The Power Of The Shark
How An IKEA Plush Became The Face Of Trans-Feminine Culture
You never really remember the first time you see a meme.
Truly, where were any of us when we saw our first Cheezburger Cat, O RLY owl, or gif where Vince McMahon looks like the horniest human being to ever live. It’s a silly thing to seriously think about, but we all grew up around memes. It can be easy to pretend we don’t engage with them — but a smile comes across our face nonetheless. We notice them when they either appear in the perfect context, or simply become impossible to ignore from ubiquity.
The latter is how I first became aware of BLÅHAJ. A large child’s shark plush sold by IKEA, for a reasonable (and yet also ludicrous) $29.99. As a cracked egg that refused to leave the shell, I was deep into transfem meme culture years before I came out to myself. I spent hours browsing and laughing over situations that were suspiciously relatable — but described in a foreign meme language. /r/egg_irl on Reddit was a secret addiction for me, visited in incognito browsers because I had to hide gender even from my internet history.
By the time I was even aware of the shark, it was everywhere. If you’re curious how deep I got, I hesitated typing that last sentence because my BLÅHAJ is a “he” and calling it anything else made me emotionally vulnerable. The rise of the meme perfectly coincided with my own transition in early 2022. So as I fully committed to this new social group, the shark was absolutely everywhere.
Sure enough, after I did come out — I made an excuse to visit IKEA with my mom to buy furniture for my forthcoming move. Transitioning coincided with a major breakup, so I was truly building a new life as I walked the maze of shelving solutions. A new bed set was a necessity, a tool that would give me tangible proof of my transition in life.
So was the shark.
I added it to our cart, offering a truthful yet embarrassing explanation. “This shark is a transgender icon.” I said not a further word about the matter. My Mom was immediately understanding, as she has been throughout my entire transition. She knew what it was like for her daughter to buy something just because all the other girls had one.
On the way out, I saw a young boy buying the exact same shark. But I didn’t feel self-conscious about it. It made me smile, because I knew that kid was probably going to be best friends with this cute shark — and so was I. At first it was a bit of an in-joke, an extension of a meme — something in my room prominently displayed next to a novelty towel from Homestar Runner. This was just an online joke I thought was funny, and had eased me into a huge life choice. Just a little decoration.
The shark now lives in my bed — alternating between a body pillow, lumbar support, and hug buddy who gets tucked in every single morning as I make the bed. My affection for it started as a bit of a joke, but quickly became very earnest. There’s something very valuable to the touch starved in a person-shaped pillow, packing a cute face to enter our heart.
I’m far from alone. Multiple friends have bought BLÅHAJ, and all tend to give it a bit of a personality. Be it for the Twitter bit, or for themselves — it’s a companion that doubles as cultural shorthand. Anyone and everyone is free to pick up one of these soft cuties, and make it a part of the family. But it’s the transfem community in particular that have turned it into a pride symbol.
Of course, when I talk about ‘transfems’ — I’m really talking about a specific niche of the community. A certain demographic of perpetually online girls who found each other online long before they even knew what being ‘trans’ was. My experience isn’t the universal transfem experience, and neither is theirs. But BLÅHAJ is the little mascot for this particular scoop of millenial weirdos.
The shark was first sold in 2014, an unsuspecting member of a wide line of mass-produced plush toys resembling animals. A polar bear by the name of SNUTTIG appeared alongside BLÅHAJ in a print ad depicting the two as a couple in embrace. Their love was as valid as any of ours, a confusing showcase of pride that would eventually define a generation of young women.
Russian social media first started to make jokes with the shark’s downtrodden face and weak limbs. The name was the perfect example of IKEA’s famously clunky branding, a portmanteau of BLÅ (blue) and HAJ (shark) into an adorably unpronounceable title. The shark’s blue, pink, and white coloration naturally popped, the under-stuffed fins useless as arms.
In early 2021, IKEA Japan released a series of ads where a man in a bulky BLÅHAJ mascot costume sells people on tiny homes with the help of IKEA’s compact furniture solutions. The lumbering carnivore traverses the city, enthusiastic about the potiental of a tiny living space. Across the globe, everyone agreed — this shark is a goddamned star.
With so many transfems deeply engrained in global meme culture, they knew about the potiental of BLÅHAJ before anyone else. So with a military degree of swiftness, they captured BLÅHAJ for themselves. The shark was on estrogen. The shark loved pickles. The shark loved everyone, even if other people thought they were a little bit big and awkward in spaces. A cute soul in an intimidating body.
Meme culture is all about awareness. So before most of the general public knew what a BLÅHAJ was, they knew it was a trans thing. Online communities have been quick to exclaim that BLÅHAJ is for everyone, but the role the shark has within this specific region of queer culture is undeniable. I know more trans women who have BLÅHAJ than who have health insurance.
