Since the scientific revolution, that started in earnest in the 18th century and came out of the Western Enlightenment, the scientific world has given us individuals who have changed the world for the better. The fact I can sit here writing this piece on a computer that would have been unimaginable to a scientist of the 18th century is a testament to how far scientific and technical progress has come. For example: In my own lifetime, and I’m not that old, I’ve seen the world of electronics go from one where thermionic valves were found in almost every television set, to one where valves are now are historical curiosities or are only regularly found in specialist high power radio frequency equipment.
The world of science has brought a massive amount of benefits to nearly all societies and those who work in the science fields, are quite rightly admired for their knowledge of the way that the world and the universe works. However that admiration of the sciences and those who work within them should not inure us to the knowledge that scientists or those with scientific or medical training, like the rest of us, are often all too human and can be wrong or even evil.
The world of science has produced many heroes and heroines, such as Michael Faraday and Dorothy Hodgkin, but has also produced those who were mistaken or ideologically driven or even just plain evil. As well as the likes of Faraday and Hodgkin, the world of science has produced those whose names are now synonymous with wrong-headedness such as Trofim Lysenko the Soviet agronomist. Lysenko truly believed that orthodox genetics was incorrect and that his own ‘communist genetics’ was correct. He promoted the idea that a wheat seed could change its characteristics by being planted in a different environment than which it would normally grow. This runs counter to traditional and proven genetic knowledge and has been described as being the equivalent of saying that a domestic dog if released to the wild, would give birth to a fox. Lysenkoism is a nonsense theory but it’s a nonsense theory that got a lot of scientists who disagreed with Lysenko arrested or even murdered by the Soviet state for the ‘crime’ of challenging Lysenko.
Lysenko himself may be dead but in other scientific or supposedly scientific fields, the sort of wrong-headedness and the silencing of critics still goes on. Also, great evils come out of bad ideas being promoted as good ones.
The sort of things that went wrong and were wrong with Lysenkoism are particularly noticeable in situations where pseudo-science has been co-opted to promote a particular ideological agenda. This is very visible in fields such as transgenderism. When I look at the world of transgender, and especially at the claimed existence, by trans activists, of paediatric gender identity problems, my mind immediately summons up the image of Trofim Lysenko and his wrong-headed idiocies and the dire effects that occurred when his ideas were made state policy.
Lysenko’s image popped up very strongly in my head when I read an article by Brendan O’Neill in the Spectator magazine. In the article entitled: “Trans activists are effectively experimenting on children. Could there be anything more cruel?” Mr O’Neill sums up exactly what is going in the sordid and cruel world of paediatric gender transition. Boys being a bit camp sometimes or girls begin a bit Tomboyish sometimes is a normal part of human existence and a very normal part of growing up. ‘Gender nonconformity’ is now being seen as a pathology rather than one part of how a child explores the world and grows up.
I remember my own childhood and I recall that I did gender nonconforming things myself as a child. I occasionally played with a doll when I was very small and did a typing course where I was the only boy in the class when I was in my early teens. As it has worked out, I was not harmed in any way by having close contact with a Barbie doll (unless it’s playing with a very thin Barbie which has made me feel that women who are too skinny are unattractive to me LOL). The typing class got me a job as a court reporter, because of my gloriously fast and accurate typing speed, which I gained because being the only boy in the clase I was given the worst equipment to work on. The typing teacher put me on a most ancient sit-up-and-beg Imperial Typewriter she could find, which meant I had to work harder and faster to keep up thereby becoming a better typist. I’ve experienced how gender non conforming stuff is normal and nothing to worry about, neither of these incidents made me any less male they just small parts of what went into making me.
The point that Mr O’Neill is making in the article below and which is one with which I concur, is that gender non conforming stuff in kids is normal and it’s cruel beyond belief for so-called ‘experts’ in gender to convince children and parents that this normal behaviour is some sort of evidence of gender dysphoria.
