For who they are
So Nicola Spurling deleted that defamatory tweet, and then reiterated the ideology.
“Children must be accepted for who they are, not told that who they are is wrong.”
But who is it that actually tells children that who they are is wrong? Who is it that refuses to accept them for who they are?
Spurling of course is claiming that it’s people who don’t believe the trans ideology, but that relies on a very peculiar understanding of the phrase “who they are.” It relies on taking fantasy as the truth of who people are, while treating the physical reality of who they are as an illusion.
In short it flips everything.
When I was a child I projected myself into a great many fictional characters from books and movies and tv shows. I would live my life while pretending to be other people for much of the time, while always knowing perfectly well it was pretending. Imagine if the adults had asked me who I was at that moment and then said that was who I really was – imagine the traffic jam.
There is no magical spiritual “who we are” that is not just separate from but the opposite of what our bodies determine we are. We are our bodies; our bodies are we. We are also our histories and our social situations. If we were born white and middle class we don’t get to say that who we really are is black and working class. We can say we feel more affinity for the black working class than the while middle class, but we can’t then try to leverage that into mandatory acceptance from the black working class. It’s funny how woke people would instantly agree to that while still feeling so very empowered to tell women the opposite.
Or, more succinctly –
I really like that last tweet. As a child who was routinely told that who I really was was not okay (I needed to be feminine, I needed to be less smart, I needed to focus on motherhood and stop expecting a career, I needed to recognize that I was inferior in physical, mental, and emotional capacity to my brothers), I understand the problem with saying to children you are wrong in your body, in your mind, in your person.
And while the trans lobby will deny this, there are people out there telling girls who are like I was (though many of them are also lesbian, which I am not) that they are in the wrong body – they are not allowed to be themselves, but are told to be someone else. I still remember the post you made once about the doctor bragging about this girl who said she wasn’t actually a boy, but the doctor convinced her otherwise with a PopTart analogy.
I remain appreciative of my therapist who asked me in the 90s if I thought I really should be a man, and when I said no, I wanted to be a woman my own way, was perfectly accepting of that analysis and worked with me on that goal rather than trying to convince me I was wrong. I wonder how often that would happen now?
I just want to grab strangers and make them read this.
As someone who struggled with the idea of male and female gender roles as a kid (I played with dolls with my sisters and actually was having fun,) and as a teen who was often referred to as a “pussy” and a “faggot,” I can appreciate men who don’t feel like they are “real men,” myself. There are other things that I tend to keep secret that if I took them to a therapist now, if were an adolescent, would likely lead to the suggestion that my inner gender is a female. This may be part of the reason that the issue has become such an important one for me. I can see boys and teens being steered, when they are most vulnerable. I worked through it, and have an understanding of gender as a function of patriarchal social structure. But being “girlish” by some perspectives did not make me a female person. I was never “wrong,” I was always me.
Same here, Mike, and a lot of women I know also say “same here.” We could so easily have been steered or pushed that way.
Mike@3, very well said. My childhood experiences somewhat mirror yours. Thankfully, no adult tried to convince us as children that we were not boys. I fear for boys nowadays, with adults actively trying to convince them that they are girls.
Ironically, wokeness has a rather strong core of misogyny. See “white women’s tears” being considered “self-indulgent”, “narcissistic”, and “pernicious”. [DiAngelo, Robin J. White Fragility] I’d also note how that parallels “Karen”.
Oh I know; that was my point.
Figured you did, but I thought it worthwhile to provide starting points for anyone who hadn’t noticed the phenomenon yet.
This whole must be “accepted for who they are” is down there with “If you don’t love me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best.” What, even if you’re torturing the cat? Refusing to play with the black kids?
Another poisoned fruit from the Self-esteem Tree.
‘Believe the children!’ was the mantra of the ‘recovered memory/satanic abuse’ cult. But no adult really hears a child at the child’s level. So, of course, the children who were to be believed were led, coached, coerced, and threatened until they produced the testimony the adults wanted.
I, too, was a fairly ‘femme-reading’ heterosexual boy. I shudder to think what might have become of me if I’d fallen into the hands of this crowd.
It’s amazing the level of subordination to peer pressure implied by this crowd and ideology.
And far too many are just pleased to go that way. It’s really only an expectation of complete submissiveness, gender is merely an excuse, it can’t be the point, because it is a totally worthless goal, and it does not make sense.
It’s thus especially no surprise it is targeting feminism so strongly.