Last week, days after the U.K. Supreme Court ruled that trans women will not be considered women under the law, Pedro Pascal arrived at a Marvel movie premiere wearing a white tee that read in all-caps: “PROTECT THE DOLLS.” (“Doll,” which has its roots in ’80s ballroom culture, is a term of endearment for trans women, though not all trans women embrace it.) The T-shirt was created in February by 28-year-old American designer Conner Ives, who’d spontaneously made its prototype the day before his fall 2025 London Fashion Week show with some heat-transfer paper and deadstock. Ives wore the tee to take his final bow. The next morning, he woke up to a massive outpouring of support: “Our whole inbox was just people being like, ‘Where do I buy this?’”
Since then, Ives’s tee — priced at around $99, the bulk of which goes to the peer support and crisis hotline Trans Lifeline — has become a celebrity fashion statement. Troye Sivan and Addison Rae sported the tee at Coachella; Tilda Swinton posted a selfie of her wearing it while blowing a kiss. (And then there’s this Lisa Rinna moment.) Prior to the premiere, Pascal had already rocked it at his 50th birthday where he partied it up with the house DJ Honey Dijon, who’s a transgender woman. His younger trans sister, Lux, a model and activist, recently gushed over him to The Hollywood Reporter: “What makes [Pedro] so fabulous is that he wears all of his humanity on his sleeve.”
What does it mean that the liberal-slogan tee, once a hallmark of cringe, has become popular again? The Protect the Dolls shirt hearkens back to the #Resistance merch of the mid-to-late 2010s (“The Future Is Feminist” or “In This House We Believe Science Is Real”) and the corporate black-square campaign to protest police brutality in 2020. A few years ago, such basic awareness-raising would have been dismissed as armchair activism for privileged people. But times feel so bleak, and real public dissent so scarce, that even would-be haters have lined up to defend it. “There’s nothing wrong with some liberal tote bag activism when everybody and their mama is a terf right now,” an X user responded to criticism of the Protect the Dolls shirt on Saturday.
— by perfect 🔻 (@lmp3rfect) April 25, 2025
Corporations and public figures, once eager to show off their progressive bona fides, have abandoned even the pretense of caring about social justice; universities and law firms, so-called strongholds of liberal democracy, have prematurely crumpled as President Donald Trump demolishes the rule of law. (Harvard, an unexpected hero for defying, then suing, the Trump administration, nonetheless has continued to suppress pro-Palestinian organizing.) In this climate of silence, saying anything feels like something. Of course, it is not enough.
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It can’t be. Trans people, who constitute less than 1 percent of the American population, have been demonized and endangered by a vicious mob who want nothing short of their eradication. They have been thrown under the bus by ostensibly liberal news outlets like the New York Times, which has been called out by over 100 LGBTQ+ organizations for its biased coverage of trans people, and Establishment Democrats who will blame anyone but themselves. In January, Trump signed an executive order prohibiting medical professionals from providing gender-affirming medical services to trans youth, referring to such care as “chemical and surgical mutilation” and “a stain on our nation’s history.” In response, even blue-state hospitals like NYU Langone canceled appointments, sending trans kids and their families into a panic spiral. Cut contributor Grace Byron, discussing the ongoing bureaucratic nightmare of being a trans person in the The New Yorker, explains that the goal “is not just to limit trans people’s ability to move through the world safely, it’s to codify a moral judgment: that trans people are deplorable.”
For Pedro Pascal, wearing a Protect the Dolls tee to a Marvel premiere isn’t just about red-carpet virality, it’s about keeping the pressure on his employer, too: Marvel is owned by Disney, which called for the repeal of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill in 2022 only after significant protest from its employees. Later, in another well-publicized incident, Pascal called out J.K. Rowling for “heinous LOSER behavior” in an Instagram comment, amplifying a public boycott of HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter series despite being one of the streaming service’s biggest stars. It’s on all of us — you, me, celebrities — to fight for the trans community in every way possible: cooking for our friends after their top surgeries; participating in bathroom sit-ins in Washington, D.C.; disseminating information about pending anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. And it’s on us to direct the cultural conversation. “We’re trying to get people to move out of this frame of trans visibility,” Raquel Willis, the co-founder of Gender Liberation Movement, told me. “When they say trans people can’t access gender-affirming care, it’s a stepping stone to block people from accessing all types of medically necessary care.”
In the snippy defenses of the Protect the Dolls tee I’ve seen online, I sense exasperation with leftist activism more concerned with our acting perfectly in a hypothetical world than making progress in a real one. Instead of just criticizing others for their privilege, we should help them leverage it strategically. We should ask ourselves: What more can we do to “protect the dolls”?
