In 2014, my son started to ask for the popular block-building computer game known as "Minecraft." Later that year, my wife and I decided to get said game for him, and he loved it.
so the horrible, disgusting, and dangerous thing this caused is.... your daughter having a loving relationship? a cute lesbian wedding? yeah no wonder you werent invited. i truly hope you find it in your heart to not be so spiteful and self centered if you gain another blessing of a trans child
Wow. It's crazy to me how something as innocent as a video game can warp our children's view of the world so drastically. I can't imagine if the video games I played as a kid had such malice sneaking into them.
If a boy playing as a feminine character in a video game "blurs the boundaries of gender and sex" and "contributes to gender confusion", the video game isn't the cause. You are being needlessly paranoid and more importantly, needlessly hurtful to your child. She almost certainly felt uncomfortable with her body and confused about who she was before she played minecraft. All her girlfriend did is help her understand herself. Please educate yourself about gender dysphoria and transgender people. They are not harmful.
No, they are not "harmful" people. But online games and social media absolutely CAN contribute to gender confusion. Some adolescents who are likely gay, but haven't yet figured that out, can become confused by online interactions with their peers and mistakenly come to believe they are trans. Parents posting on PITT have good reason to believe their children have succumbed to ROGD.
It would be really good to be able to find out if any paedos were intentionally out there hooking in kids... I mean I guess it goes without saying that yes of course there always are BUT I mean particularly spreading trans ideas.... 🤔
We need some Minecraft cyber sleuths to pretend to be kids and do some research. But how would ever know who is behind the other side?? I'm no expert, but it would really be good to categorically say this was intentional becasue it can i ly be I tentional of its
A. Politicised or B. Paedophiles
In which case BOTH would require minecraft to better control the users allowed on.
The only significant way Minecraft could be a factor is that it is a channel of communication. But communication is good, social activity is good, and there are many other good things in it. It is a forum in which my niece has been able to explore and develop her desire to be an engineer, without the slightest hint of anyone telling her this means she’s a boy.
This is basically just jealousy/envy. Parents often become jealous of the interests that they perceive their children replacing them with. It’s exactly like my mum in the 90s telling me “your eyes will turn square if you keep tapping away at that thing!”, and all the other panics about video nastiest, dungeons & dragons, drill music etc. Conservative fear about the Vietnam protests, or the hippy movement generally. It’s old people saying, “what’s this new thing, ugh!!”
While there are many toxic and harmful cultural products, my personal opinion based on experience and knowing a lot of young people (I’m a university lecturer) is that Minecraft is much less likely to contribute to your child’s transition than Barbie, Love Island and the Daily Mail. By all means complain about the pornification of everything and the ridiculously narrow definitions of make and female we offer our children. Of course the girls go nonbinary if the want to reject being a bimbo. Of course the boys question their gender if the alpha male bullies in their school tell them they must be a girl if they don’t like fighting, and all male role models involve violence.
Going after Minecraft is completely self-defeating, it’s not likely to be a significant contributor and it will make you/us look bonkers. AND we’re going up against one of the most popular toys in the world, it’s quite possible your kid will choose their toys over you.
Thanks for sharing your painful story. I hope your son realizes one day that he can never be a woman. And I hope you can find some peace with your situation. Minecraft may have been your son's way in, but the indoctrination is everywhere. It's not your fault.
This is insane. Are you a TRA, spoofing, trying to make gender critical people lol crazy?
Look, children have always been able to play out of sight of their parents. If you can’t cope with the limited amount of autonomy Minecraft offers your children how on Earth would you have coped with the 1970s, when most kids went out playing with their friends for hours on end end the parents didn’t even know where they were?
Minecraft is totally innocuous. Minecraft did not trans your kid. It was probably the only way of escaping your lunacy.
Wow. How do you know what kind of effect Minecraft had on the writer's son? I get the sense you do not have a trans-identified kid. Actually, we all would have coped much better during the 70s, when playing outside was exactly what kids did. Instead, many of our kids are being influenced by social media and yes, maybe even Minecraft.
>How do you know what kind of effect Minecraft had on the writer's son?
Because I know what it is and what it contains. The same way I know eating French cheese didn't give my wife COVID.
