An Open Letter to #1MillionMarch4Children Protesters… and Counter-Protestors
At the heart of this movement are angry, frightened, and frustrated parents who love their children and see that there is a real possibility that the government could take them away.
I watched with a mixture of concern and vindication last week as the #1MillionMarch4Children protests and counter-protests took place in many Canadian cities. I am very familiar with the real-life scenarios that serve as the impetus for these protests. These scenarios are far more common than people think.
Real-Life Scenario
A child grows up in a nurturing home with parents who love and support her, spend plenty of time with her, and sacrifice whatever is needed to help her to flourish and succeed. She’s had mental health struggles all her life, but nothing gender related. As a child she is typically feminine: dolls, dresses, Disney princesses, etc.
In her early teens, now struggling more acutely with her mental health, she is told that these struggles are gender-related - and this seems hopeful to her - a cure for her anguish! She identifies as trans and plans to take hormones and maybe even get surgeries. This treatment will result in irreversible changes to her mind and body.
The school, their guidance counsellors and teachers, all affirm and promote this path, immediately engaging in the child’s efforts to socially transition, leaving her parents completely out of the decision. There is no discussion with them about this, no meeting to seek an understanding of the history of mental health struggles or what is already being done to address those issues. In fact, the school guidance counsellor threatens to call CAS to intervene because the parents of this child will not put her on the path to lifelong medicalization as a solution to a problem that has been self-misdiagnosed.
This is our story and the story of our daughter.
The Power of Government
And now add this to the dilemma: On the official website of the Government of Ontario you can find a page called “Serving LGBT2SQ children and youth in the child welfare system”. (https://www.ontario.ca/document/serving-lgbt2sq-children-and-youth-child-welfare-system)
These guidelines, which are posted online, proclaim that “In some cases, it may be necessary to bring a child or youth to a place of safety while parents or caregivers learn how to better support their LGBT2SQ children and youth…” and that “In situations where a parent-child separation is required, the chosen placement should be one that affirms the child or youth’s LGBT2SQ identity…” Putting them into these “affirming” foster homes means, and I quote,
“allowing them to freely and openly express their identity. This includes supporting a child or youth’s choice of clothing or hairstyle, which can be important aspects of self-expression. It may also include supporting access to tools (e.g., chest binders, packers, stand-to-pee devices), gender-confirming health care and/or interventions (e.g., hormone treatments, hair removal) that for some children and youth may help them to feel their body better aligns with their gender identity.”
You read that correctly: if you are unwilling to provide your confused child with chest binders, packers, stand-to-pee devices, hormone treatments, and hair removal services, the government is happy to step in, take your child, and help with that.
Fuel For the Fire
It is this type of aggressive, overheated rhetoric that is raw fuel for movements like #1MillionMarch4Children. At the heart of this movement are angry, frightened, and frustrated parents who love their children and see that there is a real possibility that the government could take them away because, according to the government, they are not loving their children the right way.
Just like the trucker's convoy, movements like #1MillionMarch4Children certainly have their place. They bring important but heretofore relatively unknown issues into the public eye. The downside, of course, is that they seem to attract some crazed extremists along with many concerned citizens. This leads to further polarization on an issue that is already quite polarized and this, obviously, is not good.
I choose to not engage in such demonstrations. I neither completely endorse them, nor do I completely condemn them. I choose quieter advocacy, which includes direct conversations with other parents, with teachers and employees of our local school board, and writing in the public sphere even if, for now, anonymously.
Vitriol is Not Victory
The vitriol on one side paints every parent who won’t fast-track their trans-identified child onto the medicalization path as a hateful abuser. The vitriol on the other side paints every public school teacher as a monster seeking to devour children. Neither of these, of course, is true for the majority of either side, although to be sure, a small minority of such people do exist. But I find it particularly egregious that our government seems to think that every person, indeed every parent, who wants to exercise caution is a hateful abuser.
This is a brutal, bullying authoritarian tactic.
These demonstrations and the counter-protests in the streets of our cities are indeed the result of ideology being force-fed into public schools. This is often done, in my estimation, by people who have good but extremely naive intentions and who overestimate their importance in the lives of other people's children. In some cases, however, the intentions are more nefarious.
Many other employees of school boards and in the leadership of our public schools (I have spoken to them) are uncomfortable with what is happening but feel powerless to act for fear of being ostracized or facing the loss of their careers and pensions.
That fear is real, but isn't this the way it's always been? And mustn't someone stand up, Bonhoeffer-like to say that this is not good, and something must be done?
