All on the rainbow
Dang, this is startling even for Ash Sarkar.
The rigid ideology? That’s the people who don’t believe the neon-pink new ideology of Gender’s Veto Power Over Sex?
It’s no more “rigid” to say that girls are not boys than it is to say humans are not crocodiles. “If you’re a girl then you’re not a boy, but what you do with being a girl is up to you, so knock yourself out.”
Of course, it’s not entirely up to you, because we live in cultures and societies, so we’re subject to rules and conventions and pressure and bullying, but pretending to be the other sex does nothing to subvert those rules and conventions – on the contrary, it helps to cement them.
Furthermore, it’s not a matter of “something wrong about trans and non-binary people,” it’s a matter of the stupidity and incoherence of the ideology that claims “trans” and “non-binary” are meaningful descriptors. It’s not that the child is trans or non-binary and that’s bad, it’s that the child is not trans or non-binary, because no one is, because the concepts are gibberish.
And it’s not a rule that parents must listen to their children and accept their choices. Parents often have to say no to their children’s choices, sometimes for the well-being of the child and sometimes because the choices just aren’t possible. Children don’t automatically know better than adults, not even teenage children.
But empathy. What about empathy. I’m attacking empathy, aren’t I!
Empathy matters, but it’s not always all that matters. You know that prefrontal cortex thingy, that doesn’t finish developing until age 25? That’s the kind of work it does – sorting empathy from other relevant factors. Ok the kid feels very very strongly that she should transition or come out as non-binary or whatever the fuck it is on this occasion, but the kid’s strong feeling isn’t all that’s at stake here. What, for instance, about what the kid will feel ten years from now? Does the kid have a good sense of that? No, of course not, because no kids do. Their brains aren’t developed enough and they don’t have enough experience of changing their minds and feelings over time. That’s why It Gets Better – because we get old enough to understand that situations change, our feelings change, what looms large now won’t necessarily loom large next year.
Apart from all that Ash’s advice is fine.
The choice is whether you love your kid for who they are more than a rigid ideology that tells them there’s something so wrong with them that they have to change sex or they can’t accept themselves.
A rainbow is an optical illusion. If you see someone on a rainbow, chances are they’re falling, and the compassionate thing is to try to break the fall. (Can I get a job as an advice columnist now?)
If we locked kids into career choices they make at that age, everyone would be ninjas or princesses or mutant ninja turtles…I would be a minister, because I once said in passing I was going to be when I grew up. I grew out of it.
I had to have my mother’s permission to get my ears pierced at 14. I had to get my mother’s consent to have a major surgery done when I was 17; I had been in a motorcycle accident and wouldn’t walk again if they didn’t do the surgery, but I was underage. I had to have my mother’s consent when I got my wisdom teeth removed at 18. Because I had to have my mother’s consent to have my tonsils removed, I still have my tonsils. She didn’t think there was a need to do surgery for one sore throat. She was right, so I didn’t go through that. Not that I do much with my tonsils. They are about as neglected as a body part can be, but they are there, and they’re mine, and I didn’t undergo unnecessary surgery.
But…if I were still 14 (or younger?), I would have a lot of people standing up for my right to have my breasts cut off and get life-changing hormones because I know EXACTLY what I want, and what I will always want, and my parents have no idea what’s best for me.
So maybe we should let four-year-olds handle the household budget, if they know so much more than Mom and Dad.
There is a viral episode going through certain corners of German Twitter because the Green Party’s newly-elected Youth Representative has some…let’s just call them spicy tweets and public statements from her adolescence. She is black, and progressive, and has apologised for some of her expressions, and so her defenders vacillate between claiming she has nothing to apologise for and downplaying the gravity of her tweets by pointing out that she was a young teenager when she wrote some of them — indeed 14 for some of the most controversial ones.
Of course those most opposed to her on less-than-reasonable grounds are aggressively trying to “cancel” her and get her to step down, but at least some people are pointing out that youthful indiscretions and mistakes are understandable, which is why it is a shame that the German Greens are in favour of gender self-ID. And while I mostly agree that one’s shitty or contextless tweets shouldn’t really impinge on one’s political prospects, it is worth pausing to question a party which insists that a 14 year old cannot be held responsible for trolling people with “Heil!” but that same child should be given hormones and surgeries without hesitation or parental consultation.
Apparently Owen Jones joined in the criticism of this mother — no real name redacted, of course — and the Twitter pile on has been predictably horrible, with TRAs telling her she hates her “son” who will kill himself because of her, etc. etc. Empathy did NOT take the wheel.
Believe the Children is what led to the Satanic Panic, even though the children were being led to say that that these things happened. All of this strikes eerily reminiscent tones of that era.
We don’t learn. Better to believe that Satanic forces are at work than to call Children Children. Better to believe in a gendersoul.
Sastra, I’ve just been reading that. What a shit he is.
It’s remarkable, isn’t it? If you’re under 16 then there are hardly any consequential decisions which you can make you yourself in the uk. You can’t sign a contract of any kind, get a loan, own property, leave school, consent to sexual activity, work more than 12 hours a week, get a tattoo, get a piercing, drink alcohol, get married, be tried as an adult in a criminal case, be sent to an adult prison, live alone, drive any kind of vehicle except a pushbike, receive any inheritance that isn’t managed by a trustee, view or appear in sexually explicit material, open a bank account, act as legal guardian for a child or undergo elective cosmetic surgery.
Some of these things, (bank accounts, piercings,) you can do with parental consent, others (driving, inheritance, pornography) have higher age limits of 17 or 18, which parental consent can’t overrule. The common thread linking all of them is that they’re decisions which can go badly wrong. Taking out a loan you can’t repay is a huge problem, and it’s rightly felt that children need to be protected from the consequences of making those kinds of decisions.
Yet looking at that list there are only one or two items where the potential downside is as stark and unavoidable as the decision to remove or mutilate your genitals or breasts, making yourself infertile and developing a lifelong dependence on continuous medical interventions. But as we all know that is the one enormously significant, irreversible, life altering decision that there is a strong push to have handed over to children, ideally without parental oversight or indeed knowledge. This is at an age where the most important long term decision most people have made is whether to continue with history or geography for GCSE. Utterly incredible.
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If this becomes a thing, we should all be investing in ice cream and Oreos ahead of the curve. We’ll clean up. And become stinking rich.