Minecraft is almost certainly the most wholesome cultural product to have been created in the last two decades. There's nothing harmful in it at all. Now, there are are certain contexts in Minecraft where a person is able to TALK to ANOTHER PERSON, (remotely, not in person, not like when kids used to get nonced by scout leaders and priests) but if that's ultimately what the freakout is about, then I think the child probably needed to get away from their parent. Talking to other people is an important life skill and children do need to learn it. Online and in their own home is much safer than in some church hut somewhere...
I think the kind of toys that say "If you're not a violent toxic alpha man, you must therefore be a woman", or "if you aren't a ditzy bimbo, you must therefore be a man" are much more likey to cause people to reject their gender. Trying to force heavily masculine toys onto a boy who doesn't like violence or doing violence, is probably the most likely thing I can imagine to cause him to transition.
I think you’re being unduly hard on the writer of this piece, but I agree that there’s nothing particularly nefarious about Minecraft. Blaming Minecraft is a little too reminiscent of “Satanic panic” fears about Dungeons & Dragons.
Sorry, that wasn't a considered reaction, it was "OMFG seriously"? You hear a lot of TRAs claiming that the gender critical position is reactionary, ignorant, based on tabloid panic and fake news, and usually we can ignore that, but this post is exactly what they are talking about.
People have been able to create online avatars, or play games as characters who differ from them, for much longer than the trans craze. Back in the mid-2000s, I was part of this online role-playing game where all the main characters were young gay men in Victorian England. In real life, they were nerdy female history geeks/Oscar Wilde fans of assorted orientations. Writing as “Peregrine Summerhill” (or whatever my character’s goofy name was) didn’t make me thing I must really be a gay man, because back then, “transgender people” were thought of as rare, lifelong dysphorics who could barely stand to look at their own genitals.
I don’t see anything specific to Minecraft that makes it particularly nefarious. Teenagers have unsupervised conversations all the time, whether it’s 2014 and they’re on Minecraft or it’s 1984 and they’re passing notes in study hall.
Of course there was no online world to distract us from reality back when we were kids. (I grew up in the '70s.) We had our school pictures taken for the yearbook, and that was as close as we got to creating an "avatar," which would have been no use to us anyway since our games existed in reality. Oh, I take that back ! There were little game pieces of different shapes, like those used in Monopoly, and I suppose we could call them our avatars in the game -- but I'm just joking. There was a clear divide between fantasy and reality.
Kids today can morph into whatever they want to be in their fantasy worlds, so is it any wonder they start wanting to change their bodies in real life?
Kids have always been able to morph into whatever they want to be in their fantasy worlds. Before the spread of trans ideology, only the mentally disturbed thought that they could actually turn into a fictional character in a game.
Unlike kids acting out their fantasies back in our day, these kids are addicted to online gaming. It's a different world. Many kids get sucked into fantasies and lose their own sense of self. I can't blame them for being confused.
Yes, and it is not the Minecraft game that is to blame. These "conversations" can happen everywhere. The dilemma is, freedom vs control. Now, many here would argue, that we need to protect our vulnerable children. There is a need to guide them properly. The world seems to have lost its mind! Therefore we should talk with our children about that, just like we talk about not going out alone in tbe dark, stay away from alcohol, drugs, tobacco, sex, guns, etc. "Behave properly!", what does that mean?
Now that the counter movement against the pseudocult has gained some momentum and substance, it is time to integrate the polarities and find the new middle way. For me, that we mean something like, you can be who you are, but let's explore what that really means. Who am I? Then make clear what the risks are of being confused. However, you will find a generational conflict as old as mankind lurking in the dark. That's why it is so hard to address this. You must allow some freedom and yet set certain bounderies. This is the eternal churning of ideas. We have to confront that. What is good and what is bad in the "new" thing...
Minecraft, Roblox, and anime are all predatory. When my son was little he used to play Roblox. I was watching him play once and his avatar was in a room with pizza slices for wall paper and he was humping the walls. That was the last time he played it. Anime is full of gender bending and animal human cross breeds.
If that makes you feel better about it, you're right. All of these things are really good for kids and there are no predators out there. What was I thinking?
