You’d think that the state of Florida actually outlawed the word ‘gay,’ the way liberals and the media are framing the discussion around HB 1557, a Florida state bill that would bar educators from talking to students aged 5-8 about sex and sexuality beyond an age-appropriate level. The bill doesn’t say teachers are banned from acknowledging that Monica has two mommies, it says that they can’t build a lesson plan around that theme. Similar bills have been proposed since at least as far back as 2013, but why are they only just now starting to see traction? Could it be because parents are finally realizing the full extent to which, all across America, activist teachers and school boards are brainwashing their children into a broad spectrum of postmodernist academic ideologies, including queer theory?
“Don’t Say Gay” bills, or as sane people like to call them “Anti-groomer bills” are the best thing that could happen to gender nonconforming children and gay parents in the current climate of gender identity ideology, and though it may seem unlikely, I present this hot take with receipts.
But before this basically becomes a Libs of TikTok reblog, let’s ask ourselves how early in a child’s development should they be exposed to sex education? That’s a question best answered by parents of the child who knows them best, but anyone with two braincells or more could probably see the risks in adults talking to young children about sex.
Young children are not capable of separating fact from fiction, or personal opinion from reality. They’re not able to sniff out a political agenda. And there is absolutely a political agenda, the agenda of queer theory, in talking to young children about their body parts, their desires for pleasure, or their feelings about their ‘gender identity.’
You don’t want your 5-year-old indoctrinated by queer theory
Queer theory is one of the critical theories that dominates pedagogy in undergraduate and teacher’s colleges. That means that teachers are learning to teach with a queer theory framework, even those teachers who will not be teaching sex ed. This framework draws heavily from Marx and Freud, grows out of postmodernism, and ultimately rejects the central politics of feminism.
Feminist theory posits that there is a social hierarchy where men dominate women, not because men are inherently evil or biologically superior to women, but rather because women’s reproductive and sexual capacity is a highly valuable material resource, one that can be exploited. In this theory, women and men are in a class relationship similar to that relationship we’ve identified in capitalism between owners and workers. One class of people exploits another, not because that is the natural order of things, but because humans are opportunists, and resources are finite. We commonly call the social hierarchy between men and women as classes “patriarchy,” and up until basically the 90s, there was really no heavyweight challenger to the politics of women’s liberation.
Then along came academics like Judith Butler, who drew on postmodernist theorists like known-pedophile and sexual abuser Michel Foucault, to say that actually, the problem is not that women’s bodies and women’s labor are exploited. Actually, the problem is all these norms that try to box people into simple categories like ‘men’ and ‘women,’ ‘gay’ or ‘straight,’ even ‘adult’ and ‘minor.’ Queer theory attempts to liberate through deviance and the destruction of all norms. Don’t like being oppressed because you’re a woman? All you have to do is identify as something else! In fact, you can just change your outfit, and have a new identity every day!
Gayle Rubin, one of the foremost queer theorists, wrote in “Thinking Sex,” against restrictions on child pornography, in favor of teaching young children to masturbate, and in favor of ‘boylovers,’ as she affectionately terms adult male pedophiles. We continually see arguments explicitly in favor of sex between minors and adults from queer theorists, including lowering the age of consent, because the destruction of norms is central to the politic. Queer theory attempts to liberate via deviance.
While queer theory might be appropriate for college-aged students to explore intellectually, why should five year olds be introduced to the politics of deviance? Why should little children be taught that gender is a spectrum, that there are demiboys and faes and all sorts of other whimsical options outside of boring old boy and girl? Why should an eight year old be taught the fundamentally religious belief that the body you were born with may not be aligned with your brain or your soul?
We should encourage young children to be free to be themselves, in the exact bodies they currently have. Two of my best friends are lesbian moms and two of their three children are gender nonconforming. Little boy J, aged 7, likes to wear a pink cowboy hat, he likes to read more than he likes playing in the dirt. Little girl G, aged 5, doesn’t like to have long hair, she likes riding her BMX bike and beating boys on the soccer field. Can these kids be gender nonconforming? Without the influence of activist teachers telling them they’re doing gender wrong, perhaps. We don’t know if Little J will grow up to be gay, or if Little G will grow up to be lesbian. They’re too young to have a defined sexuality yet. We do know that many, many gay adults were gender nonconforming children. The current evidence base shows that around 80% of pre-pubertal children who exhibit gender confusion or dysphoria will outgrow it during adolescence, and that the most likely outcome in adulthood will be homosexual orientation.
