Child Abuse, Modern Style

Here we have it, thanks to the BBC, the latest in child sexual abuse. (via Maggie’s Farm) If an adult should ever touch a child in the wrong place, that adult will be considered a child molester. And yet, today’s modern liberated feminist parents in certain parts of Europe have decided to refuse to tell their children which gender they are. 

Apparently, these children have no sense of their bodily functions and thus cannot figure out, absent parental direction, whether they have a penis or a vagina.

Will the madness ever cease?

If you think I am kidding, here is one fanatical parent, who declares herself merely to be putting her feminist ideology into practice.

As Gabriella Martenson prepared for the birth of her first child, she came to a decision. She wouldn’t tell her child if they’d been born a girl or a boy, and would largely avoid discussing their birth sex with people outside her family and friendship group.

“I wanted them to be who they want to be. I don't want to decide that for them,” says Martenson, who was 30 and living in her home city, Stockholm, when she had her first child. “[It’s] just as I don't want to decide what they grow up to do, or who they decide to love or live with.”

As though no child and no other human being would not be able to figure it out without dopey Gabriella telling them. This begins to feel like it came straight to us from the Babylon Bee.

As I noted, the root of Gabriella’s madness lies in her adherence to feminist ideology. She is what we used to call a fanatic. And she is willing to sacrifice her children to the Great Feminist Mother Goddess:

But in her late teens, she says she “discovered feminism” and began questioning gender norms. So, when she became a mother, she chose to buy her own child a wide range of clothes and gifts, ranging from trains to dolls, giving them free choice as to which they wanted to use on any given day. 

Her goal was to desocialize her child, to detach her from social groups, and therefore to produce anomie. One understands that this rage against societal norms produces anomie, a word that means, literally speaking, normlessness. When Emile Durkheim first thought up the concept, he considered it a cause of suicide:

She also believed raising a child without gender would make things easier if they eventually identified as a gender different from their assigned birth sex, and help them accept other people who don’t adhere to the gender binary or other societal norms. “I'm letting them be anything… and teaching them to not be so narrow minded,” she says.

A German fanatic also credits feminism for her efforts to destroy her children:

Berlin-based queer gender-neutral parenting author, blogger and lecturer Ravna Marin Nathanael Siever says choosing not to label a young child as a boy or girl started to gain traction in the 1980s, mostly in queer communities. This coincided with what they describe as “the second wave of feminism”, with women rebelling against being typecast as caregivers in the home or in certain jobs. 

Heaven forfend that children would grow up to become husbands and wives. The net result of this ideology is that there are fewer and fewer stable marriages. Big surprise that.

Anyway, these abusive parents want their children to escape male-female stereotypes, stereotypes that are, generally speaking, universal. Thus, they are warring with nature, and with social reality. 

They say many of the people attracted to gender-neutral parenting want to avoid subjecting their kids to experiences they had themselves; growing up in a world where male-female stereotypes and power structures were more prevalent than they are today, transgender people faced higher levels of discrimination and LGBTQ+ relationships were less accepted, all of which impacted on people who didn’t conform to these norms. Gender-neutral parenting, therefore, emerged not to “neutralise” children’s genders, “but to allow them to discover their own identity, rather than being told about it by others”, says Siever, who uses they/them pronouns.

Of course, this damages a child’s and various adults’ ability to engage in mental processing and to find a place in society, to say nothing of the gym locker room. Again, note that this madness represents the latest in feminist nonsense:

They also hope that the approach will help spread feminist messages more broadly. “Rigid ideas of gender have been discussed as the main source of patriarchal oppression by decades of feminist work,” says Siever, who reviewed decades of gender studies literature for her book. “The more open our kids can grow up, the less gendered power structures will influence who has power in society and thus who profits most from it.”

Happily enough, the BBC offers the counterarguments, which show that children whose parents refuse to type them by sex are going to be abused, to the point of not fitting in to their peer group. They are going to be considered to be freaks because their parents taught them to be freaks.

But psychotherapist Vahrmeyer says his experiences working with clients suggest that not all kids exposed to this style of parenting will react positively. “For children who feel secure to explore the space their parents offer them, the journey can be one of discovery. However, for some children, the lack of prescribed identity can bring with it uncertainty and increased anxiety,” he says. Rather than rejecting gender norms as their parents had hoped, they may “find the lack of structure and guidance challenging”, and could even “revert to more strongly embedded gender identities to compensate for these feelings of uncertainty, and to grasp hold of some certainty”.

Another mental health professional, mother of a transgender child, points out some of the damage that this new form of parenting is producing:

Mandee Lal, a certified children’s grief and mental health coach based in Wokingham, near London, champions some aspects of gender-neutral parenting, such as choosing a diverse range of clothes and toys. But she agrees that rejecting gendered pronouns may be confusing for some children, especially when most of their peers will still be categorised as girls or boys. 

“Saying that, you know, you're a ‘they’ – I don't think a child can understand what a ‘they’ is and perhaps [the child will] maybe feel like they don't then fit into the world.”

And also,

One of Lal’s children is transgender, and experienced “horrific bullying” at school. She believes children labelled ‘they’ may not escape a similar level of ridicule, even if their parents have taken this approach to avoid future tensions if their children don’t conform to gender norms. Meanwhile she points out that non-gendered kids may still need to manage a public “switch” in identity if they opt for a binary gender label later on. “If the parents choose ‘they’, then the likelihood of the child choosing their own gender as ‘he’ or ‘she’ is still pretty high. So, there's still a lot for that kid to go through. It's not necessarily shielding them.” 

So, this is madness, but there is no method in it. God help us.