You are absolutely correct! My son’s gateway drug was “my little pony”! He became a “Brony”. Can’t you just imagine the adult men pedos trolling that site??
When he announced his trans identity, I asked him why he thought he was transgender.
His answer: I always like being the female character in role play. So there you have it! I’m really a girl! Onto the hormones that he was enthusiastically prescribed by the Sacramento gender clinic after one therapy session with an intern barely older than he was at 19.
MLP is an awesome show, though, its weird adult male fanbase aside. Rainbow Dash is exactly the sort of character people would want to spin as trans or “non-binary” - loves sports, is aggressively competitive, doesn’t want anyone to think she likes anything traditionally feminine - but she’s indisputably a female pony, and no one ever acts like she’s weird. Creator Lauren Faust said she conceived the show around the idea that “there’s no wrong way to be a girl.”
Hmmm correlation or causation? I'd venture to say that Minecraft perhaps became another outlet for transgender manifestation, the influence of which was coming from plenty of other sources outside of Minecraft.
Absolutely absurd. You think it was the harmless digital building game. And then you bury the lede in there that not only were you letting your kid "date" at the early age of 14, he was "dating" another boy. My extremely liberal, diehard democrat parents, 30 years ago, would have thought it was exceedingly irresponsible and foolish to encourage a child that age to "date." And if he brought home another little boy, red flags would go up everywhere- was grooming going on? Had he been abused?
Of course you can't question that, now. Your critical thinking only goes so far.
Fourteen-year-olds are freshmen in high school. I and at lot of other people at my Catholic high school dated during freshman year (early 2000s), and no one found that scandalous. We just went to movies and school dances and kissed. 🤷♀️
Concluding that a teenage boy with an age-appropriate boyfriend was probably groomed or abused is nonsensical to me.
To be fair, I was being unkind, i could have been more gentle, and I forgot that at the other end of this is a person grieving for their child. If the OP reads this, I apologise in that respect.
I very much do not believe it’s possible for Minecraft to have had the effect the OP describes. Nobody could be turned trans by playing a video game with a central character the opposite gender. That’s genuinely crazy talk. Does it also happen if he reads a book with a female lead character? Best not write any of those, to be on the safe side. Oh no, but then our daughters are reading all these books about men! That must be where ROGD comes from!
I think if the OP ever said this idea to anyone under 40 they would’ve laughed at. If people pick it up and reiterate it, they will ultimately discredit any other arguments made about this issue. Like the person above talking about pizza.
Since the main argument against gender identity is essentially “but reality!” And we are winning with this argument, it’s important to keep the crazy talk to a minimum.
It's helpful because a lot of people read this blog and even if the OP cannot benefit from the obvious being pointed out, one of them might benefit from it.
Allowing your kid to become sexualized too early, to "date," to identify as LGBT, is basically inviting this kind of trouble. Children should be sheltered and protected, even protected from their own rash and foolish impulsivity.
It takes courage to publish your personal story for the world to see, and people are sensitive about having their parenting critiqued (whether you are right or wrong), so that's why I asked.
I'm not sure if I would call it courage to go public with "I encouraged my son to mess around with other boys when he was barely into puberty, and when this escalated into further nonsense, I blamed a video game."
Where did the author state he encouraged his son to mess around with other boys? What I read was that the kid was dating a boy at age 14. That doesn't strike me as unusual. I had a boyfriend at that age too -- and I never asked for my parents' permission.
so the horrible, disgusting, and dangerous thing this caused is.... your daughter having a loving relationship? a cute lesbian wedding? yeah no wonder you werent invited. i truly hope you find it in your heart to not be so spiteful and self centered if you gain another blessing of a trans child
also, where is the freedom of speech in this damn place? im seeing hundreds of commends being silenced for simply opposing your foolhardy belief
Wow. It's crazy to me how something as innocent as a video game can warp our children's view of the world so drastically. I can't imagine if the video games I played as a kid had such malice sneaking into them.
If a boy playing as a feminine character in a video game "blurs the boundaries of gender and sex" and "contributes to gender confusion", the video game isn't the cause. You are being needlessly paranoid and more importantly, needlessly hurtful to your child. She almost certainly felt uncomfortable with her body and confused about who she was before she played minecraft. All her girlfriend did is help her understand herself. Please educate yourself about gender dysphoria and transgender people. They are not harmful.