Thousands of parents quietly suffer through the anguish of their children's self-misdiagnosis, watching what seems an inevitable march toward “gender-affirming care,” which, as it turns out, is often a euphemism for the lifelong body-altering effects of hormones and surgeries that will remove healthy body parts. This is surgical abuse and should be dealt with as such.
Our Story
I am one of these parents who is watching the horror show that is gender ideology unfold. I love my daughter immensely. I spend as much time with her as I can. She is a beautiful, bright, brilliant young woman who has been captured by an insidious ideology that seeks to do her great harm. As she has struggled through her life, we have continued to hold her close and love her in every way we know how. We seek out many sources of support for her and try to divert her from the obvious self-harm that would result from hormones and surgeries.
Perhaps I am naive, but it doesn't seem a great stretch to imagine that we could all agree that the scenario I described above is wrong and likely to lead to harm for my daughter and others like her. If we could agree on something as basic as that, we might have a chance to moderate the vitriol that's being spouted in both directions, to sit across the table and talk to each other.
We could talk about what's working and what's not, about what's appropriate to be taught in schools and what's not, about the level of advocacy and the amount of influence teachers, guidance counsellors, and others should exercise over students and about the place of parental authority in the lives of their children. If we can’t find a way to do this, children will keep flooding out of the public system into homeschool groups and private schools, which is what is happening in the area of Ontario in which I live.
No Byline
There is no byline for this article because I write anonymously. I do so primarily for the purpose of protecting my daughter’s identity, but I also do this for the purpose of guarding her safety - and ours - from those who see our home as unloving and “abusive” and seek to “rescue” her from it. Sadly, this includes the Government of Ontario.
That is a sad state of affairs in a country like ours and something must be done about it.
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(CONTEXT: Who Am I? and What’s my story? If you have your own story to tell or you’d like to join me in this fight, please reach out to anontransparent@icloud.com
I appreciate the desire to be civil and the concern about voices you think are too extreme, but...
The entire ruling apparatus of Western society is gleefully slicing off or chemically withering the private parts of teenagers! If you're not prepared to get a little politically extreme over that, what will it take? Do you want a kinder, gentler way of stopping female genital mutilation?
"they seem to attract some crazed extremists along with many concerned citizens."
This is a little like the old adage about "terrorist" vs "freedom fighter".
Vaclav Benda (Soviet dissident) and his wife were both pious Catholics. But they found that their fellow Catholics were unwilling to take real risk to fight the communists. So they found people who were, mostly left-wing hippies. That was the core of Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia. It wasn't easy for conservative Kamila to have a bunch of drug-using, street-living, liberal revolutionaries in her living room every month. Why did she do it? Because when you're facing evil, the most important criteria isn't someone's social standing or religious education or political purity... what matters is grit: will they have your back when the bullets start flying?
What the ruling class of the Western world is doing is EVIL. Full stop.
I think this author could learn a little from the Bendas and the Havels. You're not going to agree with everyone in your movement on everything (or even most things). But what matters is, do you agree about not sexualizing kids and are you willing to stand up in the face of enormous opposition in defense of that cause? Anyone who is is my ally, even if I disagree with them on everything else.
There's no such thing as transhumanism.
It's all a lie.....
Those are the words of a friend of mine. He's a man, he knows that now. Unfortunately he's trapped in the wrong body after being led down a path of affirmation into full realignment surgery.
With thoughtful therapy up to 90 percent of people with dysphoria could learn to live happily in their own bodies without so much as a puberty blocker let alone cross sex hormones or irreversible surgeries so why are they promoting dangerous off label drugs to children as young as 9?
What sort of ideology promotes that people should medicate and mutilate themselves to fit into society?
Imagine realising you have been sold a lie after it's too late to go back.
Let's get back to teaching these kids they are perfectly fine exactly how they are and let no one risk their health without being able to fully understand the implications of the medical pathways in relation to health and future fertility risks.
I don't think kids should be able to make those life altering decisions let alone the government. That sounds very George Orwell like to me. You must obey the party, you must believe lies like they are truth trust the science.
Honestly I sometimes wonder if I have woken up in some alternate universe where some insane mind virus has taken hold of otherwise normal sane people.
Schools, colleges and universities promoting the idea that you can magically change sex. Social media, mainstream media and even politicians censoring and attacking anyone who dares to be the child who shouts the emperor is wearing women's clothes.
Sorry but there's only 2 sexes male and female and nobody can magically change into something they are not. Let's stand up and say what we all know to be true.
Let's stand up for children's health and safe guarding. Stand up for people being bullied and harassed for believing in reality. Stand up to the nonsense of men competing in women's sports or women being called the T word (erf) for not wanting biological men in their spaces.
Most of all let's just stand up for the truth.