Rock climbing without ropes
Young people have always believed that they know better than the older generation, and now the older generation agrees with them. Middle-aged and experienced editors working in journalism and publishing live in fear of printing something that might displease the twenty-somethings who work in their company’s digital and publicity departments. Parents defer to their teenaged children about the correct languages to use and opinions to hold.
There was that chunk of time when, broadly speaking, the younger generation did know better about some things. The Civil Rights movement, opposition the the war on Vietnam, the return of feminism, the LGB rights movement were all partly generational conflicts. That background left practically everyone with an impression that Progress Is In The Kids. There are other impressions that pull the other way, like the impression that Kids Don’t Know Everything, but still – I think that core idea lurks in most people who Identify As progressive or social justicey. It’s taking forever for people to grasp that it slammed into the barrier at 80 miles an hour with the trans thing.
Younger generations have always looked for ways to differentiate themselves from the stuffy old farts who came before – their parents, in other words – while also seeking an identity that confers upon them a set of ready-made beliefs and a supportive social group.
With Civil Rights and feminism and LGB rights that worked out well, even for the stuffy old farts. With trans ideology it’s a flaming smoking melting disaster.
In the appallingly sexist but undeniably revealing documentary, What is a Woman?, provocateur Matt Walsh interviews American paediatric professor Dr Michelle Forcier, who is dressed in a toga and talks in the soothing, beatific voice of a cult leader. She says that children are ready to be put on medical treatment to change gender “when they ask for it”. By “medical treatment”, she means Lupron, which is now used as a puberty blocker on gender non-conforming children, but has been used in the past, Walsh rightly says, to chemically castrate sex offenders. Forcier wrongly insists that puberty blockers “don’t have permanent effects”, and ends the interview.
Forcier is not a teenager, but she’s caught fast in the current teenager Glorious Revolution. It’s a pathetic spectacle.
Forcier is not an outlier. Trans activists now argue that confused four-year-olds should be seen as analogous to trans adults. Not very long ago, I received an email from my children’s nursery to say that a three-year-old who I’ll call Daisy was now a boy and should be called Robert. As it happened, my three-year-old had, that same morning, informed me he was an astronaut, but it hadn’t occurred to me to tell anyone (or NASA), and that’s because children’s identities are mutable. They are still discovering who they are, and that’s as true for three-year-olds as it is for 13-year-olds.
Discovering and playing with and being creative with. Here’s the deal: pretending is fun, and good for children, but adults absolutely need to know the difference between fantasy and reality. They can go on fantasizing, but they have to know that’s what they’re doing, and that they can’t force their fantasies on anyone else. It is not in any way progressive or life-enhancing to build a politics on the claim that whatever people say about themselves [unless they’re feminist women] is true.
I was a very unhappy adolescent girl who was treated for anorexia. So I know a little about unhappy and confused adolescent girls, and how much we attack our own bodies to express that unhappiness. I also know what it’s like to be a desperate parent who just wants their kid to stop crying, to be happy and healthy and safe, and to feel like I’m a good parent who listens. The baby-led approach is an expression of that because sometimes (often) we don’t know what’s best for our kids, especially when it comes to a new issue like gender. But guess what? Your kid doesn’t know either, and nor, it seems, does anyone else who is supposed to safeguard them. Our kids aren’t breaking down barriers, they’re rock climbing without any safety ropes, and we’re encouraging it. It’s time for my generation to grow up, and be the adults.
Way past time in fact.
To me this all seems so obvious. My mother humored me about being Robin, up to offering to dye my hair color to match Burt Ward’s. But when she explained what that entailed, I lost interest. She knew what she was doing, since I was the fifth kid, abs she was also an elementary teacher and loved imaginative kids, but also was clear on where reality lay.
We don’t let kids rule on their diet, what they should and shouldn’t do with power tools, etc. Why are so many modern parents blind to this new expression of rebellion? Why do they not see it for what it is?
I’m not sure what Mom would say about it. But she’d know what’s up.
Too much deference to the old leads to stagnation. Too much deference to the young leads to a culture and government of fads. It is necessary to consider assertions and arguments purely on their own merits, regardless of who puts them forward.
That isn’t so true anymore. I know several people (including at least one in my family) who will say “Oh, Junior doesn’t like [fill in favorite thing to dislike] so I have to make him a separate dinner of macaroni and cheese every night.” Never occurs to parent that Junior might need guidance in developing good eating habits.