No, they are not "harmful" people. But online games and social media absolutely CAN contribute to gender confusion. Some adolescents who are likely gay, but haven't yet figured that out, can become confused by online interactions with their peers and mistakenly come to believe they are trans. Parents posting on PITT have good reason to believe their children have succumbed to ROGD.
For a personal account of ROGD, check this out:
https://lacroicsz.substack.com/p/by-any-other-name?s=r
It would be really good to be able to find out if any paedos were intentionally out there hooking in kids... I mean I guess it goes without saying that yes of course there always are BUT I mean particularly spreading trans ideas.... 🤔
We need some Minecraft cyber sleuths to pretend to be kids and do some research. But how would ever know who is behind the other side?? I'm no expert, but it would really be good to categorically say this was intentional becasue it can i ly be I tentional of its
A. Politicised or B. Paedophiles
In which case BOTH would require minecraft to better control the users allowed on.
The only significant way Minecraft could be a factor is that it is a channel of communication. But communication is good, social activity is good, and there are many other good things in it. It is a forum in which my niece has been able to explore and develop her desire to be an engineer, without the slightest hint of anyone telling her this means she’s a boy.
This is basically just jealousy/envy. Parents often become jealous of the interests that they perceive their children replacing them with. It’s exactly like my mum in the 90s telling me “your eyes will turn square if you keep tapping away at that thing!”, and all the other panics about video nastiest, dungeons & dragons, drill music etc. Conservative fear about the Vietnam protests, or the hippy movement generally. It’s old people saying, “what’s this new thing, ugh!!”
While there are many toxic and harmful cultural products, my personal opinion based on experience and knowing a lot of young people (I’m a university lecturer) is that Minecraft is much less likely to contribute to your child’s transition than Barbie, Love Island and the Daily Mail. By all means complain about the pornification of everything and the ridiculously narrow definitions of make and female we offer our children. Of course the girls go nonbinary if the want to reject being a bimbo. Of course the boys question their gender if the alpha male bullies in their school tell them they must be a girl if they don’t like fighting, and all male role models involve violence.
Going after Minecraft is completely self-defeating, it’s not likely to be a significant contributor and it will make you/us look bonkers. AND we’re going up against one of the most popular toys in the world, it’s quite possible your kid will choose their toys over you.
Yeah, just like the genderbread character.
Trans ideology will co-op it to indoctrinate.
file:///var/mobile/Library/SMS/Attachments/78/08/03518482-FDF6-4C33-A61E-15F3E10E829D/FILE_2376.pdf
Thanks for sharing your painful story. I hope your son realizes one day that he can never be a woman. And I hope you can find some peace with your situation. Minecraft may have been your son's way in, but the indoctrination is everywhere. It's not your fault.
This is insane. Are you a TRA, spoofing, trying to make gender critical people lol crazy?
Look, children have always been able to play out of sight of their parents. If you can’t cope with the limited amount of autonomy Minecraft offers your children how on Earth would you have coped with the 1970s, when most kids went out playing with their friends for hours on end end the parents didn’t even know where they were?
Minecraft is totally innocuous. Minecraft did not trans your kid. It was probably the only way of escaping your lunacy.
Wow. How do you know what kind of effect Minecraft had on the writer's son? I get the sense you do not have a trans-identified kid. Actually, we all would have coped much better during the 70s, when playing outside was exactly what kids did. Instead, many of our kids are being influenced by social media and yes, maybe even Minecraft.
>How do you know what kind of effect Minecraft had on the writer's son?
Because I know what it is and what it contains. The same way I know eating French cheese didn't give my wife COVID.
Minecraft is almost certainly the most wholesome cultural product to have been created in the last two decades. There's nothing harmful in it at all. Now, there are are certain contexts in Minecraft where a person is able to TALK to ANOTHER PERSON, (remotely, not in person, not like when kids used to get nonced by scout leaders and priests) but if that's ultimately what the freakout is about, then I think the child probably needed to get away from their parent. Talking to other people is an important life skill and children do need to learn it. Online and in their own home is much safer than in some church hut somewhere...
