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Trans activists are effectively experimenting on children. Could there be anything more cruel?
The Spectator ^ | 4/8/15 | Brendan O'Neill

Posted on 04/08/2015 7:03:55 PM PDT by markomalley

Can you think of anything more cruel than telling a five-year-old boy who likes Lady Gaga that he might have gender dysphoria? Or telling a nine-year-old tomboy who hates Barbie and loves Beckham that she might really be male – in spirit – and therefore she should think about putting off puberty and possibly transitioning to her ‘correct gender’?

Saying such things to kids who are only doing what kids have done for generations – messing about, discovering their identity – turns playfulness into a pathology. It convinces boys who aren’t boyish and girls who aren’t girly that they must have some great gender problem, a profound inner turmoil that their tiny minds must address, when in truth they’re just having fun. What an awful trick to play on children.

It’s being played on them more and more. ‘Transgender kids’ – the quote marks are because I’m not convinced that toddlers are capable of thinking – are in the news. On Sunday, BBC 2 aired Louis Theroux’s documentary on trans kids in America. Like all of Theroux’s work, it was objective, observant and humane. It introduced us to Camille, a five-year-old, pink-loving, Gaga-admiring boy who daftly thinks he is a girl, and even more daftly is indulged by psychologists and his parents; Cole/Crystal, a boy who can’t decide whether he is male or female (Cole, buddy, you’re male) and whose confusion was heightened by the conflicting responses of the adults around him; and, saddest of all, Nikki, born Nick, a troubled 14-year-old boy who is taking drugs to put off puberty because, according to experts at least, he’s transgender.

The trend for diagnosing gender dysphoria or transgenderism in kids who a couple of decades ago would simply have been seen as camp (boys) or unladylike (girls) is spreading. This week the BBC reported that the number of British kids under the age of 10 who are being referred to the NHS because they have ‘transgender feelings’ has quadrupled in six years. Forty-seven of these kids were aged 5 or under. Your four-year-old boy loves dancing in leggings to old Madonna songs? Quick, get him to the doctor! It’s bizarre.

The NHS now prescribes puberty-blocking drugs to so-called trans kids when they turn 10 or 11. This seems especially cruel, to deny children that tough but essential transitionary period, that biological burst that turns girls into women and boys into gruff-voiced scallywags who might one day mature into men. We do not ask 10-year-olds to make major decisions in relation to their schooling, where they live, smoking or sex; and yet we now invite them to make the terrifying existential choice to offset adulthood itself, to keep their hormones locked in limbo, to determine what sex they are. What a terrible burden to put on a human being who probably isn’t allowed to walk to the shop on his own or to stay up past 9pm.

We all now recognise that it was wrong and wicked to have castrato singers, males who were castrated before puberty in order to preserve their pure and feminine dulcet tones. The last-ever castrato died in 1922. Yet are we not doing something similar today, using drugs to keep boys (and girls) in a puberty-avoiding state, a childish limbo, having convinced them with psychobabble that they are dysphoric?

The treatment of non-conforming or plain funny kids as ‘transgender’ strikes me as a stunning abdication of adult responsibility. It is the job of adults to correct childish confusions, to guide kids through weird or rough patches, and ensure, to the best of our abilities, that they come out the other end as rounded, hopefully happy adults. But now, the cult of relativism runs so deep that adults even balk from making that most basic of all judgements – that a child with a penis is a boy and a child with a vagina is a girl – and instead we accommodate to the child’s own fads and silliness.

What about children who want to be dogs, or dinosaurs, or racing car drivers? Should we indulge them? ‘Transgender kids’ aren’t at fault at all here – the problem is an adult society that has so profoundly lost the plot that it can no longer steer and socialise the next generation, and can’t even bring itself to say ‘boys will be boys and girls will be girls’ because to do so in our Queer Studies-saturated era is apparently to be discriminatory, judgemental, oppressive.

There’s one more, seriously dark element to the promotion of the ‘trans kids’ phenomenon: it’s being pushed by adult trans activists as a way of pursuing their own interests and agenda. More and more trans campaigners are using ‘trans kids’ effectively as a moral shield, hoping that if they can convince the world that transgenderism is something that emerges as early as three or four then it must be natural, good, healthy, and thus should be insulated from criticism.

That is, they’re effectively experimenting on children, both socially and medically, both through filling kids’ heads with nonsense about dysphoria and offering them drugs, in order to advance their own adult demands for greater recognition. This is repulsive, the creation of a new generation of castratos who are paraded and praised in public by self-serving trans activists who only want more political clout and respect. Stop it. Let kids be kids. A boy who plays with dolls is not trans or dysphoric – he’s just a boy who plays with dolls.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Extended News; Government; United Kingdom
KEYWORDS: childabuse; homosexualagenda

1 posted on 04/08/2015 7:03:55 PM PDT by markomalley
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To: markomalley

Let’s just call it what it is, child abuse.


2 posted on 04/08/2015 7:05:48 PM PDT by freedom6178
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To: markomalley

The last-ever castrato died in 1922.

theres been a question as to whether the ultra feminine Michael Jackson may not have been a castrato.


3 posted on 04/08/2015 7:11:34 PM PDT by MeshugeMikey ("Never, Never, Never, Give Up," Winston Churchill ><>)
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To: markomalley
turns playfulness into a pathology.

It would be better for those who do this to have a millstone tied around their necks.

They're deliberately creating mental illness in those children. Imagine what they're going to grow up like. In the end, they'll kill themselves, because they'll know they're not right anymore, and it was the adults they trusted who did it to them.

