God’s Good Creation - Blue Ridge Style & Beyond

July 10, 2022July 9, 2022

Creating Fragile Children

Lisa Selin Davis in her recent article continues an ongoing theme of this blog; Coddling Generation Safety Blankey.

Coddling Generation Safety Blankey? Or Affirming Shared Truths?

College Students Demand Protection From Words and Ideas

Young Woman in Profile by Odilon Redon – 1910
National Gallery of Art

Davis, a parent of a gender non-conforming girl, who was frequently mistaken for a boy, has some astute recommendations for “snowplow parents” and the fragile kids they create.

Here are a few graphs.

While some advocates of gender-affirming medicine and gender-identity ideology insist they are saving the lives of vulnerable children, in practice much of what’s taught to kids today about gender—especially the conflation of gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria—suggests to masculine girls and feminine boys that they need to “fix” themselves through medical or psychological interventions that have some irreversible effects, without guaranteed benefits.

There are many possible reasons why this is happening, including the lobbying efforts of transgender and civil rights groups, and the institutional incentives created by federal laws like the recent White House executive order on “affirming care.” But I believe another reason is our national zeitgeist shift toward snowplow parenting, in which parents believe their job is to clear obstacles out of their children’s way rather than to equip them with the skills to navigate those obstacles. We are terrified of our children’s suffering and teach them to be terrified of it, too.

The lessons children are learning about gender in schools, from our culture and on social media, may leave them fragile and thin-skinned, unprepared to withstand pain and conflict and confusion. Take, for instance, misgendering—in the alterworld of Twitter, it’s a worse crime than, say, libeling someone, which is the lifeblood that powers the platform. Children are being taught that misgendering is violence, that every person must be treated exactly as he or she (or they) wishes to be by others or else they’ve experienced discrimination, and that people who violate these rules must be punished, whatever their intent. Children are being taught that feelings are facts. That figurative violence is literal violence.

Most of the time, misgendering means “correctly sexing”—identifying someone by their biological sex, not their gender identity. This can cause a very small percentage of people with intense gender dysphoria deep distress, but doesn’t mean children should learn that they’ve hurt—no, harmed—someone if they misgender them. I don’t want children to be disrespectful, but if they’re disrespected, I don’t want them to melt into a puddle and demand vengeance. I don’t want them to learn that they need to weaken others to feel strong.

Children are learning that sex and sex stereotypes are interchangeable, that rejecting stereotypes means rejecting your body. Or they are not learning about sex stereotypes; the popular gender teaching tool, the Genderbread Person, makes no mention of them. They’re learning that puberty is an aesthetic choice they can make based on their level of discomfort; they are learning that discomfort cannot be withstood.

[emphasis added]

Read the whole thing: The Real Risks of Gender Education

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July 10, 2022July 10, 2022

The Irony of Gender Identity Stereotypes

So here is a profound irony.

Feminism tried to contest certain stereotypes. But Gender Identity Activists often define boy & girl by those very stereotypes.

Gender Critical¹ Feminist’s like myself find this terribly regressive.

Here is how it works.

If a girl doesn’t like pink or dolls and prefers trucks and likes to roughhouse, you know the tomboy type, then GI Activists suggest we should consider…..

maybe she is a boy.

“She likes boy toys :)” by Chris and Jenni is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

We are counseled to consider the opposite for little boys.

Isn’t that ironic.

As soon as the ground of girl & boy is no longer biological femaleness, and maleness, then it is just stereotypes. And a narrowing of the whole range of what femininity and masculinity mean.

Here is a relevant portion of a post I wrote last September about Detransitioner Keira Bell.

Quotes from Keira:

'I felt I was not being listened to at school and blamed it on being a girl,' she explains.

'I did not feel respected as a young woman compared with young men. I thought life would be better for me if I changed my sex.'

This is part of our problem! We’ve got to change this impression. I don’t have all the answers. But I don’t believe blaming “patriarchy” or teaching our young girls with our words and actions that men get all the breaks in the 21st Century Western world is going to help them much. You’ll just increase their sense of victimization. Individual young girls may in fact have been victims of abuse or broken single parent homes, or have other psychological stresses. And that’s tragic. And should be taken into account. But women in the Western world today have never been more liberated, more free to pursue goals they desire. So many women I know say it’s great to be a women & mother living in the Western world today. Tell our girls that, especially the ones who are toying with the fantasy of sex or gender change. (The vast majority of whom are white and/or come from economically secure backgrounds.) Help them in their brokenness. But tell them, also, the world has changed. We’ll keep sensibly advocating for more change where it is needed. But don’t throw in your sex card. That’s not the solution.