Here’s part of the excellent Brendan O’Neill article and it one that has made me more determined than ever that my child will not be brainwashed by gender activists, these modern day Lysenkoists, whilst in school. I do not want my child encouraged to be medically sterilised or be mentally harmed by gender activists who have very little knowledge of either how biology or child development works.
Brendan O’Neill said:
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.
Mr O’Neill later added:
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.
Please read the whole of this first class article at the Spectator website via the link below:
I feel that I need to say at this point that I have very few issues with adults over the age of 21 (when Puberty is well and truly over for the majority) making a decision to modify or mutilate their bodies to become simulacrum’s of the opposite sex. That’s their right as free adults. They have the mental capacity normally to know that the hormone drugs may well bring an increased risk of blood clots or that there can be complications to irreversible surgery, children on the other hand do not.
Children are not capable of making such life changing and maybe life limiting decisions about their bodies. You have to be aged 21 in the UK to volunteer to drive a community minibus as it is recognised by all that a person of this age will have the required mental maturity to drive a bus load of passengers. It’s beyond scandalous that we in the UK don’t allow under 21’s to drive a Transit minibus but we allow children as low as 5 to make momentous and life changing decisions for which they are not capable.
I think all parents need to worry about this ‘transgender trend’. I think we also need to worry about the sort of pro-Trans pseudo-science that is being promoted in our schools and by various government agencies and we need to worry about the social contagion of paediatric transsexuality promoted online and by parents who are indulging their kids delusions rather than helping their offspring to overcome them.
I fully agree with Mr O’Neill when he said that those parents who are indulging their kids are abdicating their responsibility for the health of the next generation. Maybe the answer is for we individuals who come into contact with these parents who abdicate their responsibility is not to affirm these parents who go along with their child’s delusions of being a different sex, but to shun them? If our children see us as parents going along with the delusions of other parents who are in turn also in thrall to their children’s delusions, then there is a likelihood that our children will see ‘paediatric gender transition’ as normal and may depart on paths that they may very likely regret later in life.
It’s similar to how I dislike, and try to avoid, taking my child into areas where there are a number of Muslim Niqabis. This is because I don’t want him to grow up thinking that shoving women into mobile canvas prisons is normal in any way shape or form. Similarly I do not wish to expose him to bad parents who labour under the misapprehension that their child ‘little Jack’ can be magically transformed into ‘little Jill’, or these parent’s unnecessarily damaged offspring. I will tell these parents that I will not affirm their delusion that their child is the ‘wrong’ gender, I will not, because to do so may put my own child at risk of mental or physical harm.
I’m all for ‘affirmation’ when it’s down to a matter of sexuality as who you fancy as an adult, well, it’s not really a big thing is it? Sexuality in my view, unlike gender, is not an either/or situation and neither does affirming someone’s sexuality, even the sexuality of a person between the ages of 16 and 21, normally cause them any great harm. Of course sexual activity should always be undertaken in a manner that is safe, sane and consensual but apart from that there’s nothing wrong with accepting and affirming someone who is Gay, Straight or Bisexual. Sexuality is a continuum between gay and straight, with many people hovering somewhere between either end. Affirming someone’s sexuality doesn’t in the do them any great long term damage, people can start out straight or gay or bi and be somewhere else on the continuum later in life.
However, affirming someone’s gender delusion can bring great harm, to both the individual and their families. By affirming this delusion, especially in a child or young person, you run the risk of strengthening that delusion to such an extent that they go down the road of medical and surgical transition. This transition may be something that these individuals regret terribly later in life. Gender transition should be a strictly adult affair for the tiny number of people who are genuinely transsexual or for those who have been born with congenitally ambiguous genitalia. I believe that those who promote paediatric gender transition should be seen and treated with the same level of disdain that wider society treats paedophiles and we should categorise those who promote paediatric gender transition as child abusers.
Let’s fight and keep our children away from modern day Lysenkoists and let them grow up happy and whole and not depressed and mutilated.
