There are no Barbie-like breasts or broad, Ken-like shoulders.

Carefully manicured features betray no obvious gender: the lips are not too full, the eyelashes not too long and fluttery, the jaw not too wide. 25 redefines who gets to play with a toy traditionally deemed taboo for half the world’s kids. The doll can be a boy, a girl, neither or both, and Mattel, which calls this the world’s first gender-neutral doll, is hoping its launch on Sept. Then he turns to the playmate in the toy-testing room, a 7-year-old girl named Jhase, and asks, “Should I put on the girl hair?” Shi’a fits a long, blond wig on the doll’s head, and suddenly it is no longer an avatar for him but for his sister.

“The hair is just like mine,” Shi’a says, swinging his head in tandem with the doll’s. This doll, with its prepubescent body and childish features, looks more like him, right down to the wave of bleached blond bangs. An 8-year-old who considers himself gender fluid and whose favorite color is black one week, pink the next, Shi’a sometimes plays with his younger sister’s dolls at home, but they’re “girly, princess stuff,” he says dismissively.

Barbie doll wig