Some days ago, Buck T. at Ace of Spades HQ linked to this essay regarding the great Satanic Day Care Abuse Panic, and how elements of that exercise in public/law enforcement/media insanity duplicates many of the features of the current Trans-Kids! Eleventy!!! panic. Which it does, in some respects, especially in how the establishment news media elevated the panic …because that’s what the media do: Scare the ever-living-snot out of the reading/viewing public because that is what sells issues and page views. Once the panic-train gets going, every cynical exploiter of the panic wants to leap aboard the current trend.
The Satanic day-care scare particularly horrified me back in the day. Various day-care providers were investigated and charged with mass sexual abuse of the children under their care, and the whole insane mess became spread across all the media. I had a kindergarten-aged child in a day-care situation back then, because I was a working single mother in a responsible job. I really grokked how mothers in my situation could be easily guilt-tripped, especially if they really didn’t have to work outside the home. This was one of the threads of contemporary analysis over how the Satanic Panic got started in the first place; women feeling guilty about having a job and leaving the kidlet to the care of other people for a large part of the day. Yes, I do get that sense of being torn in two places; being there for the kid and yet having to earn an honest living. (Fortunately, I am there now for Jamie, the Wonder Grandson, when my daughter does have real estate work to do. But anyway…) A particularly horrifying aspect of one of the mass abuse cases, in Wenatchee, Washington State, was that some local upstanding members of the community who criticized conduct of the wide-ranging investigation, or publicly defended those accused were themselves later accused of being part of the abuse network … and had their own children taken into care. I could readily imagine the sheer horror of that situation: “Go along with the mob, Mrs.-Good-Citizen/Parent … or else we charge you as a co-conspirator in the abuse ring and take your child into care!”
This is the long way around to agreeing with the American Greatness article – that yes, there are considerable similarities besides the mass media hype. That children the age of the Great Satanic Panic victims and older are the primary target of the Great Gender-Swapping Panic. The establishment media is leading the charge… again, running after those eyeballs and klicks. And it’s all so horrible, unnecessary, and even – dare I say it – warped?
There are some differences, though. It’s not just so-called child-abuse therapists and ambitious law-enforcement on the make, as it eventually turned out with Satanic Panic. Now it’s a particularly vicious combine; messed-up adults wanting to generate a good supply of similarly messed up juniors so as to have their pick of sexual partners down the line, deranged parents looking for social kudos among their peers, and teens going through the awkward stage being influenced by social media to no good end. It has also been suggested in a couple of different comment threads that it’s an out for white teens and pre-teens being blamed for everything imaginable under the sun. They can climb a couple of more levels above their status as white oppressors by joining another and slightly higher class of the so-called oppressed. The current trans-fad also gives a perfect out for messed up adults to get a sexual kick out of displaying their particular kinks in front of an audience – no matter if it is their kindergarten class, the genuine women in a gym changing room or a Target bathroom. And let’s not forget how a certain class of medical specialists appear eager to ensure a long and substantial income stream, from ministering at a profit to those patients who have actually signed on to an unending round of hormones and surgery – surgeries which don’t appear from the testimonies of those unfortunates who opted for them in haste and now have repented at leisure.
As for me, my flag is nailed to the mast. One cannot change sex. It’s in your DNA, and obvious (for all but an unfortunate few) at the moment of development in the womb. Live as you want; put on a dress, grow your hair long, put on makeup and call yourself Loretta. It changes nothing about your DNA.
Discuss as you can bear it, and while we still can.
The day care hysteria was stimulated by a bill passed and signed that provided financial support for the prosecution of child abuse cases. It was authored by Al Gore when he was still in the Senate. I think that might have been the first spark that lit that fire. I remember the Wenatchee case. I also remembered how a detective’s “foster daughter” began it. The McMartin preschool case was obviously fed by a TV reporter who had an affair with Kee McFarland, the “Psychologist” behind most of the claims.
This also reminds me of the “Recovered Memories” hysteria. It coincided with the limitation on payment for psychologists by health insurance. By the end, when Gary Ramona won his lawsuit and ended the hysteria, the psychology society was holding “workshops” on how to recover memories. Malpractice insurance stopped coverage for the “therapy” and the whole hysteria disappeared in short order.
I wonder how much Obamacare has to do with this “treatment.”
Parents pushing their kids into transgender surgery is Munchausen Syndrome by proxy. The virtue-signaling parents want attention.
