Gender identity for six-year-olds
An item in the latest Week in the War on Women made my hair stand on end:
Twitter user, Sarah Stuart, shared her experience of an online gender workshop she attended.
Wait what? A workshop on “gender identity” for KIDS 6 TO 12???
That’s not a “workshop,” that’s indoctrination. That’s brainwashing. That’s grooming.
Participants received a Zoom meeting link, without password, and an email warning that adults must ‘remain silent observers’. Sarah Stuart reports that most of the children onscreen were without supervision and only one had an adult present.
The workshop trainer was a trans identified female and trans rights activist called Joshua Jernigan. Based in North Carolina, Jernigan founded the Gender Education Network, an organization with “A goal to educate everyone about gender diversity”.
I wonder how Josh feels about the receding hairline.
Jernigan told the watching children that JK Rowling’s recent statements were “harmful” and “wrong” and the ensuing workshop was full of ideological rhetoric; sex is a spectrum, “same-gender attraction” supplants homosexuality, being a woman is not defined by biology, “deadnaming” and “misgendering” are verboten etc. Jernigan also discussed hormones, surgery and social transitioning and told children that they can change their pronouns as often as they like; ‘Try it on and see if it fits’.
I read the whole thread. It’s creepy as fuck.
It is creepy as fuck. But I was slightly reassured by the reporting that except for the obvious ‘ringer’ in the audience the kids didn’t really seem to give a shit.
This doesn’t sound like a good idea, but I do think it’s likely more parents were present than was apparent. When our kids have online meetings we’re usually off to the side monitoring but don’t appear onscreen.
Here’s hoping the boredom expressed by almost all the kids is because their dumb woke parents forced them to participate and this will make them less inclined to be swept up in this fad.
This meeting pushed the book Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, which I thought looked neat and picked up to buy for my daughters. Then I flipped through it for a few minutes and one of the first allegedly inspiring stories was about a woman who was noticed in Africa for her exceptional beauty and became a supermodel. Er, what? Then a bit later was a story about a 4-year-old trans girl (the link has a video of that story being read). I put the book back and found a book about women in science instead.
“Liife ain’t easy for a boy named Sue” – Shel Silverstein
Thanks to COVID, we can sexually groom your children without even leaving our homes!
But seriously, that fat old beardo is what again? A man not even pretending to be a woman, or a woman doing a bang-up job pretending to be a man?
Also, please tell me he doesn’t drive a white van with a teddy bear painted on the side.
Pretty sure that’s a woman… Considering I know someone she’s a dead ringer for I’d say that she’s passing pretty damn well.
I read a good deal more of the thread myself, including the book recommendations.
One of those books is about a crayon protagonist: a blue crayon that accidentally has a red label (including naming the color as “red”) put on it. The crayon’s parents and friends try to help him (clearly a “he/him” — he’s blue, after all) get along with his “Red” label (“let’s color some strawberries!” but it obviously doesn’t work, or let’s cut off some of the red label so you can breathe more easily, but it doesn’t resolve the crayon’s discomfort and anxiety about not fitting in) until some wise and presumably woke person reveals to the crayon that, on the inside, he’s actually blue! It’s good to be true to your inner self!
The author of this children’s story hasn’t thought it through very well. The analogy they want to make is that the crayon was “assigned Red/female at birth,” based solely on outward appearances, i.e., the crayon’s registered “sex,” whereas the crayon’s”true” color –blue — is “on the inside,” and it takes special insight and support to discover the crayon’s “true” inner self, or gender. How many crayons has this author ever seen? The CRAYON is the colored wax. That’s its physical body, and analogous to the sex of a physical body. The label or wrapper is like clothes – gender stereotypes and gender expression. Babies aren’t born with clothes on. If the hospital put a pink gown on a boy baby, it’s the baby’s body, not its wrapper, that determines sex. The doctor wouldn’t put F on the birth certificate just because of the color of the swaddling. And the crayon’s blue color sticks out of the red wrapper anyway. It couldn’t color anything if it’s entirely covered in wrapper.
It would be a mystery crayon, unable to perform any of a crayon’s functions. Nobody is fooled into thinking it’s really a red crayon; everybody can see, from the get-go, that it’s actually blue. The blue crayon can only produce what its physical nature (analogous to sex) permits it to (produce blue color on paper). The crayon’s destiny is determined by its physical actuality (sex), not its label (gender). The author’s “logic” is exactly backward. It’s disingenuous and stupid to try to put one over on children like that, before their critical thinking faculties have been developed.
maddog1129 #6
Exactly, the analogy works far better if you turn it on its head. The TRAs are the ones who claim that blue is red, and physical traits like the wavelength of light reflected has nothing to do with it.
Bjarte, taking that further, there’s potentially a childrens’ book highlighting the dangers of the trans dogma to be written by somebody with better writing skills than I possess.
In the story transcolour rights activists not only claim that blue is red, but when faced with the evidence of light frequencies and shown the Newtonian prism experiments, say that blue and red are just social constructs, true blueness and redness are inner feelings, sincerely held and therefore undeniably true, which nonetheless are obvious to all who take the care to look
Then, one of the TRAs will have the bright idea of wanting to paint the town’s fire trucks with this ‘transred’. When the firefighters refuse to allow it, pointing out the transred is clearly blue and highlighting the point by standing transred against a red truck, the TRAs declare that the firefighters are transcolour- exclusive bigots and begin a media campaign to shame them.
The campaign turns into a real shitstorm, carrying the townspeople along with it and eventually results in the town’s woke council members voting to stop all funding of the fire service, a move which forces the service to disband.
Unfortunately, shortly after the closure a fire breaks out in the council headquarters. As the fire builds the smoke and flames are seen by people in neighbouring towns who send their own firefighters to try to reach the scene, but they are blocked by roadblocks set up by the TRAs who refuse to let anything but transred firetrucks into their town. Meanwhile the fire, fanned by high winds, spreads across the town with nobody to stop it, reduciing the entire town to ashes.