Define “suitable”
This is a book for FIVE year olds??
When I saw that Jessica Kingsley were publishing a new book for children on gender, I was immediately interested. Jessica Kingsley are a respected publisher who often produce specialist psychology books. They have a solid reputation and I have many colleagues who have published books with them. I was predisposed to liking the book.
I order The Gender Book. It is advertised as suitable for five to twelve year olds, but the illustrations make it clear that it’s focused more on the younger kids. It’s brightly coloured and looks like lots of other picture books. The characters are ethnically diverse and wide-eyed. Two of them, Casey and Ellie, are our guides. They start off by telling us their pronouns.
Little kids don’t think in terms of “pronouns,” let alone luxury personalized pronouns.
There’s only one mention of biological sex in this book. It’s this. “When each person is born, they’re given an assigned gender at birth based on their perceived biological sex. Generally this gender will be either male or female’.
Excuse me? In a book for young children? Wtf is an “assigned gender” to a small child? It’s nonsense to sane adults, but to little kids it’s just jabberwocky. And as for “perceived biological sex”…come on. That one word “perceived” stands for a tricky abstract concept that is way beyond the ken of a 5 or 6 or 7.
The language seems quite complicated for five-year-olds, and I wonder how they’ll explain ‘perceived biological sex’. They don’t.
Understatement. It’s absurdly complicated for fives.
In the next page we’re told that being assigned male or female at birth is determined by chromosomes, but there’s no explanation of reproductive differences or what being male or female actually means.
Fives know all about chromosomes do they?
From here on in it gets more confusing. We’re told that people can be gender non-conforming – the picture shows a man with long hair and make up, and a woman with short hair and a tool box. Then we learn about cis people and trans people, there’s a cis man baking cookies and a transwoman knitting. We’re told that there’s a difference between gender identity and gender expression. The gender identity is the ‘gender that most feels like ours’ – but how do we know? What does it mean to feel like a male or female? The book doesn’t explain.
The book continues to throw confusing statements at us. We meet new people, one of them is agender, another is greygender. It’s not clear what any of it means or why a person might decide that that is the right label for them. We’re told that 1.7% of people are ‘intersex’, which seems a bit complicated for young children who may not yet have learned how to add and subtract – but it’s also wrong. This statistic is often quoted and is not backed up by evidence because the definition used for ‘intersex’ is not a valid one. The real figure is 0.018%.
Enough. Throw it all away. Give the kids Pooh and Tigger, Laura and Mary and Ma and Pa, Ballet Shoes, Mary Poppins, Swallows and Amazons. Let kids be kids.
It really is indoctrination, isn’t it? Children are supposed to swim in these concepts and accept them as normal and commonplace, even before they can understand them, so that by the time they do, it will all be unchallenged wallpaper, taken as just another part of “how things are,” like photosynthesis, gravitation, and the heliocentric solar system (which are also concepts beyond the understanding of five-year-olds, but which happen to refer to things which do actually exist in the real world).
All of this gender bullshit is going to come crashing down, and it feels like the ideologues are trying to cram as much of it as possible into our heads (and our children’s heads), as well as into the fabric of governance and culture before it does. It’s like we’re trying to interrupt the establishment of a fait accompli; we’ve turned the lights on in the middle of a process that was supposed to be happening in the dark, and the perpetrators are trying to simultaneously pretend that they haven’t just looted the cash box and the cookie jar, and that the money and cookies were already, actually theirs in the first place because SHUT UP, BIGOT!
What is “intersex”? Someone composed of features of all nine sexes? Is intersex “assigned at birth,” too?
I have to go outside and scream now . . .
I know that there is a database somewhere that contains lists of words for books by children at each age. This one would not pass muster; words like ‘perceived’ or ‘assigned’, or probably even ‘gender’ are not going to be on the five-year-old list. I’m not sure if they are on the twelve-year-old list. Since I don’t write books for children, I can’t be certain of the second.
Fausto-Sterling (who was responsible for the 1.7% “intersex” estimate) back in 1993 in a NY Times op-ed piece cited John Money’s estimate of it being perhaps as high as 4%. So this kind of thing goes back for decades and is part of a long campaign for acceptance of transgender ideology that has no problem with misleading both adults and children. “Intersex” itself is a misleading concept that tries to portray disorders of sexual development as somehow being outside the sex binary, which isn’t the case.
According to Child Evangelism Fellowship,
Read the whole thing here — it’s short and to the point.
Go ahead, try to convince me that Genderism isn’t some weird new religion.
I copied and pasted the text snippet into several online readability test scorers. The clearest one (I don’t know all the lingo) gave it a grade level score of 8.87 or Ninth Grade, age range 14-15. Difficulty was rated as “slightly difficult”.
These are crude tools, but I think the upshot is clear. Not anywhere close to written for five-year-olds.
Earlier in the book there’s a section on how it’s fine for men and women to break gender stereotypes ( man wearing make up, woman with toolbox) and if all the other stuff about transgender identities was eliminated, I could see the above exercise helping drive home the point about non-conformity. That is, I could see it helping if it didn’t mention how these things make us “feel the gender we are.” And I could imagine it being useful if we weren’t talking about young children at a stage of development which makes them much more likely to be impressed by the lists of What Boys Are Like and What Girls Are Like than a follow-up mention that oh, hey, no, they’re not… always.
Add in the trans stuff and it absolutely reinforces gender stereotypes. Even adults can’t describe what makes a trans person who doesn’t conform to the socially constructed beliefs about gender nevertheless identify as trans. It’s like describing God — if you haven’t experienced it, you can’t understand it. What’s concrete and comprehensible, on the other hand, is stereotypes.
The steadfast belief that children and teens simply could not be influenced into thinking they’re trans if they’re not really trans reminds me of the similar conviction regarding children and sexual molestation during the Satanic Panic and similar panics on child abuse. No matter what leading questions were asked or what coercive techniques were used over what amount of time, a five year old would never say someone touched them inappropriately if it didn’t happen. Never — it’s like a special gift of clarity and purity that rises above the massive evidence we have on psychological influence under social pressure.
Thus, kids who aren’t trans absolutely know their gender with the unerring accuracy of those who know their true gender doesn’t match up to what others see. Perhaps that’s why the book skips over defining critical terms. The kids already know, having burst upon this world trailing clouds of gender. The lesson is only to jog their memory.
Very Romantic.
[…] a comment by Sastra on Define […]
Because five year olds are so knowledgeable about chromosomes.
Most adults aren’t knowledgeable about chromosomes. So of course five year olds would be, right? Because kids know more than any adult on earth…at least, that’s what we seem to be moving toward.
It seems to work with electronics. Maybe if you tell a five year old that chromosomes are some sort of computer accessory or game console, they’ll nod sagely and start doing recombinant DNA experiments right after milk and cookies.