Validate or else
Julie Bindel on “conversion therapy” and the laws.
The [Scottish National] party has proposed a new law that could criminalise parents for refusing to fully validate their child as transgender.
Among the actions that could be criminalised are preventing someone from “dressing in a way that reflects their sexual orientation or gender identity”, even if that decision were to be taken by a parent acting to protect their child from gender ideologues.
The SNP proposed a law to force parents to encourage their children to believe in a delusion.
Five or ten years from now will the SNP be writing laws to force parents to let their children dress up as dogs, sheep, dolphins? Not for parties or giggles but for daily life, including school?
Over the past decade, the number of children claiming to be transgender or non-binary has rocketed, as has the number accessing gender clinics.
The facts are shocking. A high proportion of children attending gender clinics have some form of autism; puberty blockers almost always lead a young person on to irreversible cross-sex hormones once they reach the age of 18, and the serious mental-health issues and trauma that the child may well be experiencing are often overlooked in favour of simply validating (labelling) them as transgender.
Imagine if mental health issues caused children to think they are rabbits, weasels, frogs. Imagine how healthy it would be to encourage such delusions.
The interim Cass Review into the NHS Gender Identity Development Service was very clear that there is both a distinct lack of evidence about the effects of puberty-interrupting drugs on children and a great deal of confusion as to their purpose. Parents have not just the right, but a duty, to prevent their children from becoming immersed in a dangerous fiction that will affect them for the rest of their lives.
That’s Kathleen Stock’s insight: that people who call themselves trans are immersed in a dangerous fiction. Immersion in fiction can be a fine thing, and it can be a harmless thing, but if it gets hooked into a fad for “validating” the fiction as rock-solid truth…not so much.
A few years ago — like my father before me at this age, ‘a few years ago’ might be anywhere up to twenty years ago! — but this was probably only six or seven years ago as the crow flies — my niece developed the conviction that she was really a boy, and began identifying herself as such in school. No one denied her feelings but they did not back it up with practical action. Her family accepted her “new identity” but never went so far as to encourage her to take it any further than her feelings; for after all we all are smothered in delusions in childhood. About a year later (more or less) she realised that she wasn’t a boy, and resumed thinking of herself as a girl, and for obvious reasons (having to do with sheer physical reality, I suspect) there was no longer any reason for thinking otherwise.
But to legislate or even encourage kids to act according to their delusions is madness. When I was a kid I saw a cartoon in which a rooster (yes, a bird) was blowing bubbles, and just stepped off a roof and flew away on one. Being in a quasi-dream mood at the time, I really believed that possible. I’m glad I didn’t carry my imagination any further, and stepped off a roof onto a soap bubble! What is it about today that makes the recognition of the madness of believing in children’s illusions so difficult to achieve. Children are deluded all the time, and so are we all. Why do so many adults today simply buy into them?
What’s worse, is that the kids don’t know what kind of fiction they’re getting immersed into. The adults playing along with this fiction have their own agenda, and the kids aren’t being let in on it.
To many adult men, transgender is a special kind of immersive fiction, distinct from the nerdy hobby of live-action role-playing (LARPing).
Larpers get together in groups, and enact their roleplaying personas while they’re among the group, and revert to their real selves when interacting with people outside the group, or when they’re not actively “in session.”
But trans is more akin to kayfabe, a word that came into use at the turn of the last century as “professional” wrestling emerged among the travelling carnivals and sideshows that roved the American frontier. (Its etymology is unclear, but it’s probably derived from pig latin for “be fake.”) Kayfabe is like the reverse of Larping: you can let your guard down and be your true self only when you’re alone with your in-group peers; in the presence of outsiders you must always maintain the illusion that your roleplaying persona is real.
Wrestlers depended on elaborate fictional backstories and soap opera-like rivalries to generate excitement and draw crowds to thier (rigged, performative) bouts. Their livelihoods came to depend on keeping up the illusion that these personas were real; if word got out that they were faking it, the whole profession could collapse for loss of viewership.
“Pro” wrestling continues to this day, and the omertà of kayfabe was strictly maintained until as recently as 1989, when executives from the World Wrestling Federation, facing athletic regulation laws, testified to the New Jersey state senate and for the first time publicly admitted that wrestling superstars like Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant were, in fact, paid entertainers and not professional athletes. Up until then, many of wrestlers’ own relatives were kept in the dark about how fake the whole thing was.
Fetishistic trans-identifying men are just like pro wrestlers in this regard. When they’re alone with each other they’re completely open about being fetishistic men, and they make and share pornographic videos with each other, etc. But in the presence of outsiders, ma’am’s the word. The lie must be maintained or the whole enterprise could collapse: no more unfettered access to women’s spaces and no more power to force everyone else to play along with their fantasy.
A clear example of a trans person’s private reality vs. public kayfabe is Lia Thomas’s social media: his public Instagram account is the usual guff about protecting trans kids and trans women are women blablabla… But he has a second, private Instagram account, which he uses to interact with his private circle of fellow fetishists and to allegedly share content about fetishistic transvestism and porn.
All of this is to say that these fetishists aren’t upfront that it’s all kayfabe to the children and their famililes they’re targeting, or with the institutions that are backing them. They’re not being let in on the scheme. This can and will be devastating to a lot of kids when they grow up and realize that most of the people leading the “trans community” are conspiring together in a lie to serve their personal, private sexual fantasies.
Wow. That’s a mind-bender.
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