Yes, OC – I so believe that it is. And I am so sorry for the kids that are the victims of this. I am about 200% certain that in a decade or two they realize what has been done to them ’cause Mommy is a freak for social approval, that there will be a a horrific response taken.
No, you can’t change your sex. You are either XY or XX, male or female. That is your sex and that is your gender. There is no difference. Elevating the fantasy that you can not only pretend to be a woman if you are a man, but can actually physically be a woman, and vice versa, to some kind of a noble moral cause has already done a great deal of harm, particularly to children. I’m sure it will do a great deal more before we move on to the next faux morality fad. It’s useful to understand the way these people think. NPR has been in the forefront of the fight for “transgender rights,” and “gender affirming care,” particularly for children, and you can listen to some of their broadcasts on the subject at this link:
https://prod-www-origin.npr.org/search/?query=trans%20&page=1
Their basic argument is that children will be harmed if they don’t have access to “gender affirming care,” by which they mean poisoning with dangerous chemicals and surgical mutilation in a vain attempt to alter their sex. They assure us that the chemicals, puberty blockers, are “safe.” It is beyond me how anyone capable of intelligent thought could seriously believe that disrupting the sexual development of a child at its most critical point is “safe.” It is bound to have a significant negative effect on the child’s later ability to have children of its own. Normally, we are assured that surgical intervention in the case of children will only involve the “upper body,” not the genitals. Removing a female child’s breasts is not “safe,” and it, too, will negatively affect the normal process of reproduction.
These people are quite brazen about expressing the belief that it’s OK to administer such “gender affirming care” without the parents’ knowledge. You see, parents are Neanderthals who aren’t quite up to speed about why such “care” is necessary to avoid “harming” their children. And what does the “harm” consist of. Why, if they don’t have access to this “care,” the children might harm themselves! They might even commit suicide!
I would love to see accurate data on how many children committed suicide because they didn’t have access to “gender affirming care” in those benighted times before children were proselytized by trans activists into believing they could actually change their sex. I don’t recall any of my friends giving the least thought to the subject when I was a child, nor did I ever hear of anyone suffering from this dangerous fantasy. If there were any such suicides, the number must have been vanishingly small. If we now face the possibility that some children may commit suicide because their states have wisely prohibited “gender affirming care,” whose fault is it, then? These noble and pious activists will have the blood of these children on their hands.
I consider morality subjective, but from a natural point of view, I can think of nothing more vicious, vile, or immoral than destroying a child’s ability to reproduce. I don’t consider it possible to be more immoral than that. It is really tantamount to murder. What of adults who inflict this damage on themselves? I suppose you can look at it as natural selection taking its beneficent course. However, I suspect there are few of us who never did anything dumb and thoughtless as young adults. Fortunately, in most cases the effects of what we may have done were not so devastating or irreversible. To the extent that their propaganda has convinced young adults to harm and mutilate themselves in this way, trans activists must also bear a heavy burden of guilt.
What can you say? Perhaps this latest “great moral imperative” of trans activism isn’t as bad as such earlier manifestations as Communism or Nazism, but it’s bad enough. No doubt future historians will look back on this era with wonder.
A piece on the fact that sex is binary by a man who knows what he’s talking about:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/06/08/colin-wright-dismantles-zemenicks-claim-that-sex-isnt-binary/
Sgt. Mom: I liked the notion you mentioned about trans being an out for white school kids, I hadn’t thought about it in that way and it makes a lot of sense, There has been rumblings about the social contagion effect regarding LGBT identities among kids but as a response not just to peer pressure but to the overall school-imposed curriculum, whoa nellie, a lot of implications.
Doug: Thanks for the link to Jerry Coyne’s site and that one post of his in particular. I wish he would go more into his critique of Queer Theory and gender, he mentions it in the link but when I go through the post and his site he seems to focus only on biological sex which I find not only limiting but dangerously close to old men yelling at clouds. Post-modernists such as Zemenick that Coyne takes apart offer biological arguments for a gender spectrum, but that is really just a side show and not the main argument. The main thrust of the Queer Theory/gender theory is that gender is a sociopolitical construct, which Coyne understands, but which he never gets into with any depth and instead focuses on scientific arguments, This is a shame given that he is a biologist – he would have a unique perspective on the language issues involved. I went through his site and didn’t see much, do you know of any other writings he has?