If we want to give kids the chance for self-acceptance, we should not start telling them that certain clothes or toys are just for boys or girls, or that certain behaviors make them deviant. We should remain profoundly disinterested in their sexuality, because it’s none of our fucking business, and because they’re not even close to puberty yet!
No Child Is Trans
It is completely and utterly inappropriate to talk about gender identity with young children. Children between kindergarten and third grade still have imaginary friends, still occasionally identify as squirrels or tigers, and yes, they may think they are the opposite sex. If a young child tells you they’re the opposite sex, your responsibility is to help them feel good in the body they have, not cultivate their insecurities by telling them that, in fact, they were born in the wrong body, but that that’s OK because they can be fixed with a new name, set of pronouns, and a lifetime dependence on sterilizing hormones.
Probably the best-known example of queer theory applied to young children who say they’re the opposite sex is the case of Jazz Jennings, whose mother claims that he called himself a girl starting at age two, and who never liked to do stereotypical ‘boy’ stuff. That child has since been chemically sterilized and surgically castrated, all by the time he was 18, and all before he ever had a sexual longing or even an orgasm.
But the tale of Jazz Jennings and his munchausen-by-proxy poster child of a mother has hardly served as cautionary. In fact, the opposite — it seems more like a how-to — and more and more young children are being taught to dis-identify with the only body they will ever have in this life. Worse, parents who resist the idea that their minor children should receive experimental medical treatments are having those children taken from them by the state. Consider the case of Jeff Younger, a Texas father who lost custody of his twin sons after his ex-wife began transitioning seven-year-old James into Luna. Younger claimed that his son never showed signs of gender confusion, and that his ex-wife was orchestrating the social and medical transition of their child against his will, since he preferred ‘boys’ clothes’ and pronouns outside of his mother’s supervision.
Then there’s the parents of a 17-year-old Ohio girl, who lost custody of their child because, following symptoms of anxiety and depression, she was diagnosed with gender identity. The parents would not provide consent for her to take puberty blockers and wrong-sex hormones, a course of medicine that is known to lead to vaginal and uterine atrophy, loss of normal urinary and sexual function, premature hair loss, bone density issues, sterilization, and other permanent changes.
Activist Teachers Are Grooming Your Kids
The American school system has failed kids when it comes to sex ed. That’s why many kids will learn most of what they know about sex from porn, and many will start watching porn as young as age 11. This is a big problem, but one that should be solved by age-appropriate sex ed, and not an obsession with masturbation, consent, or pleasure for an audience of five to eight year olds. I wish I were exaggerating when I say that adults in teaching roles, inside and outside of public schools, are introducing these concepts to children as young as toddlers, but I’m not.
Here’s a summer camp for kids as young as 3rd grade — remember, that’s the age range specified in the Florida bill, to learn about kink, condoms and consent.
Teachers colleges are, like the rest of academia, filled to the brim with “gender identity” and queer theory. Among many other postmodernist theories, teachers colleges are instructing young adults to go into classrooms and tell your kids that sexuality is fluid and that sex is not real, but “gender identity” is. They are doing this under the false premise that it’s the best and only way to advance the politics of equity, diversity and inclusion.
In point of fact, trans ideology is anti-equity, because it claims that there is a genetic or biological basis to the sex role stereotypes that have prevented women from being full participants in society for *checks watch* all of human history. It is anti-diversity, because it takes away the option to be gender-nonconforming, and instead pushes children into little pink and blue boxes. It is anti-inclusion, because it denies girls access to sex-segregated spaces like sports, bathrooms, locker rooms, social clubs, and scholarships, all of which were created to level the playing field for girls and women in society.
Some teachers are obsessed with sexual orientation and “gender identity”. They believe they’re better guardians and caretakers to your children than you could ever be. They think that every Republican is a walking hate crime, and that the children of Christians are victims of brainwashing in need of re-education. Not conservative or religious? That’s OK, you’ll still be included in the contempt of teacher activists, unions, and school boards. These people are tweeting and TikToking their utter disdain for parents from across the political, religious, and every other spectrum. They paint parents with broad brushstrokes of ignorance, incompetence, and neglect because they, the teachers, are trained and credentialed experts and you’re just some idiot who happened to push out a baby.
The personal opinions of activist teachers are protected under the First Amendment, but unfortunately for the rest of us, school districts are adopting affirmation policies, and bringing their political agendas off of Twitter and into the classroom. They will encourage children to go by a second name or set of pronouns at school, even going so far as to withhold from parents that they are doing this with the child.
