Most institutions have at least one
Helen Joyce explains one reason so many institutions have gone all trans-ideology:
…by now most institutions have at least one senior employee who has socially, and perhaps medically, transitioned a child—and who is likely to spend the rest of their lives justifying that decision to themselves.
It’s a terrible, difficult choice, what to do about it, she says: make their child furious and miserable, or make their child happy at least in the short term.
But that second option amounts to a promise to the child that parents cannot keep without involving everyone else in a pretence. If you tell your child that yes, he “really is a girl” or she “really is a boy”, you require all the rest of us to play along, not just now but always. You require the child’s school to tell the teachers and pupils that Anthony is now Adelaide and that they must never again mention the truth. Anthony has to be allowed into the girls’ toilets, changing rooms and sports teams. When the time comes Anthony will have to go on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and probably get surgery. All of society must be rearranged to accommodate Anthony as really, truly a girl and then a woman. Because anything else means that the parents have made a horrific mistake.
I know of several parents in influential positions in British public life who have made this choice. Each, whether or not intentionally, casts a pall of collective dishonesty over an entire organisation. Any colleague of theirs who knows about the child will feel gagged when it comes to speaking about the dangers of childhood transitioning or the overreach of trans lobby groups. If the parent is in senior management, they may be able to impose “trans-friendly” policies across the organisation, such as gender-neutral toilets or pronouns in email signatures.
I hadn’t really thought of it this way. It would explain a lot. Just one person high up at the ACLU, at Planned Parenthood, at NOW, at the BBC, the New York Times, The Atlantic, and on and on.
It’s grim.
I’d say that this sort of social pressure, even outside of organizations, is one of the primary supporting factors. You don’t want to talk about how ridiculous and evil the movement is because Suzy is here, and her daughter recently became her son. Or it’s Chris, Suzy’s brother who’s here. Or it’s Chris’s wife. Or it’s Chris’s wife’s best friend. The number of degrees of separation the chilling effect can travel is truly frightening.
How many children are growing up nowadays without ever learning how to take “no” for an answer, then having to find out the hard way about the fundamental realities of life? Parents unwilling to teach this lesson create a mental weakness that is easily exploitable by predators. During my childhood, The School of Hard Knocks was often taught by my own parents. I learned from them how *not to* learn things the hard way, with some measure of success overall… (adolescent rebellion has it’s own lessons to teach), but thankfully they didn’t indulge every fantastic idea that I had (and I had more than a few). I’m all for the ideal of ‘you can be whatever you want to be in life’ within a reasonable and realistic framework, but removing all parameters is apathetic and treacherous.
I think the chilling effect goes even farther than that: you don’t need to have affirmed a minor to curtail your speech; it is enough that the minor is within your family or social circle and perceives anything short of “full support” as tacit admission you’d rather they conform, or die. So one kid in a family that’s distressed and “finding their *real* friends/family” elsewhere, and that’s mum, dad, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, teachers, school friends all effectively walking on eggshells, not writing to the paper, not attending that rally, and definitely not saying what they really think most of the time, just in case.
I have to say that I’m relieved that my former employer had moved away from actual DEI classroom training, and chose to use video training instead. And none of the video went into any sort of trans ideology, other than to say that we all belong in this happy little corporate world (until they decide to cut the budget.)
A takeway from this situation is that nobody learned the most important lesson from the Satanic Panic: yes, we need to listen to them, but no, we don’t need to accept what they tell us as fact. Parents know that kids will lie about brushing their teeth, or washing behind their ears, so it’s fitting to discuss with them their claim to be a gender identity that doesn’t match their bodies. Kids live between imagination and reality, which is a big reason that they need adults to keep them in check and to not run off and join the circus. I can think back to many fantasies I had when I was a kid about there being a way for me to take a rocking horse to an invisible barrier beyond which it would be a real horse and I would be a cowboy. It made no sense, but it felt real to me.
I once told my mother that I wanted to be the real Robin and she should have my hair dyed dark brown to look like Dick Grayson’s hair. She told me how many visits and follow-ups it would take at the beauty parlor and I decided not to follow-up on that particular fantasy. It wasn’t complicated nor impossible for my mother to go through the idea without making me feel unloved.
But it’s that old “my child is special” think that once gave parents the “indigo child” label and now leads them to conclude their kids are trans. “Listen to the children, they know who they are.”
Sure, sure they do.