Yesterday, I awoke to social feeds flooded with images of a doll in a blue polka dot dress standing against a very recognisable shade of pink. Hi Barbie! But this one was different. This Barbie was wearing diabetes devices – and they were proudly on display.

Photo of Barbie. She’s wearing a blue polka dot skirt and top and wearing a pink pump and pump CGM.

American Girl did this a few years ago with a diabetes accessories kit. And T1D Barbie isn’t the first doll to be living with a chronic health condition or a disability. In recent years, Mattel has released a Barbie with a wheelchair, a Barbie that is blind, a Barbie with a prosthetic leg, a Barbie with hearing aids and a Barbie with Down Syndrome.

The launch was huge! In sync, Mattel and Breakthrough T1D celebrated the new doll with a pitch perfect media roll out. I could see just how meaningful this was to kids with diabetes. And adults with T1D too! I admit to squealing a little when I saw her pink pump (just like the pink pump I wore for the first 6 years I was looping) and her heart-shaped CGM over patch. I’ve worn one just like that! (And have the photo to prove it.)

Photo of me in a striped dress, standing in the garden. I am wearing a CGM covered by a pink heart-shaped patch on my arm)

It wasn’t just diabetes media that picked up the story. Type 1 diabetes Barbie was everywhere! And the stories were positive – T1D representation is important and matters. Which makes sense – seeing toys reflect diabetes helps normalise the condition we live every day.

And then I did something I knew I shouldn’t do. But because I’m an idiot – or maybe I was hoping that humanity would surprise me – I did it anyway. I read the comments. I didn’t read all of them – there were thousands. There were no surprises and what I read told me this:

Diabetes remains a horribly misunderstood condition and with that lack of understanding comes stigma.

There were a lot of comments about how unnecessary a T1D Barbie is, how it was ‘pushing an agenda’ and that kids don’t need toys wearing their health condition. I call rubbish on that from the get go, because representation does matter. Of course it does. To see our health condition in the mainstream tells us that we matter and that our experiences (and devices!) aren’t something to hide. That’s why we get excited when we see characters with diabetes in film and TV (albeit at the ready to criticise when diabetes is reduced to a single scary moment, or someone charges at a person having a hypo with a full insulin injection!).

Then there were the comments about how Barbie was glorifying ‘diseases’ or encouraging an ‘unhealthy lifestyles’.

And bam! The stigma was front and centre, with the loud confidence that comes from people who genuinely have no ideas at all about any type of diabetes.

People not impacted directly by diabetes often don’t understand it. If I could wave a magic wand I would have those people simply say nothing. In an ideal world, they’d learn a little bit about diabetes, but honestly; I’ve come to realise that’s not going to happen, and I really don’t care. I know nothing about health conditions that don’t directly impact me. My brain is too full of other things to learn the nuances of every single autoimmune, metabolic or chronic health condition out there.

If it were up to me (and sadly it isn’t) I would have every person with zero level of knowledge or understanding of diabetes simply scroll on by and say nothing. But of course that didn’t happen. Instead, they treated us to stigma-laden tropes about ‘lifestyle diseases’, ‘personal responsibility’ and the always fun ‘she doesn’t look like someone with diabetes’.

And that was followed by people from within the diabetes community trying to justify why this Barbie matters and going to great pains to shout back about different types of diabetes.

I read a lot of those comments with the same dismay as the comments from people outside our community. Because many of them did nothing but add to diabetes-related stigma. In efforts to define T1D, T2D and the people living with it were thrown under the (Barbie dream) bus.

I don’t know what it’s going to take for people to understand that responding to stigma with stigma doesn’t help the T1D community. It harms us.

All diabetes stigma is bad for people with diabetes. When we reinforce damaging stereotypes about other types of diabetes we do ourselves no favours. That’s not what is going to change attitudes of the broader community – in fact it will simply make many double down on their stigma. Stigma harms all of us. It doesn’t care about type. If we want stigma to end, we can’t keep adding to it.

The launch of our own Barbie with diabetes is a moment of joy and offers an opportunity to build confidence in kids (and adults!) living with T1D. Just think of the way it can start conversations and reduce feelings of isolation. This moment deserves to be harnessed as a moment for more visibility, more understanding, and more celebration of what it means to live with T1D. Let’s go Barbie!

Disclosures

I work in the Global Responsibility team at Breakthrough T1D.