The Alternative Universe Offered to Children

Which is neither real nor achievable

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

In my last post, I explained how making up things and calling them facts does not create a false new world. In my original notes for this post, I realized I had inadvertently created two disparate groups of people when you discuss trans issues: adult men and children.

These two categories mesh in an unhealthy way when you are looking at pedophilia. Oh, whoops, pardon me, I meant Minor Attracted Persons (MAP). This sounds so much better, right? The MAP movement’s aim is to remove the stigma associated with adults who want to sexually abuse children.

In my opinion, the last thing we should be doing is normalizing adults using children (or their images) for sexual gratification, but then I don’t believe that any child is trans either. There are many out there who do have a foot in both camps; this man is just one of them. Using their logic if children can “know” they were born in the wrong body, I guess they can also know when they are ready to engage in sex practices with adults (although how children too young to speak would give consent to this remains a mystery).

If, like me, you think that children need safeguarding from predatory men, then read on because I think that children need safeguarding from any adult who seeks to harm them.

The first myth about “trans kids”: Children know themselves

I remain astonished that any competent adult who has lived with/loved/cared for/parented children for any length of time (like say, an entire childhood) could believe this bit of bilge water thinking. Even if you haven’t formed a relationship with a young homo sapiens, surely you can remember your own childhood with some sort of clarity and know absolutely, that some of the ideas you once had about your future self were unrealistic or downright bonkers?

Childhood can be a truly magical time, filled with imaginary friends and endless possibilities. But one of these possibilities is not the ability to change your sex, as this was set at conception, is immutable and however you feel about it, unalterable. I have already written about the lies that parents tell their children and the difference between a bit of social mythmaking (think Santa) and the perils of social transition (which, in order to work, involves the active participation of everyone practicing a deception).

No child is going to consider that they may have “been born in the wrong body” unless they have been schooled by an adult. For many children, it can take about three years before they are conscious that people have different bodies and even longer before they attach any significance to this. All those tales of “my preschooler is trans” (or even “my fetus is trans”) are no more than an adult projecting their own fantasies on a gullible child. Children have to invest their trust in the adults around them as their survival is at stake, so they are primed to believe anything a loved adult tells them.

Here’s a partial list of other things that some people “know” are true that society does not condone, support or uphold:

• I am so fat I can’t eat anything at all and if I do, I will vomit.

• I must kill myself to save my baby from my terrible mothering/my baby will be better off without me.

• I am the second coming of Christ.

• Aliens are living inside me.

• (Insert name of a famous person) is in love with me (even though we’ve never met).

• My friend is trying to poison me.

Anyone who is suffering from any of these states needs help, but taking harmful drugs and lopping off healthy body parts will not be the “treatment” for helping to relieve their disordered thinking.

Social transitioning kids is harmless and can relieve distress

Add or subtract hair, put on a tutu or overalls and voila! Image by www.freepik.com

Nope.

There is no such thing as a trans child and not one human has ever been born in the wrong body. If a child claims this then the very concept and idea that it might be true has been put into their head by some adult.

This child has been lied to by an adult.

It must seem so easy prior to puberty. Change the hair length and clothes and you’re good to go! But all this does is to lock in delusional thinking and make it harder for children to back out. After being made to feel ultra special, sometimes for years, how can kids disappoint their parents and wider audience and admit that they got it wrong? And maybe they really are trans, so it’s easier to just go with the flow, even if this means that their body will be forever stuck in a prepubertal state?

For real life proof of the harms and collateral damage that happens when you socially transition a child read this. Three little girls were thrown into a pit of deception to “protect the identity” of one boy. Treating him as a girl did not turn him into a girl (not even “a girl with a penis”), but it did harm the girls forced to lie for him. They were sacrificed on the altar of “trans”, but their school somehow considered them acceptably expendable.

Hey, you can always change your mind!

In theory, yes, but in real life…

Children are supposed to make bad decisions as their brain matures, but adults are supposed to prevent the worst from happening.  Our frontal lobes are the last bit of our brains that makes us fully functioning adults and this is never accomplished as a child, no matter how mature a child may appear to be. This is where our executive functioning operates from, which is why children are not legally allowed to do some things that adults can do. This is why getting a driver’s licence is age related, not height related.

