Several years ago, Jules Hoffman’s nephews and niece posed a simple question: Are you a boy or a girl?
“I don’t really feel like either of them, is that okay?” Hoffman, who is transgender and nonbinary, told the now 8-, 7- and 3-year-olds. “Their response is always like, ‘yeah, that makes sense.’ And that’s it, the conversation’s over.”
Hoffman is now one of the stars of the wildly popular YouTube channel for babies and toddlers, “Songs for Littles.” Using their niece and nephews — which they refer to as niblings — as inspiration, Hoffman belts out tunes on pizza, dinosaurs and the hokey pokey. The channel’s most popular video, which teaches baby sign language and nursery rhymes, has been viewed more than 290 million times.
But the channel, which has more than 3 million subscribers, has come under fire recently after some parents took issue with Hoffman’s identity, asserting falsely that the show introduced the concept of they/them pronouns to their young audience. A video on TikTok criticizing the show has been viewed more than 400,000 times, with one commenter asking “why can’t kids just be kids ... [without] this pronoun bs.” Another chimed in, writing “I’m not confusing my kid. They/them means you’re referring to multiple people.”
Hoffman, 30, said the backlash was a surprise and sent them on a “roller coaster” of emotions as they waded through hundreds of TikToks and commenters, some critical and others supportive. The show’s star, Rachel Griffin Accurso, an educator and songwriter, announced that she was taking a break from social media to address her mental health after the fallout.
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“Hurtful videos and comments, no matter how much attention they get, will not bring you want you want. Only love can do that,” Accurso wrote in the caption of a video announcing her temporary departure.
The online criticism comes as conservative lawmakers introduce dozens of bills on gender and diversity, ranging from requiring teachers to use pronouns matching children’s sex as assigned at birth to banning children from drag shows. Now, the backlash has come to children’s programming, a $1.6 billion industry, which critics have said often excluded marginalized communities.
“Someone just saw me and I was a vessel for some of that fear and that rage,” Hoffman said.
Television shows for children have traditionally been reluctant to include LGBTQ topics and people on their programs. The actor who played Officer Clemmons on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” Francois Clemmons is gay and revealed in his 2020 memoir that the show’s star encouraged him to stay in the closet for fear that being out would harm his career.
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But more children’s programs are including gay and lesbian characters in recent years. A character on the animated program “Arthur” came out as gay in 2019, and so did a character on “Adventure Time” in 2018. It has sometimes led to backlash. In 2020, “Sesame Street” was criticized after actor Billy Porter made an appearance on the show wearing a tuxedo gown.
“For a long time it was felt that [LGBTQ topics] would be confusing to children, they wouldn’t understand it. Parents wouldn’t understand it. And it was better to omit it or be completely vague,” said Sherri Hope Culver, the director for the Center for Media and Information Literacy at Temple University.
That thinking began to change as much of children’s programming migrated from network television to YouTube, Culver said. About 80 percent of all parents with a child who is 11 years old and younger say that their child watches videos on YouTube, according to a 2020 by the Pew Research Center.
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They “are answering to themselves, creators on a network are answering to network executives. So there is going to be a huge difference in the freedom that a creator has,” Culver said.
“We know that some parents are concerned about LGBTQ+ related issues in entertainment designed for children while others are seeking this content,” the Parents Television and Media Council, a nonpartisan group, said in statement. “When it comes to entertainment for children, parents ultimately play the most valuable role in determining what their children watch on screens.”
Hoffman says they began questioning their body and gender identity at 3 years old. At 17, they told their dad they were gay. “My dad was like, ‘Okay, what’s new?’ It didn’t even faze him at all, I don’t know how I got to be so lucky,” said Hoffman, who grew up in Texas.
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But Hoffman says they were still searching for the right language to describe themselves. A decade later, they began identifying as transgender and nonbinary — meaning they don’t identify as either a man or woman.
Share this articleShare“I just kept saying I’m both and I’m neither and I don’t know how to describe that. And it’s kind of a scary place to be to question yourself and not have words for it and not know how to share that with people," Hoffman said.
Their parents were also unfamiliar with the terminology but accepting.
“They have days where they really get my right pronouns and days where they’re struggling with it," Hoffman said. “But they always pull through.”
In 2018, Hoffman answered a job posting seeking a performer for an in-person children’s music class in New York City. At the time, they were walking dogs and teaching songwriting. Hoffman, who plays the guitar, piano, trombone and drums, says they submitted several original children’s songs, including a favorite about “imagination” written to “teach kids that they can do anything.”
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Hoffman also nervously told Griffin Accurso, the star of what would become “Songs for Littles,” about their identity. They were hired.
“I’ve always just shown up as myself,” Hoffman said. “My defining factors are that I’m energetic and fun and creative and imaginative and loving and that’s who I’ve come across as on the screen, I hope."
The music classes started out with a handful of kids, but soon moved to YouTube where “Songs for Littles” quickly became a hit, especially among parents searching for ways to entertain their children during the pandemic.
While Hoffman can’t pinpoint the catalyst for the recent controversy, their pronouns are listed on the show’s website as they/them and they are more open about their life on their personal TikTok account. There, Hoffman posts impressions of Elmo and Mickey Mouse, experimental music and videos with their niblings.
They have also described anxieties over an upcoming surgery, which they declined to discuss in an interview, citing privacy concerns.
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Things began to change when a TikTok user, mama_burg, who described herself as a “traditional mother” lamented a few weeks ago: “When miss Rachel introduced they/them/their pronouns so you have to stop watching her.” The video, which includes the hashtags #protectthechildren and #pronouns, in the description, has been “liked” nearly 14,000 times. The user didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The debate quickly flooded Hoffman’s comments and email, sending the show briefly into hiatus.
“I try not to get too caught up in the negativity, but really focus on the people that are standing up for me and want to be a part of this conversation to create a better world for their kids,” Hoffman said.
The show hasn’t lost support among moms like Kaela Skiba, 21, from Lakeland, Minn., who began watching “Songs for Littles” with her 20-month-old son, who loves singalongs about dinosaurs, during the pandemic. “I love that everything on the show isn’t extremely overstimulating like a lot of kids cartoons,” she said.
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Skiba said while Hoffman’s gender identity hasn’t been discussed on the show, it’s not a secret. Hoffman typically dresses androgynously with a baseball cap or beanie and a button-down shirt. “One can typically assume that they were” nonbinary by their appearance, she said.
“I don’t have any negative thoughts about Jules [Hoffman] being on the show, I’ve always loved them,” Skiba said.
Research shows that children tend to be more open to seeing trans and gender-nonconforming representations in media, said Alithia Zamantakis, a postdoctoral scholar at Northwestern University’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing.
“Babies and toddlers don't necessarily have a huge sense of gender to be recognizing if a person is a man or a woman,” Zamantakis said.
Seeing gender-nonconforming people normalizes them so that children see them as “a simple part of reality and not some oddity,” Zamantakis said. For children who realize later on that they are gender-nonconforming, viewing representations of themselves in media can make them more resilient and positive about themselves, he said.
“You can’t make kids trans, you can’t make them nonbinary, you can’t make them gender nonconforming,” Zamantakis said. “But you can make sure that they know that they have support and that they’re not alone.”
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