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....what? How does not wearing pants = hermaphrodite? Hermaphrodites have both sets of sex organs, or at least, that's what I've always been led to believe. And I didn't know stuffed teddy bears were supposed to have genitals (at least as far as the folks of Poland are concerned????). Just...what the everloving ********? Do all stuffed animals in Poland need to wear full dress, or is it just teddy bears? Is a lack of shirt okay, but is it the pants part that disturbs these people? What the hell is the thinking on this? I try so hard to understand how stupid works, but more and more I realize that you cannot apply logic to stupid, no matter how hard you try.... confused

Of course Winnie The Pooh doesn't have genitalia, he's a TEDDY BEAR emotion_facepalm

Here's the thing that makes it even weirder and worse. The town council was voting to decide if Winnie was going to be the mascot of a local park or if it would be a Polish bear character who happens to wear a full set of pajamas. This one woman in the town didn't want the children looking up and seeing nothing where sex identifiers should be. She then, on a local Polish newscast, claimed that A.A. Milne chopped off his own genitals with a messed up razor when he was sixty because he was ashamed to be a man and didn't know what gender he should be. So the town council would rather have a Polish bear with pants than a gender confused bear created by a man who chopped off his own gender identifiers.

So far I haven't found any evidence to back up that woman's second claim at all.

You know, the first time I read this I was thinking about all the obvious stuff about toy bear, apparent lack of understanding about what "hermaphrodite" means, etc.

But on second look -
I'm also wondering, do they even have the rights to use the Winnie the Pooh character?
I mean, I'm assuming you can pay someone money to make that happen but are these genital worrying town folk also worrying about copyright?

If they suggested Donald Duck, he would end up being banned from a European country for reals this time. (He was never banned from Finland contrary to urban legends.)