Megan Mulls It Over

+JMJ

Note: In this post, as I have done consistently throughout the course of this blog, I will use what many would consider to be the “wrong pronouns” for transgender people. I can assure you that this decision comes from a place of genuine compassion and concern, and if you don’t believe me, I hope you will at least hear me out.

If you read my recent post about Jazz Jennings, you will know that one area of The Acronym that I find particularly disturbing involves children who are being raised as the opposite sex and/or being allowed and encouraged to begin “transitioning” as juveniles. Even though I believe these children’s parents need some very tough love and a reality check, I want to understand more about why they make these choices and the struggles that their children are experiencing.

So several months ago I watched this video from VICE News entitled “How Trans Kids and Their Parents Decide When to Start Medical Transition.” (Notice how it says “when” rather than “if”? Hmm…) It presents the stories of four youths, ranging in age from 5 to 18. In the interest of preventing verbal and emotional overload on myself and my readers, I have chosen to present my commentary as a four-part series, with each part focusing on one of the youths.

The first child we meet is 5-year-old Kai Shappley, a boy who is being raised as a girl in a suburb of Houston. He is shown in his room with a book entitled My Princess Boy, and when the interviewer asks him why he likes this story, he says, “Well, ‘cuz it’s about a boy who likes to be a princess” (1:14-1:19). She then asks him if he identifies with the story, and he responds, “Well, um, my mom thought I was a boy and dressed me like a boy I did not like it” (1:21-1:31). The “I did not like it” sounds very scripted and robotic, and I definitely noticed how much he is fidgeting with his arms as if he is nervous.

And even though there is nothing funny about this video, I am finding it amusing that the most logical comeback about the fidgeting is one that those in favor of juvenile transitioning can’t use (i.e., some version of “That’s just what boys do at that age! You can’t expect them to sit still!”).

Kai continues with, “…I already thought she, um, knew I was a girl, but she didn’t know, so I had to tell her when I was old enough to say it” (1:32-1:41).

And here the producers are basically telling us, “Your child knows their gender identity before they are old enough to speak. So if they tell you at 5 that they identify as a gender-fluid zebra, don’t be a fascist about it.”

We are then introduced to Kai’s mother, and my feelings about her are a mixed bag. She is wearing a cross necklace, presumably to show us that raising your child as the opposite sex is totally compatible with Christianity. She seems keen on reassuring us that raising Kai as a girl is not a form of social protest for her. How can it be when the very word “transgender” is a relatively new word in her vocabulary? She tells us at 2:02, “ ‘Transgender’ in the beginning wasn’t a word that I knew. It wasn’t in the media…Caitlyn Jenner hadn’t happened.”

Uh…so you’re telling me that there are American adults who didn’t know about transgender people before Caitlyn Jenner hit the scene?

I call BS because I had a fairly sheltered rural upbringing, but I had heard about transgender people by the mid-90s at the latest. Secondly, I think Mom’s statement would be very hurtful to former President Obama, after all that he did to bring the transgender cause into the spotlight.

How many more dissidents would he have had to sterilize in order for everyone in America to know the word “transgender”?

Food for thought: Given Mom’s Republican background (which will be revealed a little later in the video), if the interviewer had asked after the Caitlyn Jenner comment, “What about Chelsea Manning?” I think there’s a good chance she would have responded something like, “That dirty rotten traitor?!”

And the producers should have totally kept that in, so that we would be able to see that not only is this woman a devout and faithful Christian, she is also a patriotic, loyal American.

Mom goes on to tell us that because she didn’t know anything about transness, she originally thought that Kai was just an “extremely feminine” boy (2:12-2:15). At 2:15, she tells us, “Between the ages of 2 and 4, Kai started playing with girls and thought boys were yucky.” Um, so what? But there’s more. He also “wanted a tutu and not a truck” (2:20-2:23). Well that settles it!

And here we see how a subset of the Left has found a way to help those parents who would rather have a pseudo-daughter than an “extremely feminine” son. If your son doesn’t want to play with trucks, she’s really your daughter! (And yes, these are the same people who will remind us that boys don’t have to play with trucks. Are you confused yet?)

Kai’s mom admits that having a son who’s really a daughter was not her first choice. In fact, she shares how she resorted to what sounds like child abuse in order to make Kai comfortable with being a boy. At 3:00, she explains that she would “scream at her, I would yell at her, I would punish her” for saying he was a girl. And then at 3:10, we hear, “There were days when I would have to tell myself that I could not spank her again that day.”

Translation: “I decided to stop beating my son and start emasculating her instead.”