I think the kind of toys that say "If you're not a violent toxic alpha man, you must therefore be a woman", or "if you aren't a ditzy bimbo, you must therefore be a man" are much more likey to cause people to reject their gender. Trying to force heavily masculine toys onto a boy who doesn't like violence or doing violence, is probably the most likely thing I can imagine to cause him to transition.
I think you’re being unduly hard on the writer of this piece, but I agree that there’s nothing particularly nefarious about Minecraft. Blaming Minecraft is a little too reminiscent of “Satanic panic” fears about Dungeons & Dragons.
Sorry, that wasn't a considered reaction, it was "OMFG seriously"? You hear a lot of TRAs claiming that the gender critical position is reactionary, ignorant, based on tabloid panic and fake news, and usually we can ignore that, but this post is exactly what they are talking about.
Starting to think ur high on ketamine or??
People have been able to create online avatars, or play games as characters who differ from them, for much longer than the trans craze. Back in the mid-2000s, I was part of this online role-playing game where all the main characters were young gay men in Victorian England. In real life, they were nerdy female history geeks/Oscar Wilde fans of assorted orientations. Writing as “Peregrine Summerhill” (or whatever my character’s goofy name was) didn’t make me thing I must really be a gay man, because back then, “transgender people” were thought of as rare, lifelong dysphorics who could barely stand to look at their own genitals.
I don’t see anything specific to Minecraft that makes it particularly nefarious. Teenagers have unsupervised conversations all the time, whether it’s 2014 and they’re on Minecraft or it’s 1984 and they’re passing notes in study hall.
Of course there was no online world to distract us from reality back when we were kids. (I grew up in the '70s.) We had our school pictures taken for the yearbook, and that was as close as we got to creating an "avatar," which would have been no use to us anyway since our games existed in reality. Oh, I take that back ! There were little game pieces of different shapes, like those used in Monopoly, and I suppose we could call them our avatars in the game -- but I'm just joking. There was a clear divide between fantasy and reality.
How times have changed! Just google "avatar generator" and you'll get plenty of results like these: https://www.canva.com/create/avatars/
https://avatarmaker.com/
https://www.adobe.com/express/create/avatar
https://unionavatars.com/
https://meiker.io/games/tag/avatar-maker
Kids today can morph into whatever they want to be in their fantasy worlds, so is it any wonder they start wanting to change their bodies in real life?
Kids have always been able to morph into whatever they want to be in their fantasy worlds. Before the spread of trans ideology, only the mentally disturbed thought that they could actually turn into a fictional character in a game.
Unlike kids acting out their fantasies back in our day, these kids are addicted to online gaming. It's a different world. Many kids get sucked into fantasies and lose their own sense of self. I can't blame them for being confused.
Yes, and it is not the Minecraft game that is to blame. These "conversations" can happen everywhere. The dilemma is, freedom vs control. Now, many here would argue, that we need to protect our vulnerable children. There is a need to guide them properly. The world seems to have lost its mind! Therefore we should talk with our children about that, just like we talk about not going out alone in tbe dark, stay away from alcohol, drugs, tobacco, sex, guns, etc. "Behave properly!", what does that mean?
Now that the counter movement against the pseudocult has gained some momentum and substance, it is time to integrate the polarities and find the new middle way. For me, that we mean something like, you can be who you are, but let's explore what that really means. Who am I? Then make clear what the risks are of being confused. However, you will find a generational conflict as old as mankind lurking in the dark. That's why it is so hard to address this. You must allow some freedom and yet set certain bounderies. This is the eternal churning of ideas. We have to confront that. What is good and what is bad in the "new" thing...
I agree very much with this comment.
Minecraft, Roblox, and anime are all predatory. When my son was little he used to play Roblox. I was watching him play once and his avatar was in a room with pizza slices for wall paper and he was humping the walls. That was the last time he played it. Anime is full of gender bending and animal human cross breeds.
Bonkers. It’s just a game.
If that makes you feel better about it, you're right. All of these things are really good for kids and there are no predators out there. What was I thinking?
>his avatar was in a room with pizza slices for wall paper and he was humping the walls. That was the last time he played it.
