Imagining way too many possibilities
Sarah Phillimore on grooming in the schools:
On 16 December 2021 I saw a very distressing video of a mother, Jessica Konen, speaking at a school board meeting in Salinas, California, objecting to the school going behind her back to counsel her suicidal 12-year-old daughter about her claimed “transgender status”. The anger, pain and misery in her voice was evident.
Local press reported that two teachers at the Buena Vista Middle School in Salinas were recorded coaching other teachers how to conceal the nature of LGTBQ clubs from parents.
The teachers led a workshop about how to run a “Gay-Straight Alliance” club in “conservative communities” at a California Teachers Association conference held in October, called “Beyond the Binary: Identity & Imagining Possibilities”. The teachers described the obstacles they faced as “activist teachers” to conceal the activities of GSA clubs from parents. These teachers were later suspended pending an independent third-party investigation.
There’s helping kids who are lesbian or gay, and then there’s coaching kids to think they’re “trans gender.”
I suppose there’s potential for overlap in both, because schools might want to make sure kids know it’s fine to be lesbian or gay and they don’t need to feel shy or awkward or scared about coming out – so that could veer into persuading kids they’re lesbian or gay. The same could apply to kids who think they have an interesting gender identity, but that’s complicated by the fact that it’s not at all clear that it’s fine to be trans. There are several reasons for that, but maybe the most relevant one for young teenagers is the drastic reduction in the dating pool.
No one could reasonably object to a school making efforts to ensure that its pupils — regardless of their sexuality or claimed gender identity — are able to learn in an atmosphere free from abuse or intimidation. This incident in Salinas reveals serious concerns that such clubs may go much further than merely supporting children, but cross a line into “affirming” young children with transgender identities and deliberately concealing this information from their parents.
And affirming transgender identities is more drastic than affirming being lesbian or gay. It’s more drastic, more magic-based, more eccentric, more linked with narcissism. The existence of lesbians and gays enriches the human story, in my view, while the claim to be the other sex very much does not.
Given that this path of affirmation appears to lead inexorably to medical and possibly surgical “transition”, and given what we know of the sparse evidence base for the efficacy of such treatments, most parents would be extremely concerned to think these matters were being discussed in secret by medically unqualified teachers with their 12-year-old children.
That, but also – what does it even mean? Does anyone know? Do these teachers know? Lots of people have a lot to say about it as if they do know, but what they say is less than convincing. The trans ideology comes across as more like an obsession with UFOs or Satanic Panic than like a dot on the map of human sexual variety. It’s creepy if schools are coaxing children to join a cultish new Gender Circus based on the kind of nonsense talked by trans activists.
Activists need to be aware of the distinction between a sexuality and a “gender identity”. The first does not require either medication or surgery to maintain it and a child is unlikely to “grow out” of feelings of sexual attraction. By contrast, the majority of children with “gender identity” issues left to undergo a normal puberty desist from any further desire to “change sex”.
In other words people are mistaking the shock of puberty for gender dysphoria, and acting accordingly – and schools are joining in the fun. It’s a recipe for absolute disaster.
Yeah, puberty’s not fun. But a lot of things aren’t fun and we aren’t being told we should affirm “identities” based on a fear of the dentist, or falling in the pool, or…or…a vast majority of difficult things for kids.
It’s more than just not fun though – it’s a radical change and transition (a real transition), and it can just feel all wrong. It’s confusing. It happens to people who are way too young to know how to deal with the confusion and the all wrong feeling. But…for most people “it gets better.” It’s deeply weird to see adults thinking puberty angst is a permanent condition that means the angst-haver is in The Wrong Body.
If someone claims to be sexually attracted to members of their own sex and behaves accordingly — demonstrates romantic attachments and physical intimacy with members of their own sex— that’s pretty damn straightforward (so to speak.) We don’t have to question whether sex exists, wonder what a man or woman is, rewrite evolutionary biology, or exercise huge amounts of trust in their subjective reliability in “knowing their own sexual orientation.” Catch a couple of teens canoodling under the bleachers and there’s the objective diagnosis. Sexual attraction isn’t complicated.
Someone claiming to be the opposite sex in their mind would be equally straightforward, if all we were looking at were their personal feelings and beliefs. Instead, we have to overhaul pretty much everything, from epistemology to ontology to biology to psychology to feminism. “Affirming trans identities” isn’t just problematic because of the medical commitments being made on behalf of young children and teens. It’s a twisted and contorted commitment made on behalf of pretty much everything.
I can understand why teachers and others consider transgender claims and see a superficial resemblance to being gay or lesbian. But only years of looking at religious, paranormal, and pseudoscientific beliefs helps me catch a glimmer of understanding concerning how they seem to be able to stop looking so easily. It’s fascinating, in a macabre, depressing sort of way, I guess. And it’s wrong enough and testable enough that it may eventually be looked back on in surprise.
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The closest I’ve ever seen to someone who self-IDs as gay or lesbian changing their mind is coming to a later conclusion that they are bi, with the exact preference ratio somewhere between the ends of the version of the Kinsey Scale that most people think of, even though it’s not the actual one (which was only descriptive of past relationships/encounters).
This makes a certain amount of sense, especially since bisexuality isn’t even on the radar in deeply conservative communities–anyone who is same-sex attracted at all is considered ‘gay’ (if they’re lucky–considerably worse language gets used on a regular basis, of course). So if you are a 14-year-old boy and suddenly realize the quarterback is kind of cute, you don’t think, “Am I bi?”, but rather, “Am I gay?”
And so you go someplace far away to college, and there you find that there are other kids with the same sorts of attraction, and you decide, “Hey, I’m gay!” and do all the coming-out things. Then a few years later, you realize the head cheerleader is ALSO kind of cute, and get to go through it all again–sometimes facing more than a bit of backlash from homosexual students who have been bonding with you during that time, and now feel a bit betrayed (understandable, in the sense that the psychology is understandable, but also very unfortunate and unfair, in that you simply didn’t have the life experience or education to understand your own sexuality).
Meanwhile, the kid with gender dysphoria who doesn’t learn that he’s ‘trans’ will generally outgrow it, usually to his own betterment. He’ll just come to recognize that most of what was causing his dysphoria was the environment of toxic masculinity, rather than some nebulous form of ‘womanhood’ that he is privy to.
Yes, and some boys will also realize that a cause of their dysphoria is their extreme intolerance of change. Such a boy – the type who cries when a business in the neighborhood closes, even one he never frequented – may be utterly horrified by the changes to his own body by puberty.
The siren song of the groomers in our midst, telling this boy that the pain can all go away if he medically transitions, can compel such a boy to memorize the creed of the transgender child (“I have always felt this way, you must call me she or I will kill myself…”) and back his parents into a social corner. Nobody in the medical field can afford to risk telling such a boy the truth, that his dysphoria will only go away over the course of many years.
I think the groomers take advantage of the idea that there are cases of parents who don’t accept their children’s homosexuality and cultivate a “presumption of abuse” in parents of those who they identify as transgender; justifying not communicating with the parents before undergoing a process of transformation. They’re working the system based on a history of homophobia.
Leading the children to believe something and state it is pretty easy for those practiced in the arts of psychological suggestion. We are not far beyond the Satanic Panic, it’s not a distant memory. There are still people suffering from the effects of that particular wave of spurious accusations based on the forced testimony of children, where we were admonished to “Believe the children.”