How many bad decisions do you see adults make where they seem unable to extricate themselves? Unhappy marriages, disastrous financial decisions and a legion of other situations that we adults remained trapped in, sometimes for decades, but we expect children to just announce that they got this trans thing wrong, reverse course and embrace their actual sex?

If children can’t refuse cancer treatments, why are they allowed to consent to the removal of healthy body parts?

Informed consent for medical care is a cornerstone of modern medicine. Gone are the days when unknown ‘things’ would be done to you without your express permission. This is a process that involves asking and answering questions and considering future results.

But when dealing with pediatric cancer patients, sometimes the court system is used to gain consent for treatment that parents are refusing to give. Often this is due to the fact that if left untreated, doctors know that a child will die, so are prepared to override a lack of parental consent. In some cases, a minor child has refused treatment and the court has ruled that treatment must be given, even in the face of a child’s refusal.

After socially transitioning children (which is an iatrogenic intervention in and of itself), the next step in “gender affirming care” (sic) is puberty blockers. Puberty blockers cause harm because puberty is a normal life stage for us humans that you only get one crack at and it can’t be postponed, nor can you “restart” this at a later date.

So to agree for your child to have puberty blockers you are saying you are fine with your child coping with:

• Weight gain

• Hot flashes

• Headaches

• Mood disorders, emotional instability and increased risk of suicide

• Osteoporosis and permanent loss of stature

• Seizures

• Cognitive impairment and loss of IQ

And when combined with the nearly inevitable next step of cross sex hormones:

• Permanent sterility

• Inability to orgasm

• Menopause (girls)

• Micropenis (boys)

This study demonstrated that in sheep, cognitive loss was permanent even after discontinuing the blockers. In humans, the studies haven’t been done.

Puberty blockers are given, starting as early as age eight in some clinics. So, you are expecting your eight-year-old child to give their consent to never fully developing an adult body or an adult mind (as final brain maturation is dependent on successfully completing puberty), to never having their own children, and to not having a normal, pleasurable sex life.

Additionally, if this path is followed to its logical conclusion (cross sex hormones and surgeries), you are expecting your eight-year-old to consent to living their entire life (the next sixty-something years) with their permanently mutilated body. And all of this won’t make them into another sex anyway.

Adolescence is a busy period in human development because this is what turns children into adults. In addition to the obvious physical changes of gaining our secondary sex characteristics, the final maturation of our brains is a massive enterprise that allows us to:

• Develop the ability to think abstractly.

• Become concerned about philosophy, politics and social issues.

• Think long term.

• Set goals.

• Compare self with peers (and peer acceptance gains importance)

• Desire independence from our parents.

• Develop romantic and sexual relationships; fall in love and demonstrate commitment to another person.

I have never met a child who could give informed consent with a full understanding of the momentous side effects of forgoing puberty, and I do not believe that parents have the right to deny their children their full adult potential.

Giving consent to “gender affirming care” is both absurd and futile

It is touted that treating children and teens for gender dysphoria is “lifesaving”. It is not. What is lifesaving is compassionately dealing with the normal feelings of adolescence, which can be frightening for children to feel. Puberty is not some condition that requires a “cure” any more than pregnancy does.

What is harmful for children is lying to them about what they can do in an effort to relieve them of any feelings of distress. Throwing out biological sex is not actually an option and suicide rates are higher in those who have had “gender treatments” than in those who were supported, cared for and had any other mental conditions properly treated.

The whole point of gender ideology is that you give up on reality in the belief that feelings are more important. It should come as no surprise that people reach a point of losing all hope in their endeavor to reconstruct their bodies into something that is an acceptable facsimile of the real thing.

Health care practitioners who promote being trans, while ignoring the very real problems that teens may be grappling with are encouraging them to deliberately neglect the other chores of adolescents. So, while their peers are moving into adulthood with their changing bodies and their nascent relationships, the kids taking puberty blockers/cross sex hormones are stuck in a time warp and can never catch up.  

There is an entire genre of art dedicated to telling stories about an alternative universe to this one. They are categorized as science fiction for a reason.  We need to be alert to the threat that the alternative universe offered to today’s children may be more like science fiction than reality and is similarly neither real nor achievable.