And of course, the producers would have us think that all of Kai’s troubles stem from the transphobic bigotry of society and not from a mother who ditched one form of abuse for another. And even if you don’t think that emasculation is abuse, is it that much of a stretch to presume that Mom’s harshness exacerbated any dysphoria that Kai might have been feeling?

Or are we not allowed to go down that road because it would cut into the profits of the neo-Mengeles who have a large financial interest in Kai’s discomfort with his maleness?

The pity party for Mom continues as we learn that she has lost friends over her decision to raise Kai as a girl. Friends whom she describes as “straight-ticket Republicans” who are very religious (3:56-4:06). Those darn Republicans and their darn religion!

But unfortunately for the producers, I recently stumbled upon a treasure trove of liberals who use the wrong pronouns and think that boys like Kai shouldn’t have to sacrifice their fertility in order to keep their cute toys. One of my favorites is Miranda Yardley, a Brit who underwent a “male-to-female” medical transition in middle age, but prefers masculine pronouns. He has written and spoken extensively about how what he calls the “regressive Left” encourages children to believe that they are “trapped in the wrong bodies” when they fail to conform to stereotypical ideas about appropriate fashion and hobby preferences.

And he is a gay atheist who uses words like “oppressive” and “misogynistic” and would consider me an uptight religious nutjob. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, producers.

At 4:22, Mom sums up her feelings about this whole thing with “It feels lonely.” Yes, let’s ask Mom how she feels. Because she’s the most important person in this situation.

I notice we haven’t met Dad yet.

And no interview with a social engineering parent would be complete without the Suicide Card. Mom says at 4:27, “You feel like you’re in the fight of your life to save your child.” I see that the neo-Mengeles have already gotten to this woman with some version of “You must allow Kai to live as a girl like yesterday or she’s going to slit her wrists with the Bowie knife that one of your transphobic Deplorable relatives gave her for Christmas.”

She finishes the Suicide Card sentence with a return to the “I’m so lonely” spiel: “And the people that have been in your life – they leave you on the battlefield alone” (4:40-4:48). I don’t know what specifically went down with the friends and relatives she is referring to. Maybe they were overly harsh towards her, and, even worse, maybe some of them projected their feelings about her onto Kai.

But I’m also wondering if they are the ones who abandoned her, or if she’s the one who cut them out of her and Kai’s life simply because they disagreed with how she was raising him.

At 4:50, she really lays on the guilt with, “How do you do that to Kai?” and the producers pile on by cutting to a shot of him playing on the floor with the family cat. Again, I don’t know what the full story is about why these people are no longer associating with his mom, but it’s possible that they had the very same question for her. She is obviously hurting. But she is also virtue signaling and guilt-tripping every sane person in America. So I am having a hard time feeling unconditional sympathy for her.

And I bet she thinks I’m one of the “people in the world that hate my child simply because she exists” (4:53-4:57). Yes, because I’m against emasculation, I hate your 5-year-old son. That makes total sense.

At 4:59, the narrator tells us, “Around 1.7% of American youth identify as transgender, and those estimates are conservative since the population is likely underreporting.”

Translation: Are you sure you’re not trans? I saw you eyeing that pink crayon.

After my brain came up with that translation, it also came up with how I would like a son of mine to respond to such a comment.

“I was eyeing the pink crayon because I was going to color this My Little Pony picture. And if you think that makes me less of a man, there’s plenty of sand out in the sandbox that you can go pound. #BegoneEmasculator.”

Back to the video where things are taking a more explicitly political turn. We learn that Kai’s mom is currently battling the school board in order for Kai to be allowed to use the girls’ bathroom. And she’s here with lots of cringey guilt-tripping to tell us that Kai is currently in the “worst school district in the worst state right now at this time starting kindergarten” (5:58-6:06).

We are taken to the scene of the school board meeting, a moment during which Kai’s father is, once again, conspicuously absent. I really loved watching the audience reactions. The blond woman at 6:48 looks like she’s being a good white liberal, but the black guy looks like he ain’t havin’ it. My suspicion that he wasn’t on board with this mess gained more support at 7:02-7:14 when Kai’s mom drops a reference to segregation and the civil rights movement. I was thinking at this point, “Please show the black guy, please show the black guy.” But the producers didn’t. So my guess is that he didn’t have the proper reaction. Because if he did, they wouldn’t have hesitated to show his nod of support, fist in the air, and/or wiping away of a sympathetic tear.

And here comes our old friend the Suicide Card at 7:16 when Mom tells the board, “…I am a mom of a little girl that I would like to see live” and throws in a reference to the “41% suicide rate” in the transgender community.

Translation: “If my daughter commits suicide, it’s your fault for making her use the boys’ restroom. It’s not my fault for spanking her when she said she was a girl and for piling on to her dysphoria by assuming she was a girl because she likes the color pink.”

