Blissfully Almost Ignorant

Sitting in a room full of similarly minded mums in my friend's yurt I get that sinking feeling I always get when they talk about their kids and school. They are all homeschooling mums and they know ALL about the problems with school, and not just from a gender ide-fucking-ology viewpoint. As a mum to two trans-identified children who are caught up in this, I can't help but wonder which women are part of the #bekindbrigade and if they actually know what they are supporting. 

Their relief and conviction at not being in the system is both intoxicating and ignorant at the same time. Sure, they know what kids are being taught is out of alignment and wholly inappropriate, but they don't exactly know why. 

There was the usual talk of the importance of teaching kids respect and kindness to others but they had no real notion of what that #bekind approach is really doing for society. What does that actually mean for children in schools? What does that really mean for vulnerable children like mine? While kindness and understanding are upmost in any interaction but what does saying yes have to do with your kindness? #BeKind riiiiight??

Well, here's what you are agreeing to. You are opening your child up to a flawed belief system and a notion that is not grounded in reality. The notion that, after hundreds of centuries of history where every man, woman, child and dog were either male or female and required each other in order to 'promulgate the notion' that sex is binary, they have now decided it's not. Sex is now on a spectrum and you can be anywhere on it you want. I doubt this is in keeping with the progressive "be who you want to be" mantra that has since been thrown by the wayside by sparkly eyed idealistic kids for a more stunning and brave notion that you can literally be whatever sex you want. And woe betide anyone who dares topple your mentally fragile feeling house of flimsy nonsensical cards.

You are also telling your child that it is indeed possible that their feelings are true. It is wholly possible that the hatred of their body going through the vital process, that every other child for millennia has gone through, of growing and changing and becoming, is actually WRONG. Your child is wrong, their body is wrong, their soul is wrong. Your child is born in the wrong body. The wrong body, as if during your pregnancy you somehow made a wrong child inside you.

Every time you picked up your wrong baby and loved them and grew your connection with them, you were setting yourself and your child up for a lifetime of misery. Don't you think you would have felt that wrongness? Mother's intuition is strong, surely it should have given you some inkling you had a WRoNg Un?

In addition to right in being wrong, you are also telling your children that with a couple of skittles here, a small incision there, a penis pump and a wound drain, they will become the other sex. PRAISE BE your child will cured, because trans is the answer to all their ails! Of course, where is the mention of the irreversible damage or the life-long medicalisation and surgery required to maintain this illusion?  

Another thing your child is now learning as fact is the idea that a man is now a woman if they say so. You may have spent your entire life up until now being sure your child knows that for their safety and protection, some men (certainly not all) should be considered dangerous. Some men can be unscrupulous and can try to lure you away. Safety for children and safeguarding of their innocence was always paramount. Now, this protection and instinctual cloak that we once enveloped our children in has become a massive flasher's mac. They must forego natural instinctual knowledge about their safe spaces and female needs and replace that with the notion that children should just deal with a penis in their face. Most of these 'men' never have any kind of medical or surgical treatment and remain physically and wholly male. It's OK. Gender idefuckingology says so.

Your children must now be au fait with dangerous, violent, sexual criminals who have raped women, tortured children, abused anything or anyone, sharing a prison cell with vulnerable women. It's perfectly safe and normal for a fully intact dangerous fox to be in amongst the chickens. It's OK. Gender idefuckingology says so.

Next what you are allowing your child to believe is that men who think they are women can join women in their competitive sports events and not enjoy advantages in strength, speed or endurance, even after having gone through puberty.

Also what your children are having embedded into their psyche when gender idefuckingology is introduced at such a young age is that women’s rights mean nothing. All the women who have fought for hundreds of years to obtain rights and privileges that their male counterparts have always enjoyed are now transphobes. This includes the women who died for the right to vote. And the women who stood up and fought against inequality - who fought not to be shackled to men and kitchens. This is not OK. This is not right. All those women have been shat upon from lofty heights by men in skirts. 

So finally, with your support and vague knowledge of being part of the #bekindbrigade, it is inevitably you who are pushing for my autistic vulnerable impressionable children to believe they can be born in the wrong body and want to become boys at the age of eleven.

Mostly though, as I sit with these lovely unintentionally 'ignorant' women who really do want equality, who really do tell their children you can be whatever you want to be, who really do think about exactly what they want their children to know and think carefully about how they say it, what I think sitting with these lucky bunch of blissfully unaware women is how I so wish I was just like them.

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