I also hear parents complain “I can’t limit their screen time; how would I enforce it?” That is difficult, I realize, during the hours they are away from you, but when they are in your house? Yeah, you can enforce it. My son thought I couldn’t because I was at work when he got home….until one day he came home and found vital parts of the computer missing. He called me; I told him it was bring your computer to work day, so I brought parts of it. Then I told him he wouldn’t get the parts back until he cleaned his room. He asked how I knew what to remove, and I asked him “Who do you think set up the computer in the first place? It didn’t just appear here by magic.”
If any parent would think back and remember their own childhood, they might remember how many times they changed “who they are”. Parents might play along (depending on the parents), but just as play. “Okay, you’re Dr. Who. It’s time for Dr. Who to eat his vegetables.”
The adults who are transing three year olds have lost their imagination just as these children are exploring their own. They’re imposing their own mental straightjackets, playing a very adult game, for keeps, limiting and restricting the choices available to these children before they’ve even learned the rules. These children are being set on a path that they don’t know even exists, and which they can’t consent to following. It’s not much different than preparing a child who pretends to be a cow, for a lifetime of milking, or a destiny of ground beef and steaks.
Iknklast #3 wrote:
I recently came across a term for this: Accomodationist Parenting (not to be confused with religious Accomodationism.) Parents do exactly this, working their and other people’s lives around their child’s expressed preferences and fears. “Ada is afraid of cats, so everyone has to lock their cats away when we visit, always and forever.” “”Ethan doesn’t like fractions — you must give him something else.” And so on, accommodating and adapting in an effort to be sensitive and accepting, with a confident, well-adjusted son or daughter. The child is treated as fragile, and ends up becoming entitled and incompetent. Sometimes they just need to hear “I don’t care, buck up and deal with it.”
The article (essay?) then went on to connect this parenting style to transgender issues involving children. We are all expected to practice Accomodationist Parenting.
And it’s moved into teaching. Actually, it moved into teaching quite some time ago, mostly unnoticed. Now it’s moved into higher ed (even outside gender studies, race studies, and philosophy departments). In my job, it started with accommodating veterans. Well, they’ve been to war, so you can’t say/do/think/wear anything that might be a bad reminder. Of course, not all who have been in the military have been to war, but all who have been in the military are to be accommodated.
Then it’s “Some people aren’t good at math.” In that case, they’re going to struggle in a science class. So we put in mandatory placement. The students didn’t like it, because having to take the classes that would get them ready to take college classes added another semester to their education. Out went mandatory placement. Now if they say they are able to take a course, well, damn it, they’re able! Our administration claims that has been a huge success, that students are still passing math at the same rate. Our math teachers say otherwise. Guess which ones have data?
Then there is something known as Quality Matters. “Quality” means such things as letting student pick how they want to be tested (modern interpretive dance to show your knowledge of mitosis, for instance), not setting any deadlines (which is dreadfully bad for students, professors, and everyone else). If you don’t accommodate their every whim, you might find yourself on the receiving end of an angry phone call from a parent, even though their child is now an adult, because this type of parent manages to get Junior to sign a form allowing us to talk to them.
The “accommodation” of content warnings, to my understanding, was not to prevent anyone from talking/teaching about difficult subjects. It was to allow combat veterans, or rape survivors, to prepare themselves to face the material being presented. Warnings were not intended to shut down any and every mention of any difficult material. Same with “safe spaces.” Originally, there were a few designated areas where a traumatized person could go to calm themselves, away from traumatizing stimuli. Now it’s been converted into a weapon to stop all conversation. EVERYWHERE now has to be a “safe space,” which essentially means bullying and censoring anyone and everyone from saying anything that someone might not like.
Safety-creep, as it were.
There’s a trope about militaries building their strategy for any war according to what worked or conspicuously didn’t in the last war, based on the people in charge often having been in more junior roles learning how things worked at the time. Examples include the US treating Vietnam as a rerun of Korea and coming unstuck very badly, or the French preparing the Maginot line to deal with another iteration of world war 1 and finding it was utterly unsuited to the technological and tactical advances that had taken place by thectime world war 2 broke out.
To a great extent we see what we expect to see, and build that expectation on resemblances to things we’ve seen before. The 1960s and their representation in popular culture have provided a lot of people with a convenient model of virtuos, socially progressive political movements ; they’re driven by the younger generations, they use the language of justice and equality, they’re disapproved of by social conservatives and the religious right, and supported by artists and musicians. Heuristically, that provides a simple way of spotting a familial resemblance to the civil rights movement, which acts as as the archetypal progressive movement and tells you how to orientate yourself with regards to this new movement – with the goodies, obviously.
Considerations of the truth or wider implications of the claims being made then get bypassed by the apparent familiarity of what you’re seeing. Whether the passage of time and the growing number of regretful detransitioners expose people to the reality of their faulty reasoning with the same clarity as military miscalculations tend to is for now an open question.
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