4 posted on 04/08/2015 7:15:17 PM PDT by concerned about politics ("Get thee behind me, Liberal")
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To: markomalley

this is all pure child abuse


5 posted on 04/08/2015 7:19:27 PM PDT by GeronL (CLEARLY CRUZ 2016)
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To: markomalley
I don't know who created this graphic, but it needs to be spread wide. It exemplifies what we are facing.


6 posted on 04/08/2015 7:24:37 PM PDT by DiogenesLamp
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To: markomalley
More and more trans campaigners are using ‘trans kids’ effectively as a moral shield, hoping that if they can convince the world that transgenderism is something that emerges as early as three or four then it must be natural, good, healthy, and thus should be insulated from criticism.

Pathologies, no matter at what age they manifest, are completely natural. But that doesn't mean they are good. Are we now advocating that schizophrenics and autistic children are perfectly good and healthy, just because those conditions are natural? What about cancer?

True transgenderism is a mental illness that needs to be treated. Kids who show interest in activities that are stereotypical of the opposite sex, however, are not "transgender," any more than kids who pretend to be animals are "transspecies." They are kids going through phases, like kids have done since the dawn of time. To treat these phases as if they are the kids' permanent identities is a serious abdication of adult responsibility.

I grew up a tom girl. I would have raised daughters to be tom girls (but I had sons). When my husband described me one time as "unfeminine", his coworkers thought he was insulting me--he wasn't, he was just describing me. And I thank God that I didn't grow up in this crazy decade when adults deem that a girl who shows interest in "boy stuff" must really be a "boy trapped in a girl's body."

7 posted on 04/08/2015 7:38:57 PM PDT by exDemMom (Current visual of the hole the US continues to dig itself into: http://www.usdebtclock.org/)
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To: concerned about politics
To Homosexuals their little boys are tools, they want them gay to bring home
other gay boys they themselves can have sex with. Yes it's a sick perversion
and shouldn't have gotten this far. It's a mental health issue for the nation
and protection for our children. they all should be locked up in a mental
facility and lobotomized. Or killed, I don't care which.
8 posted on 04/08/2015 7:48:08 PM PDT by MaxMax (Call the local GOP and ask how you can support CRUZ for POTUS, Make them talk!)
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To: exDemMom

Yes...I was a tom girl too....my Mom thought I was weird....but my (2nd/current) husband would tell you one of the reasons he married me was because I could throw and catch a baseball! In fact i caught a softball barehanded in 8th grade in a pickup game..hit by a boy! I always wondered what would have happened if I’d had a daughter. ..luckily I had a son. The abuse children are getting by trans is evil.


9 posted on 04/08/2015 7:51:09 PM PDT by goodnesswins (I think we've reached PEAK TYRANNY now.....)
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To: markomalley

It’s also cruel for a child to be told he’s a homo and can’t ever get out, so he may as well bend over and learn to enjoy it.


10 posted on 04/08/2015 8:00:38 PM PDT by Some Fat Guy in L.A. (Still bitterly clinging to rational thought despite it's unfashionability)
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To: Some Fat Guy in L.A.

leftists are some really sick freaks


11 posted on 04/08/2015 8:08:21 PM PDT by GeronL (CLEARLY CRUZ 2016)
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To: GeronL

They are not sick, they are evil.


12 posted on 04/08/2015 8:40:04 PM PDT by coincheck (Time is Short, Salvation is for Today)
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To: exDemMom

The craziest part of it to me is it’s based on gender stereotyping that they often decry.

Gender stereotyping is good apparently if it involves butchering your genitalia.


13 posted on 04/08/2015 9:14:18 PM PDT by Bogey78O (We had a good run. Coulda been great still.)
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To: MeshugeMikey

No, he was a perverto.


14 posted on 04/08/2015 9:36:20 PM PDT by Pining_4_TX (All those who were appointed to eternal life believed. Acts 13:48)
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To: exDemMom

When my husband described me one time as “unfeminine”, his coworkers thought he was insulting me—he wasn’t, he was just describing me

were I to describe my wife as ‘unfeminine’ I would be facing death (figuratively) by a million micro-aggressions...


15 posted on 04/09/2015 3:26:51 AM PDT by IrishBrigade
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To: markomalley

The idea that kids who can’t get a tan or their ears pierced without permission can decide they are the opposite sex, and then receive life altering hormones and behavioral conditioning is horrific.


16 posted on 04/09/2015 5:22:10 AM PDT by tbw2
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To: GeronL

Camille Anna Paglia did an interview I think in 2013 or early 2014 where she said she was glad the transgenderism crap didn’t exist when she was a child. She dressed up in boyish clothes, was a Centurion for Halloween, but they would have pushed her to become a “man” in today’s regime.

She’s a lesbian, but she agreed that human sex is a binary male/female, a biological fact, whereas gender roles are much more fluid.

I also respect her for coming out and saying that feminists need to have more respect for men and the work they do.

It’s a Man’s World, and It Always Will Be

The modern economy is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role — but women were not its author
By Camille Paglia Dec. 16, 2013

Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.

Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role — but women were not its author. Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!


17 posted on 04/09/2015 5:25:55 AM PDT by tbw2
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To: markomalley

a pedophile is a pedophile regardless of the abusive technique applied... reading writing and arithmetic... leave it at that .. the rest is libtard bullshit... and the unionized teachers dont do such a good job at the basics.... in new york your child is guaranteed to read at the ninth grade level after 12 years of unionized “teaching”...run spot run...ok you’re ready for suny..(state university of new york)


18 posted on 04/09/2015 6:29:31 AM PDT by zzwhale
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To: exDemMom

Its not a mental illness though, its a biological aberration. The child/person body is one thing, but the brain tells them its another. Its not mental illness, it comes from brain chemistry, hormones.


19 posted on 04/10/2015 4:51:23 AM PDT by the scotsman
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