"Remember, parents are not entitled to know their kids' identities."
— Abigail Shrier (@AbigailShrier) March 7, 2022
UNREAL. https://t.co/UFqOhVze75
They drive a wedge between children and their parents, convincing children that their parents don’t have their best interests at heart, or that the teachers are their “real” family.
They help teenagers get access to wrong-sex hormones and other experimental treatments with the potential for permanent consequences. In California, it has been legal since 2013 to provide gender treatment to minors without their parents’ consent, and to withhold a child’s ‘gender identity’ from their parents. In Wisconsin, similar legislation has landed.
What is at stake in parents’ rights bills is not just your right to choose when and how your kids learn about gender, sex, and where babies come from. It’s about your right to make medical choices for your child. The affirmation model starts in the schools and ends up on the surgeon’s table. Gay children deserve the chance to grow up to be sexually functioning adults. If you’re lesbian and you have children, you benefited from not being sterilized as a minor. Don’t you want your children afforded the same right? Then don’t let teachers talk to kids about ‘gender identity.’
I think most teachers get into the game because they want to teach, not because they want to mold a generation in the new, ultra-woke image of queer ‘liberation.’ But it only takes a vocal minority, a highly motivated, politicized activist class, influencing the media, teachers unions, and school boards, to bring grooming to our schools. These teachers see themselves as liberators. They introduce children to sexual topics so that those kids can ‘be their true selves,’ breaking down ‘heteronormativity’ and ‘binaries’ along the way. This is a total reversal, since we know that a child’s self is almost infinitely suggestible when they’re young. We also know that being introduced to sexual topics too early can scar a child’s psyche and self-esteem.
Teachers and politicians are lying to you when they say that parental rights are not at the heart of this bill. They say that the state has a vested interest in standardizing this sort of instruction, because parents can’t be trusted. They say that there’s no such thing as ‘other people’s kids,’ and that while your kids are in school, they are the guardians charged with raising a generation of ‘world changers.’ This has nothing to do with a 5-8 year-old-child being gay, or gender-nonconforming, or going home to same-sex parents. It’s about the state and teachers defining what it means to be male and female. Never forget that these definitions of male and female end up defining what it means to be gay or lesbian.
Will HB 1557 and similar bills hurt young lesbian or gay children? No, they won’t, because prepubescent children do not really think about their sexuality much, and they certainly don’t need to be talking about it with adults who are not their parents. In fact, if I have a criticism of HB 1557, it’s that it doesn’t go far enough. I don’t think teachers should plan lessons around sex or gender identity at any point in elementary school.
The Real Reason We’re Calling this the “Don’t Say Gay” Bill
The reason that prominent liberals have reframed this as a ‘don’t say gay’ bill is because the country has largely accepted legal protections for sexual orientation, but has not done so for “gender identity.” This nation is still very much divided on the idea that men can become women, that there are unlimited genders, or that identity is more real than biology.
See for example the story of Lia Thomas, the 6’4″ trans-identifying swimmer who is currently setting new records for women’s college swimming after three years of losses (Thomas never even qualified for an NCAA Championship when competing as William). If you listen to NPR or read the New York Times, you’ll have heard of Lia Thomas only as a hero, smashing gender barriers, rather than a man who’s denying scholarships and titles to female athletes who’ve worked their entire lives to get where they are. While you won’t hear from them in the mainstream media, conservatives have been on this story closely, and even many liberals know that Lia Thomas is the harbinger of the end of Title IX protections for women.
Another great example is the recent case of the ‘anti-trans’ executive order in Texas to investigate for child abuse where minors are receiving experimental medical interventions. While well-meaning (or creepy?) liberals from Chicago invite ‘trans refugees’ from Texas, the rest of the country scratches their heads wondering how and why minor children, some as young as 13, are having mastectomies. These procedures may be rare, but again, as in the case of Jazz Jennings, they are not unheard of.
No matter how many late night hosts tell you otherwise, this country is not ready to medicalize every young child who says they’re the opposite sex. We’re not ready to let the state dictate what male and female mean. Parents, especially gay parents, or the parents of gender nonconforming kids, should fight tooth and nail to be the ultimate arbiters of what’s appropriate and not for our kids to learn. Because while in this election cycle it may be Republican or Evangelical parents who are being deemed unfit, next election cycle, it could very well be the gay and lesbian parents, as it has been before.
