By Steve Sailer
04/15/2021
Earlier: NYT: Everything Is A Trend, Except Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria In Adolescent Girls
A friend writes:
I keep thinking about this comment from iSteve commenter gent:
The real goal of this is to legally pry apart the parent and child relationship.
Society will soon be such that allowing a child to explore or define their own perceived gender, specifically their ability to “express themselves” as that gender, will be considered a human right.
Everything else flows from that fact.
Parents who deny their child’s transgenderism, or potential for transgenderism, will have an enemy in the state (they already do in custody battles you’ve highlighted on the blog).
But transgenderism allows this parent v. child battle earlier than does the battle for LGBT rights, which at least waited until after puberty.
Even more crucial and subtle, child transgenderism plants the seed that children have a “sexual identity” earlier than we previously wanted to acknowledge. Any sort of parenting on the subject of their child’s gender or sexuality, short of allowing them to have sex and watch pornography (e.g., parents now allowing children to view media because of “gay themes”), could soon be a gray area.
A child saying “I want to wear dresses but my dad won’t let me” to a teacher will be what “my parents spank me” was in the ’90s: a reason to call social services.
A friend of mine already has his soon-to-be ex-wife bringing in the county’s Child Protective Services every time he refers to their adolescent daughters as “she.”
On the other hand, is the time right for the bad guys to launch a big legalize-sex-with-children campaign like that of French leftist intellectuals such as Sartre and Foucault in the 1970s? On the one hand, Foucaultism, which works to deconstruct distinctions, such as between black and white, man and woman, and, perhaps not all that coincidentally, child and adult, is now dominant.
On the other hand, our era is increasingly anti-sex. Much of the appeal of transgenderism is to nervous adolescent girls uneasy about this whole becoming-a-woman thing. In the past, young girls tended to associate becoming a woman with being a bride, but now, with pornography ubiquitous, womanhood looks pretty horrifying to a lot of girls.
So, I’m not sure which way it’s going to go.
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