So why this shark? Why did this subset of queer culture gravitate so strongly to one budding meme superstar? Why didn’t this happen with all memes? Why aren’t Shiba Inus for any one hyper-specific demographic? For an explanation, I briefly want to warn everyone that I might inspire them to open Facebook for a second. Deep breath.
The Minions first appeared in Despicable Me in 2010, small background characters that quickly stole the show with their bulbous eyes, round stances, and slapstick bullshit. For as exhausted as the Minions have become in modern culture, you can’t deny — they’re a funny little concept. Round little idiots who get smacked around, and smack each other around. We all agree they’re at least a little funny.
But White Moms got there first, fuckers. They were the earliest adopter of Minions as a source of comedy, and made an immediate landgrab.
Minions belong to white suburban moms. It is the definition of “Your Mom’s Meme.” A subculture so deep that the mere format of ‘a minion with text on it’ is shorthand for profoundly racist conspiracy theories. It doesn’t matter if they like bananas, play pranks, or speak in gibberish. They kneel for the cross, and stand for the flag, motherfucker.
Early adoption of a meme incites ownership. Like it or not, the internet’s attention span is a game of first come, first serve. Trans women simply got to BLÅHAJ first. It is theirs to include and exclude at will. Be grateful that they kept it clean and quiet enough that IKEA still sells so many of them a year without blinking an eye. It’s not just awareness that allowed trans women to plant this flag though — it also reflects deeply shared beliefs within the community.
Being a trans woman involves a certain degree of inevitable trauma. Hopefully it will not for future generations, who are aware of their own existence with early clarity. To be a trans woman is to have missed being a girl. To have spent one’s formative years having the incorrect childhood experiences. I am a woman who has never attended an all-girls sleepover. Didn’t own a Bratz doll. Didn’t give a shit about Hannah Montana or the Jonas Brothers, and only experienced Twilight years after the fact due to a very pushy ex.
I didn’t get to be a girl. I never will. It’s okay. That lack of experience is depressing, but it also defines my femininity. Because I have sisters who made the same realizations, nostalgia locked to a different sort of shared experiences. Male lives, but from the outside looking in. Little boys who didn’t quite get why the other boys were wrestling, if they even got invited to the birthday party in the first place. Spending long nights on Sailor Moon or Ranma 1/2. This is somewhere I could fit in, even if I didn’t share all the same qualities.
There’s a beautiful trauma to how the girls I grew up with weren’t on the schoolyard, but were on the official NSider Nintendo Forums or Neopets. We were all the quiet ones on the schoolyard, anxious to get off at 3pm to run home for Slime Time Live, hopping on MSN DSL, and reading up on what new details of the Nintendo Wii were coming out of Japan than week. All pretending to each other that we were a few years older, a few years wiser, and absolutely were cool, nerdy men.
The connection fell apart in our teen years. Changing circumstances eventually forced us to ‘be a man’, and we picked up enough male socialization to get by. Some sad souls even lashed out at the queer community, violated by the way it made them think about ourselves. A sad life, perpetuated without meaning.
As millenial adults, we all became aware of these shared lies around 22–30. Of course, some got there earlier and some got there later. No shame in that. We all have a night in common, one spent in the dark thinking if they truly, at last, found the answer to a misspent life.
Our forum accounts replaced by Twitter pages and Twitch streams, we found each other again. On new forums under new names, or in threads about the sequel to the sequel of a remake to the game you loved as a kid. We connected. A culture grew. After years of talking ourselves down, deciding that we deserved to be ignored by the masses — the girls spoke up. The growth of nerd power on the internet (a phenomenon that has made everyone else’s life worse but mine much more enjoyable), led to us driving a conversation of memes and culture. The lowest wrung of society, but one we knew like the back of our suspiciously manicured hands.
The reason cis people love the MCU? Millennial Trans girls. The reason The Wachoskis got to have a career for as long as they did? Millennial Trans girls. The reason why you laugh at 69 and 420? You guessed it. Millennial Trans girls. The web is our domain, the toxic sludge we evolved from like a goddamned river monster.
So we took BLÅHAJ. The cute little dork who we all would have fawned over as girls. The cute phenomenon that crams the airwaves and overwhelms the multiplexes. But we didn’t get to speak up back then. Or rather, our voices were heard loudly, but in the wrong direction. (Why else do you think Universal thought Scott Pilgrim vs The World was going to be a hit? Millenial Trans girls.)
The cute little shark gave us all something to rally behind. A joke that we’re clinging onto today, even if it makes those outside the community cringe. BLÅHAJ makes us happy. The curved bastard just makes us feel good, and we get to decide how often we see one — without any judgement over what it means to another class or subclass of people. Cultural ownership is often an invisible force. Let the girls take this one.
That’s what brings us to today. An age where one $30 shark defines a generation of trans girls, confusing outsiders but letting some know that they can be in on the joke too.
