Guest post: It’s strange and confusing because it’s impossible
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Nuanced.
“Remember that your child has probably been thinking about and exploring this for some time – whereas you’ve just found out and you now need to go through that process of learning and discovery too
Pay no attention to those TERFs with their talk of ROGD! NO SOCIAL CONTAGION TO SEE HERE, FOLKS. YOUR CHILD HAS BEEN THINKING AND EXPLORING, SO SHUT UP AND NOD AFFIRM WHATEVER THEM SAYS.
Notice that there’s no suggestion that the parents cast their minds back to their own experiences struggling with these same issues when they themselves were growing up. Because none of this shit had been invented yet. The Beeb would have been able to connect the old vocabulary used to describe these concepts to the new terms. But they don’t because they can’t. What are being described as new terms are the novel redefinitions of old terms, hijacking them and using them in novel, idiosyncratic ways that have no parallel to the parents’ experience of puberty and maturation. Sex words turned into gender words. Sex words conflated with gender words in order to suggest that sex is somehow fluid and malleable, that your personality (i.e. “gender identity”) can and should override the trajectory of your body’s pubertal development.
If it were true that “there have always been trans,” then there would be a rich history of growing up with these struggles with supposed “gender identity” already present in the whole cultural tradition of “coming of age” stories. Sure there’s plenty of lore surrounding growing up, of boys and girls becoming men and women (much of it burdened with sexist, patriarchal stereotypes), even of discovering one’s homosexuality, but there’s no rich tradition of becoming the other sex. It’s all new to parents because it’s new, period. It’s strange and confusing because it’s impossible and can’t happen. Children are being told it can, and, being impressionable, some – too many- believe it. Without outside prompting, this isn’t something the children would be pursuing. It’s no different than if what was being encouraged was trans-speciesism rather than trans genderism. Changing species is just as impossible as changing sex, but advocates of the former lack the power and influence to inject their beliefs into society the way genderists have uploaded transness into the culture. Transness is freshly made up, out of whole cloth, putting the lie to the claim that it has always been around. Parents would have already been exposed to it and in the know if it were as widespread as it is claimed to be, or more importantly, real at all.
Children are prone to magical thinking, and that tendency is being exploited. Instead of being urged to explore a creative mindset, children are being told fantasy is reality and reality is fantasy. I grew up with a lot of fantasy surrounding me, but my parents kept me on track so I could understand what was real and what was imagination (except where it came to god; then I must accept the big sky father).
Stopping puberty will have disastrous consequences in the future for these children.
I am always astounded at people defending against a perceived attack on video games or movies or fantasy books or whatnot by saying “I read books about dragons and wizards, and I didn’t become a wizard”, or “I played video games with shooting and killing, and I didn’t grow up to be a serial killer”. We read books, we encourage children to read books, as a means to entertain and inform and inspire and influence and spark imagination. Not everyone who reads a book about Katherine Johnson will become a mathematician, but some may find inspiration in the story and move in that direction. It’s not a strange thing. The fact that a person is able to take good influences from cultural material and avoid bad influences from similar material is not due to the nature of cultural material.
Similarly, social contagion is not a strange thing. Parents like to monitor their kids’ social circles to be aware if they are getting involved with gangs or drug addicts. Kids adopt clothing styles, music preferences, and many other things from their friends. I cannot fathom why social contagion can influence drug use or criminal activity but not declarations of trans-ness.
The closest there is to a ‘tradition’ of trans-ness would be the very storied women who posed as men, either in pseudonyms while writing, or even full-time when in public. But of course, this was quite a different beast than the modern phenomenon, no matter how much the current wave of trans activists seeks to claim them as predecessors.
They didn’t pose as men because they wanted to be men; they posed as men because there was something more important to their lives and identity than mere gender. Mary Ann Evans was going to pick up a pen and write, goddammit, and if she had to do so under the name George Eliot, then so be it.