I mean this does sound like an overreaction.
Apparently you don't understand the pizza meaning.
Then explain it.
It is a symbol predators use to avoid using the actual words.
Yes indeed. My daughter was into games and anime and the same thing..
You are absolutely correct! My son’s gateway drug was “my little pony”! He became a “Brony”. Can’t you just imagine the adult men pedos trolling that site??
When he announced his trans identity, I asked him why he thought he was transgender.
His answer: I always like being the female character in role play. So there you have it! I’m really a girl! Onto the hormones that he was enthusiastically prescribed by the Sacramento gender clinic after one therapy session with an intern barely older than he was at 19.
MLP is an awesome show, though, its weird adult male fanbase aside. Rainbow Dash is exactly the sort of character people would want to spin as trans or “non-binary” - loves sports, is aggressively competitive, doesn’t want anyone to think she likes anything traditionally feminine - but she’s indisputably a female pony, and no one ever acts like she’s weird. Creator Lauren Faust said she conceived the show around the idea that “there’s no wrong way to be a girl.”
Hmmm correlation or causation? I'd venture to say that Minecraft perhaps became another outlet for transgender manifestation, the influence of which was coming from plenty of other sources outside of Minecraft.
Absolutely absurd. You think it was the harmless digital building game. And then you bury the lede in there that not only were you letting your kid "date" at the early age of 14, he was "dating" another boy. My extremely liberal, diehard democrat parents, 30 years ago, would have thought it was exceedingly irresponsible and foolish to encourage a child that age to "date." And if he brought home another little boy, red flags would go up everywhere- was grooming going on? Had he been abused?
Of course you can't question that, now. Your critical thinking only goes so far.
Fourteen-year-olds are freshmen in high school. I and at lot of other people at my Catholic high school dated during freshman year (early 2000s), and no one found that scandalous. We just went to movies and school dances and kissed. 🤷♀️
Concluding that a teenage boy with an age-appropriate boyfriend was probably groomed or abused is nonsensical to me.
Which is more unusual: playing a video game or wanting to have sex with people the same sex as you?
And how is this comment helpful?
It was helpful in that the craziness of the OP seriously discredits gender critical thinking, so it’s reassuring to have sane people down here.
Minecraft is completely wholesome, honestly, if you have a problem with that, really your objection is to your kids growing up and becoming people.
It's never helpful to call someone crazy.
I suppose you feel that I should affirm their delusions?
That's not the point. You're making assumptions about someone on very little information, and you're being unkind.
To be fair, I was being unkind, i could have been more gentle, and I forgot that at the other end of this is a person grieving for their child. If the OP reads this, I apologise in that respect.
I very much do not believe it’s possible for Minecraft to have had the effect the OP describes. Nobody could be turned trans by playing a video game with a central character the opposite gender. That’s genuinely crazy talk. Does it also happen if he reads a book with a female lead character? Best not write any of those, to be on the safe side. Oh no, but then our daughters are reading all these books about men! That must be where ROGD comes from!
I think if the OP ever said this idea to anyone under 40 they would’ve laughed at. If people pick it up and reiterate it, they will ultimately discredit any other arguments made about this issue. Like the person above talking about pizza.
Since the main argument against gender identity is essentially “but reality!” And we are winning with this argument, it’s important to keep the crazy talk to a minimum.
It's helpful because a lot of people read this blog and even if the OP cannot benefit from the obvious being pointed out, one of them might benefit from it.
Allowing your kid to become sexualized too early, to "date," to identify as LGBT, is basically inviting this kind of trouble. Children should be sheltered and protected, even protected from their own rash and foolish impulsivity.
It takes courage to publish your personal story for the world to see, and people are sensitive about having their parenting critiqued (whether you are right or wrong), so that's why I asked.
I'm not sure if I would call it courage to go public with "I encouraged my son to mess around with other boys when he was barely into puberty, and when this escalated into further nonsense, I blamed a video game."
Where did the author state he encouraged his son to mess around with other boys? What I read was that the kid was dating a boy at age 14. That doesn't strike me as unusual. I had a boyfriend at that age too -- and I never asked for my parents' permission.