The phrase “flag nailed to the mast” is interesting. In the Age of Sail it was rare for ships to be sunk in battle. They were just too well built. No, you’d fire away until everyone was dead or wounded (i.e. soon to be dead) from splinters of metal and wood. The traditional way to surrender was to strike your colors, that is to lower your flag. It was not considered to be treasonous to do so when clearly outmatched….after a decent exchange of iron and insults of course. Now, if you nailed your colors to the mast it meant you will fight to the death. It is the salt water equivalent of raising the Black Flag of No Quarter.
So in this particular fracas is Conservatism a three decker First Rate – as public opinion polls on this matter suggest? Or a mere Frigate up against far more guns in the media/deep state? It matters little as no honorable surrender is possible in either case.
A big element of the ‘gender affirming’ craze is the Leftist view that the individual is nothing and the identity group is all. It is not permitted that a girl be anything other than an ISO-standard girl, or a boy be anything other than an ISO-standard boy. So those unfortunates who aren’t ISO-standard must be slotted into one of the other Heinz 57 variety genders. (Mother Gaia and St. Marx forbid that they simply be a non-standard girl or boy!) And it they still won’t fit, then they must be buggered to fit.
There’s a great opportunity here to clean out the medical community of fraudsters who are falsifying medical records to create unwarranted diagnoses:
https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1666496308150951954
They seem to be quite open about their willingness to falsify records in order to extract money from insurance on bogus diagnoses. These are crimes. They cost all of us money.
They seem to be quite open about their willingness to falsify records in order to extract money from insurance on bogus diagnoses. These are crimes. They cost all of us money.
This stuff began years ago with what was called “Upcoding.” I can remember having Medical Records people asking me to change a code for some diagnosis as it paid the hospital more. This recent stuff that Matt Walsh talks about is not the same but it began with upcoding.
The person who blew the Wenatchee witch hunt out of the water was Dorothy Rabinowitz of the WSJ. All America owes her for that. The insanity was thick in the news over here on the WA side. A lot like the recent hysteria’s.
Unfortunately, more than a few on the pro-TG side will take the view that transgender people have always existed, many have been suppressed, and that the only thing comparable to the satanic panic or the recovered memories panic today is the REACTION against transgender identity from those opposed to this “reality” about humanity. They will conclude, using the same analogy, that complaints about “transwomen” [men] using women’s washrooms to ogle and assault women are a mere moral panic.
I’m not, entirely convinced they are wrong. The typical male transwoman’s mental defect seems to be some point along the spectrum of really thinking they ARE female to desperately WANTING to be female and believing they can make themselves so. Whether or not their sexual orientation is directed at males or at females is a separate question. Few seem to be doing it for the purpose of being heterosexual men in disguise just with easy access to vulnerable women. Or are all that likely to be doing it for that purpose- they believe they ARE women. Similarly, and just as there used to be a fair amount of recreational gay bashing by working class straight men and no straight bashing by gay men, not enough to be comparable at any rate, so there is some track record of violence against [historically called] transsexuals or cross-dressing men, and I have not heard of violence by ‘trannies’ against normals, including women.
So I would counsel guarding against handing the opposition an analogy that they can use to better effect, an ability they have demonstrated time and time again. Now, if the analogy is explicitly focused on belief in unreal things that don’t exist [just to emphasize], abuse of psychiatry, and so on, then it has some traction.
I beg to differ, Random – there have been plenty of instances of male predators claiming suddenly to be trans-women in order to get sent to female prisons. Where they predate… as expected. The Wii spa tranny turned out to be a sex offender, for ex. There was a post in PJ media a month or so ago, with a list of the incidences of male sex criminals claiming to be female, dispatched to a female prison on that claim … and right as any sensible person would expect – menacing their genuinely female (and often lesbian) fellow prisoners. The list was long, horrifically long – and I was shocked at exactly how extensive it was.
A couple of random notes:
Spiked has been on a lot of the Trans ideology, especially in Scotland which makes our pro-trans administration look like moderates.
A friend this evening pointed me to protests in Ottawa (of all places) against a local school’s policy requiring all students to be addressed as they/them. (https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/school-board-asks-people-to-stay-away-from-protest-but-mpp-and-community-groups-urge-them-to-attend) If you look at the photos over at the Ottawa Citizen, notice anything? Alot of Muslims in the crowd. This past week there were similar protests at the Montgomery County (Md.) School Board meeting this past week regarding the Board eliminating the ability of parents to opt their children out of LGBT+ curriculum, once again with a lot of Muslims. (https://www.dcnewsnow.com/news/local-news/maryland/montgomery-county/two-groups-rally-outside-mcps-boe-meeting/) The Montgomery County protests were a follow-up to a filing in federal court by Muslim and Christian parents.
