Gender Role Regression

Imagine if you told a young girl that she shouldn't behave like a boy. That, if she was rough-and-tumble tomboy who liked climbing trees, skateboarding, and in general behaving in the "noise with dirt" fashion, that she was acting contrary to her gender.

Were this a century or two or three ago, you'd be conforming to the stereotypes of the day, stereotypes that emerged from natural biological proclivities and then imposed as cultural strictures and repression of one's inherent nature.

Were it fifty years ago, at the fore of the women's liberation movement, you'd have been part of the oppressive patriarchy, seeking to repress individual's freedom to not conform to "traditional" norms.

Were it fifteen years ago, you'd be deemed a fossil or Luddite or some other throwback to a time where women were subordinated to men.

But, do it today and you are at the leading edge of "woke," ready to take the next step and suggest (coax, even) that girl into believing that she is trapped in the wrong body, that Mother Nature played a cruel trick on her by not granting her an XY chromosome and all it produces.

Adults, definitionally in a free society, have reached a stage of development where they are deemed capable of consequential decisions. Children, on the other hand, aren't fully formed. On top of that, evolution imposes certain traits on them early-on, including the desire to fit in and the desire to please authority figures (parents, teachers, etc). Thus, they are highly susceptible to suggestion, peer pressure, and adult biases.

As I've blogged on numerous occasions, my libertarian nature puts me on the side of adults who deem themselves "trans." Pursuing happiness is what life's about, and if that's someone's path, my only objection lies where it intersects negatively with others' pursuits (and rights, of course). My human nature recoils from the trans-activist ideology that embraces minors deciding that they're in the wrong body and pursuing chemical and/or surgical alterations. Beyond the matter of children simply not having the mental development required to responsibly make such a life-altering decision, there are all the things we know about it in practice: the "affirmation" industry that leaps at every opportunity to change a kid, the high prevalence of other mental health issues in young transitioners, the reality that a large fraction of those who think they might be trans figure out they're gay or lesbian rather than trans once they've matured, the trendiness factor that infects some parents, and the "uncoolness" of being a boring old straight kid nowadays.

The trans movement piggybacked onto both feminism and the LGB community by claiming common-cause in being an "oppressed" identity group, but if we break things down, "T" (or at least the activist and gender theory/queer theory subset) stands in opposition to both the women's rights movement and the gay communities. Gays and lesbians are told that anatomy shouldn't be relevant to their attractions, and women are told that penises should not be excluded from the spaces they've carved out for themselves.

The irony of all this is how regressive it is.

Is telling a lesbian "try some male organ out" made acceptable if it's followed up by "it shouldn't matter to you because its bearer identifies as a woman," rather than "liking women is unnatural/immoral?”

Is telling a young girl "you behave like a boy, you must be male inside?" not a reinforcement of old stereotypes that women spent decades trying to overcome?

Is telling women "that person with a penis in your lavatory or your locker room shouldn't (nay, mustn't) matter you, because blah blah pronouns blah blah identifies as a woman" the goal of the gender theory movement?

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson famously bent the knee to "woke" in replying "I'm not a biologist" in response to "Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?" An unartful dodge - you don't need credentials or a degree to understand one of the most basic aspects of life on earth.

This exchange between famed evolutionary geneticist Richard Dawkins and journalist/activist Helen Joyce is, at 51 minutes and change, a commitment of time, but Joyce's insights into the gender theory craze are so myriad it’s worth it, and among them lies the inspiration for today's blog.

One of many money quotes (38:15):

You can't ignore the fact that this is for the betterment of men.

What does this have to do with liberty, you might ask? At its heart, the trans-activist movement is about coercion - of language, of behavior, of a radical set of new social norms... and of children.

Coercion is antithetical to liberty.

End of story.