Beloved children’s teddy bears are transgender, a taxpayer-funded exhibition has claimed.
A publicly funded exhibition has declared that certain Care Bears characters are “transgender or gender fluid,” drawing on money from Arts Council England to advance its claims.
The Villiers Revealed project, produced by Culture Leicestershire, describes the beloved children’s toy line as “a symbol for the LGBTQA+ community” while seeking to spotlight what it calls “trans narratives erased by colonialism.”
Originally created by the American Greetings card company in 1981, Care Bears became one of the decade’s most recognisable children’s brands, encompassing both toys and animated characters.
The exhibition first appeared as a physical display at Melton Carnegie Museum in Melton Mowbray before transitioning to a digital format.
Its creator, John Sleigh, explained the shift online by noting that “some people simply aren’t ready or able to access queer spaces physically.”
At the heart of the exhibition’s Care Bears analysis is Funshine, a character portrayed as both male and female at different points since the franchise’s inception.
The project holds up Funshine as a potential role model for the LGBTQA+ community.
Beloved children’s teddy bears are transgender, a taxpayer-funded exhibition has claimed
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GETTY
The exhibition claims: “Having a character like Funshine who transitions, with a positive characterisation, sends a strong message to those going through a similar change.”
More broadly, the project argues that the bears offer inspiration because they “disrupt gender norms through their expression of their true selves but are accepted regardless.”
The exhibition’s primary subject is the Jacobean court, particularly George Villiers, who is widely believed to have been the gay lover of King James I.
Alongside such historical figures, the project examined various objects considered to possess “queer resonance.”
Care Bears became one of the decade’s most recognisable children’s brands, encompassing both toys and animated characters
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GETTY
Mermaids, for instance, are interpreted through this lens on the basis that their “genitalia is not visible, and therefore is irrelevant to their gender expression.”
The exhibition also addresses the legacy of the British Empire, arguing that colonial rule led to the “suppression of queerness” and the “repression and erasure of queer and trans identities.”
It contends that “colonialism disproportionately erased fluidity in gender and sexuality, particularly among black, brown indigenous and other people of colour.”
The Villiers Revealed project sits within a broader trend of applying gender identity frameworks to well-known historical figures, a practice that has drawn criticism for viewing the past through an anachronistic queer lens.
In 2023, the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson was identified as an LGBT historical figure during a school tour on the Isle of Wight, despite no substantive evidence supporting the claim that he was gay.
A year earlier, Shakespeare’s Globe altered Joan of Arc’s pronouns to “they/them” in promotional material for a production about the French patron saint.
The same theatre went further still, suggesting that Elizabeth I may have been non-binary.
GB News has approached Culture Leicestershire for a comment.