Little Blessings.”
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