I get that Kai could be a target in the boys’ bathroom because of his clothes. But I am not on board with how we are all supposed to concede that dressing him in a more socially acceptable manner is not an option. That’s right, I forgot. Mom probably thinks he’d kill himself if he had to wear boys’ clothing.

So then maybe he should be in therapy for “how not to commit suicide when you present as your real sex” rather than “how to be emasculated and proud of it”?

After we see the clips from the school board meeting, former Obama-era attorney general Loretta Lynch joins the party at 7:55. And we are quickly reminded that if Loretta Lynch thinks something, it must be true. After all, neither she nor the president under whom she served ever did anything questionable. At 8:00, the interviewer asks Lynch why the bathroom issue “should be viewed as a civil rights issue,” and Lynch explains that transgender bathroom rights are a civil rights issue because they relate to “how our government is gonna interact with people whom we perceive to be different” (8:02-8:15). Not taken into account here are the tremendous efforts that many in the transgender community go to in order to be perceived as different.

Take for example the obscene number of gender dysphoric men who think that “Choke on my girldick” is an acceptable retort to those who disagree with them. Do these sound like the words of people who just want to blend in and live quiet, normal lives?

Lynch laments that the nation has “made such great progress” when it comes to civil rights but yet there are those who want to “roll back that change…” (8:15-8:24). Whoa.

So the struggle of black people to be able to vote without having the hoses turned on them is just like people wanting to use the restroom of the opposite sex? Give me a break.

And what’s with this “made so much progress” business? People on Lynch’s side of the spectrum are typically so fond of reminding us that the United States is still very much in the throes of Jim Crow. We don’t see much about crosses burning in yards anymore, but there’s still stuff like decorative cotton to worry about. So has Lynch gone Aunt Uncle Tom on us?

I don’t know if she’s an Aunt Uncle Tom, but she is definitely an apologist for the police state (another irony considering that she’s undoubtedly also an apologist for Black Lives Matter). At 8:26, she says about the supposed gender-related rollback of civil rights progress, “…that’s exactly when the Department of Justice has to step in.” Orwellian much?

When the interviewer asks her how she would respond to people who are afraid that liberal bathroom policies will make it easier for predators to enter opposite-sex bathrooms, Lynch states that transgender people are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of violence (8:29-9:02). But even if that’s true, under the desired policies, there don’t seem to be grounds to kick any man out of a restroom, even a cisgender man who actually is in there to cause trouble. I’m assuming you can’t go up to him and say, “You don’t look trans enough. You need to use the men’s room.”

Morbid fun fact: some gender-critical feminists who are opposed to men being allowed to use women’s restrooms will make an exception for “trans women” who have undergone bottom surgery.

Which shows us that these feminists don’t view all men as threats, just those with non-inverted penises.

And if the Civil Rights Card didn’t convince you that Lynch is on the right side of history, maybe the Human Dignity one will. At 9:05 she tells us, “…it is about innate dignity…”

So if you tell a gender dysphoric male, “If things go south in the restroom, you are just as capable of throwing a punch as a non-gender dysphoric male,” that’s an affront to her dignity as a woman.

I saw in this segment a mom who was making dramatically life-altering decisions for her son based on very flimsy assumptions about what his preference for girls’ clothing and toys meant. I would also like to know more about who and where Kai’s father is and why he is not around, as well as whether or not Kai has any male role models in his life. I have a suspicion that his mom has a lot of resentment towards men and is taking that out on her son.

And I think homophobia may also be a factor.

Your screen is not malfunctioning. The identity politics critic has indeed just cited homophobia as a possible motivation behind someone’s actions. Consider: given her conservative Christian background, when Kai’s mom noticed his, in her words, “extremely feminine” behaviors, she probably feared that he would grow up to be gay.

So maybe this is her way of letting him keep his cute toys and sparing herself the shame of having a gay son.

“But Megan, that doesn’t make any sense! The people who would be most likely to gossip about her having a gay son would also be opposed to her raising Kai as a girl!” Fair enough, but sometimes people do crazy, counterproductive things in order to avoid the things that they fear the most.

“But Megan, this still doesn’t make sense. You think that acting on homosexual desires is wrong. So even if you think raising Kai as a girl is wrong, wouldn’t you empathize with his mom for fearing that he’d grow up to be gay?” Yes, but while it’s not wrong to not want a gay son, it is wrong to not want your gay son. And it’s also not a good idea to assume that your son is going to be gay just because he doesn’t act like many other boys his age.

Wait, didn’t Loretta Lynch say something earlier about being mindful of how we treat people who are different? Maybe these social engineers should take their own advice.

Verso l’alto,
Megan