Insanity
June 26, 2022
Jesus Christ: the Way, the Truth, and the Life ~
It is Pride month, where every year in this country we are supposed to celebrate and promote LGBTQ-ism. It has been my intention for years to write a pastor’s column on various aspects of this global agenda, especially with practical ideas for addressing it between family members and friends. That pastor’s column has to be very carefully written and might well be pages long. Hence, I’ve haven’t found the time to write it. But I want you to know that you’re not crazy if you think this is contrary to God’s will, and thus harmful, and rightfully frightened of the consequences of speaking out in any way against it. I attach here an article from a woman from England (so bear with slight differences of wording), about her own perspective on transgenderism. I had to cut about half of the article out to make space, you can read the whole thing by going to the website below.
In the Love and Peace of Jesus Christ,
Fr. Thomas Nathe
The Kids Aren’t Alright
By Hadley Freeman
Last month, the Times reported that a girl in a London private school “was surrounded by up to 60 students who screamed and spat her” after she questioned gender ideology. “Teachers were initially supportive [of the bullied girl] but withdrew their backing after the other sixth-formers [middle schoolers] accused the girl of transphobia, and the school ended up apologizing [to the 60 bullies] for not maintaining a ‘safe-space’ [from the one girl who didn’t buy into transgenderism],” wrote Nicola Woolcock, the paper’s education correspondent. This girl, ‘Kate’, was interviewed by Julie Bindel for UnHerd last week and she described overhearing her favorite teacher apologizing for Kate’s “terrible, hateful behavior”. Kate, who had only recently left hospital where she was being treated for anorexia, ended up leaving the school.
In the appallingly sexist but undeniably revealing documentary, What is a Woman?, provocateur Matt Walsh interviews American pediatric professor Dr Michelle Forcier, who is dressed in a toga and talks in the soothing, beatific voice of a cult leader. She says that children are ready to be put on medical treatment to change gender “when they ask for it”. By “medical treatment”, she means Lupron, which is now used as a puberty blocker on gender non-conforming children, but has been used in the past, Walsh rightly says, to chemically castrate sex offenders. Forcier wrongly insists that puberty blockers “don’t have permanent effects”, and ends the interview.
Forcier is not an outlier. Tran’s activists now argue that confused four-year-olds should be seen as analogous to Tran’s adults. Not very long ago, I received an email from my children’s nursery to say that a three-year-old who I’ll call Daisy was now a boy and should be called Robert. As it happened, my three-year-old had, that same morning, informed me he was an astronaut, but it hadn’t occurred to me to tell anyone (or NASA), and that’s because children’s identities are mutable. They are still discovering who they are, and that’s as true for three-year-olds as it is for 13-year-olds. By now, I’ve received several emails from parents I vaguely know, telling me their child — always under 15, invariably female — is Trans and now goes by a new name. Those parents are, of course, only trying to support their child. But it is not supportive to publicly lock a child into an identity when, in a week, or month, or year, they will likely be a very different person.
In March, the Cass Report, an independent investigation into the quality of care for gender dysphoric young people in this country was published. It found that treatment by the NHS’s specialist Gender Identity Development Service had become mired in ideology, with clinicians too scared to raise concerns about rushing children into changing gender, or asking why girls are disproportionately now identifying as boys, lest they be accused of bigotry. If even doctors are too scared to press the brakes on unhappy children diagnosing themselves, what hope for parents?
Discussions about gender are often described as “toxic”, and that means they are characterized by tantrums and threats from activists — again, arguing tactics that will be familiar to parents of teenagers and toddlers alike, and yet that does not diminish their effect. Parents have been terrorized into buying their unhappy teenage daughters binders to suppress their breasts because ignorant and bad faith organizations have told them — without any evidence — that not doing so will push their children towards suicide. Similarly bosses of liberal organizations have allowed feminists to be muffled and denounced so as to avoid censure from young activist employees.
I was talking to a friend recently about a mutual friend whose daughter has said she is a boy, and so her mum bought her a chest binder, and I said how sad I found that. My friend was shocked by my sadness.
“But what would you do if your daughter wanted one?” she asked.
“I’d ask her what she thought she could do as a boy that she can’t do as a girl, and I’d ask if she wanted to be a boy, or did she want to be different person,” I said.
“But it’s the daughter’s choice,” my friend said.
“It would be her choice if she wanted to self-harm. But I wouldn’t buy her the razor,” I replied.
I don’t know if I’m right, but, like Kate, I was a very unhappy adolescent girl who was treated for anorexia. So I know a little about unhappy and confused adolescent girls, and how much we attack our own bodies to express that unhappiness. I also know what it’s like to be a desperate parent who just wants their kid to stop crying, to be happy and healthy and safe, and to feel like I’m a good parent who listens. The baby-led approach is an expression of that because sometimes (often) we don’t know what’s best for our kids, especially when it comes to a new issue like gender. But guess what? Your kid doesn’t know either, and nor, it seems, does anyone else who is supposed to safeguard them. Our kids aren’t breaking down barriers, they’re rock climbing without any safety ropes, and we’re encouraging it. It’s time for my generation to grow up, and be the adults.
