Right. :-)
Growing up (eons and eons ago - or as my children put it, around the time of the dinosaurs), I remember boys being shoved around and beaten up and called that word. I felt bad for them. They mostly were nice boys. Some of the same bullies pushing them around would pick on me (a girl) sometimes, too. So, to me, a swagger and tough talk didn’t make a boy a boy, or a man a man. What really made a boy a boy was the way he treated girls. If he treated them badly, he was just a jerk.
A few of the bigger boys who never had effeminate mannerisms, and who were popular with the girls, turned out to be three-dollar bills (an old term). ;-) Meanwhile, most of the boys called “sissies” or that other word grew up to marry women, etc. So, it always seemed to me that mannerisms (effeminate or macho) had nothing to do with “homosexuality”.
Ironically, when a boy is called “gay”, the activists assume the boy really is “gay” - even the little boys who recently committed suicide - when in reality, they’re usually just nice boys who were picked on.
I agree. Kids can be “mean” and now with the slide of family life and so much else, many kids are just feral. And kids are exposed to topics like homosexuality which they really do NOT need to know about until they are older.
Simple precepts like courtesy and respect are missing.