Interesting, no? The question is which is more interesting, the fact that these protests are taking place in some of the most liberal parts of North America home to both country’s bureaucrats or the unreported fact that Christians and Muslims are working together under an organization called the “Coalition of Virtue” (especially in light of the SPLC labeling “Moms for Liberty” a hate group) Spin that Washington Post.
I loved this line from a parent protesting against the ability to opt-out…. “There are children that are being raised in ideologies that don’t support LGBT and they don’t learn about it. where are they going to learn about it? they need to learn about it in school” I think that parent should try to take that philosophy to the local mosque, I don’t think that dog is going to hunt. What is she going to do? Call them Christian Fascists?
“There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
Parents speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind”
Yeah baby, hey Leftists, two can play at this game. Tamer call me, I got a school voucher program we can pitch.
@Mike
“I wish he would go more into his critique of Queer Theory and gender, he mentions it in the link but when I go through the post and his site he seems to focus only on biological sex which I find not only limiting but dangerously close to old men yelling at clouds.”
In fact, I think his assertion that sex is a biological fact goes right to the heart of the matter. Sex can’t be a fact and a sociopolitical construct at the same time. The trannies really don’t believe that claim themselves. Otherwise, why would they be poisoning themselves and carving themselves up in order to “transmute” themselves from male to female and vice versa? The demand that men be allowed to compete as women in sports makes no sense absent the belief that they’ve become “real women.”
It doesn’t make any difference whether we’re talking about sex or gender. They’re the same thing. It’s wrong to allow these people to redefine and bowdlerize the English language to introduce a nonexistent difference, Among other things, it concedes them one more weapon to use in proselytizing and grooming children.
Helian,
I don’t disagree with you, my disappointment with Coyne is that he tantalizingly touches on the sociolinguistics aspect of the problem but then avoids further comment.
While science is a necessary part of any response, it is insufficient. The Left has already acknowledged science and dismissed it with its use of cisgender and transgender. The reason why I think science in of itself is an insufficient response is in part agreement with what you said regarding their corruption of language. However transgenderism is just one aspect of the the larger postmodern project and that project rests largely on its critique and use of language. I agree with you, they cannot be allowed to get away with it but they have gotten pretty far and I don’t think science alone will do the job.
To top it off that project has embedded itself like a cancer in the American polity because it uses the language of liberty “I am…” in order to further it aims. We need to be aware of the dangers in addressing this, when do you tell someone who is making a personal choice that they are unable to do so? Where are the boundaries? There are already debates beginning to brew on the Right on dealing with this which to be honest, throw the baby our with the bathwater in this respect.
One other aspect of the science argument. Alot people on the Right have stated that this transgenderism, indeed post-modernism in general, cannot go on for much longer because of its absurdity and internal contradictions. It is indeed absurd but the question is when? Marxists have been waiting 150+ years for capitalism to collapse based on its internal contradictions. Also the longer this goes on the more damage is done, especially to our young people.
It is not enough to point out why someone is wrong, rather the moment demands a strategy to defeat them. They have one, do we?
Sgt. Mom,
OK, I’ll buy that. I’m willing to infer I’ve been a victim of mainstream media non-coverage to some large extent. And not just recently but over a lifetime, really.
I suppose I also just wanted in the absence of such information to not merely give in to my own bias that trans people are weird and dangerous.
I am even familiar with a prison case from recent Scottish history- this was part of the downfall of Nicola Sturgeon as first minister.
My failure extends to not really having considered the prison situations when I penned my earlier comment. That’s a real failure on my part but I also admit it is also a caveat for me – I have been guilty of caring a lot less about them in the past so probably that’s why it didn’t occur to me the other day.
What I did have in mind was more what does or does not happen in civilian life- public washrooms in malls and similar places. Some commentary has given me the impression there are a lot of trans predators looking to rape women or girls in these settings. I’m ready to believe that, I just don’t seem to hear of it.
Where as there HAS been some history of tranny-bashing in the past, as of gay-bashing. That’s more where I’ve been coming from, not least because I find it a hard point to push back against when it’s made to me.
I do love comments like this:
I loved this line from a parent protesting against the ability to opt-out…. “There are children that are being raised in ideologies that don’t support LGBT and they don’t learn about it. where are they going to learn about it? they need to learn about it in school” .
“They need to learn about it…”. I’m not convinced of that.