The “victimization trap” may play well in the world of radical politics, which is the animating force behind Gender Ideology. But it’s not a recipe for personal or social growth. Just grievance.

Also, we need to teach our young children it’s okay if they don’t conform to expected boy – girl behavioral type. It doesn’t mean they are not a boy or girl. We must stop propagating that fiction! And stop the bullying associated with that fiction too. There are only two sexes or two genders, and a variety of ways for individuals to express themselves. For example, parents with a sensitive boy who likes to read and doesn’t particularly like rough and tumble stuff should find other parents with boys like yours. Otherwise, in today’s world, he might get the erroneous idea that he’s a girl. That’s a road you don’t want to travel.

Same with “tomboy” girls.

Let them play with the opposite sex if they want to as well. But show them other same sex examples like them.

And for God’s sake, parents, let’s do what we can to keep these girls and boys from viewing degrading online porn. If young girls see that crap they might desire to opt out of “being a woman.” Especially after being “properly” trained in Gender Identity theory from Kindergarten! [See this post for details.]

Smartphones, the Internet, & Social Media are part of the problem too. Take control of the devices you pay for! And ask other parents in your circle to do the same. This matters.

Keira Bell

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July 9, 2022July 10, 2022

The Dangers of Gender-Affirmative Care

“Rainbow face paint on child, Leeds pride 2015. Family event. E67A9850” by TerryGeorge. is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Another important piece from UnHerd.com with this essay by Eliza Mondegreen.

[Standard link disclaimer¹]

American doctors are unnecessarily harming children

The Biden administration recently announced a plan to ban “conversion therapy” and dismantle barriers to “gender-affirming care” for transgender-identifying children and adolescents. A few days later, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal introduced the “Transgender Bill of Rights” on Capitol Hill which sought to legislate what the Biden Administration proposed to impose by executive order.

On this issue, the Democratic Party assumes the mantle of righteousness. Who could oppose “life-saving” “gender-affirming care”? Who supports “conversion therapy”, which the Biden administration described as “a discredited and dangerous practice that seeks to suppress or change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQI+ people”?

The reality diverges sharply from the loaded language the Biden Administration deploys, lifting terms directly from the most radical trans activists occupying positions at the outermost extreme of an ongoing debate between different factions of gender clinicians.

The dispute over how best to treat gender-questioning children that the Biden Administration seeks to resolve by enshrining “gender-affirming care” and stigmatising “conversion therapy” boils down to whether or not clinicians regard the children in their care as exceptions to everything we know about child development, human biology, sexual orientation, and more. Attending closely to the language of the activists with whom the Biden Administration has sided provides a masterclass in how to manipulate language to normalise risky and invasive medical intervention on a class of people — children — who are widely understood to be unable to provide consent in other contexts.

What’s changed are the ideas and expectations that we’ve raised children on and the way we’ve turned them loose in an online world whose terrain no one has mapped. Many of these children have grown up with extended experiences of online disembodiment. They may not be free to run around outside with their friends but they’re free to roam the darkest corners of the Internet. Who knows what strangers and strange ideas they encounter there.

These children have grown up hearing a very new and confusing set of fairy tales about gendered souls that can end up in the ‘wrong bodies’. Adults who should know better — adults who do know better — have made these children impossible promises.

Children who identify as trans aren’t sages. They aren’t sacred. They haven’t been endowed with wisdom beyond their years. It’s not fair to treat them as exceptions to the safeguards we place around children, so that when they grow up and change their minds and ask why we let them do this, we say: You wanted it. You asked for it. You were so sure. What else could we have done?

There’s a way in which everything that touches trans must be exceptional — the children, the stakes, the feelings, the possibility of knowing anything for sure — because if these kids aren’t exceptional, then we threw everything we knew out the window. We didn’t ‘help’ exceptional children but harmed ordinary ones, struggling with ordinary challenges of development, sexual orientation, identity, meaning, and direction.

[emphasis added]

Read the whole thing.

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