Teaching Our Children about Gender Ideology

I’m not confident there is a sure-fire way to protect our children from trans ideology, but I think the best we can do is to inoculate them from a very young age with critical thinking skills, especially taking the time to teach them how to evaluate ideas and authority.  What follows are some recollections of how I did this with my own children, in hopes that others might find it helpful.

My children were about eight and ten years old when I read about a mother in Georgia whose daughter was removed from their home because she had allowed her to play unattended in a park. I told my children about what I’d read, and instructed them thus: “If you are ever approached by someone who appears to be concerned for your welfare when you are playing outside, it might be a social worker, and they sometimes take children away from their families, so you need to tell her that you can’t talk because your mommy hurt her ankle and you are running to get help from your friend’s mom who is a nurse, then run to Ben’s house.” (Ben was a playmate on the block whose mom was a nurse).

Around this same time, my children complained to me that at school, a student could get in trouble for telling younger children that “Zero the Hero” (a character invented to teach kindergarteners about the 10s place in mathematics) isn’t real, and that they could also get in trouble for saying that God IS real. I told them a bit about the First Amendment, commiserated with them, and put it into perspective. “Sweethearts, I didn’t want to tell you this so young, but the world is full of idiots with power over you. You need to be polite to them, but be careful, and realize you can’t trust these people (teachers and administrators). Learn what you can, but don’t trust people just because they have authority.”

One evening, a neighbor came over. Let’s call her Lucy. Lucy began berating another neighbor, whom we shall call “Rochelle”, telling us that Rochelle is Not a Good Person, and that we shouldn’t trust her.  Lucy and Rochelle had been best friends.  I told Lucy that she needed to stop bad-mouthing Rochelle or get out of my home because Rochelle is my friend.  She stopped the tirade, changed the subject, and left an hour or so later.  I turned to my kids.  

“What did we learn this evening, kids? Did we learn that Rochelle is Not a Good Person, and that we shouldn’t trust her? Or did we learn that Lucy is a woman who will say terrible things to hurt a woman she pretends to be best friends with?”  My children thought for a while and concluded we had learned the latter.

“That’s right. We don’t learn about people from what other people say about them. But we do learn about people from what we hear them say about others. You need to make up your own minds based on what you actually know. That’s important to remember.”

We had numerous learning experiences at doctors’ offices, too.  When a pediatrician recommended a chest x-ray for my daughter, who had a fever but no cough, I questioned the doctor as to her reasoning, which turned out to be that she “didn’t know what else to do.” I declined the x-ray.  At one point, our medical provider gave us incorrect information about how to use an inhaler for my son’s cough, and then decided when the inhaler “didn’t work,” that my son had walking pneumonia, even though nothing showed on a chest x-ray, and prescribed antibiotics instead. The antibiotics did nothing good for him. I went online and learned that we had been using the inhaler incorrectly, and further research lead me to believe he was chronically dehydrated and had acid reflux.  I fixed his cough accordingly.  When dealing with anorexia after the long COVID-lockdown, my daughter and I had a psychologist explain to us that anorexia is caused by fat-phobia, which was invented by the thin white men who control the AMA. I fired the psychologist.

In all these examples (and countless others), I explained to my kids that, unfortunately, you can’t trust doctors and psychologists to always know what they’re talking about, that you have to do your own research and think about things for yourself.  I told them that all drugs have side effects, all medical interventions have risks, and that it is important to try one’s best to stay healthy. If you do get sick, ask a doctor for advice but question that advice, and do your own research as well, and only take medicine or have other treatment if it is absolutely necessary to prevent death or disability. I also told them that it is generally safer to take older medicines, because we have more information about their safety.

I told my children how psychologists used to “know” that autism was caused by cold mothers, until it was known that it wasn’t, and that homosexuality was listed as a mental disorder, until it wasn’t.  I told them about the false memory scandal which happened before they were born, in which women were convinced by their psychologists that they had been molested as children, ripping apart families.  I told them that as a teenager I’d peeked into my older sister’s psychology textbook and learned that psychologists had tortured baby monkeys to learn that babies need love and affection to grow healthy.  

“Any discipline that needs to torture monkeys to figure out that humans need love is really sick and can’t be trusted to make people well.  It is also misogynistic, because if these men really didn’t know what babies need, they could have asked just about any grandmother, but they didn’t – they’d rather torture baby monkeys than trust a woman,” I explained.

There are good therapists, I told them, but the good ones are only good because of their natural abilities, experience, and good sense, not because of what they were told to believe in school.

I also told my children about the dangers of capitalism (as well as its perks).  For a long time, whenever we were in the supermarket waiting in line for the cashier to ring up our groceries, my children would grab the candy, displayed at kids-eye-level along the line, and I would scold them and tell them to put it down, that I wasn’t going to buy it and they weren’t allowed to play with it.  One afternoon, however, I started to scold them, but then something inside of me snapped and I thought better of it.

“I’m sorry, kids. I shouldn’t scold you for playing with the candy. It isn’t your fault. Powerful, rich corporations had the candy put there specifically so little kids will grab it and play with it and beg their parents for it and we’re supposed to be embarrassed and give in and buy it for you, or scold you, and I’m not having it. I am SO over this. Play with the candy. Throw it in the air and catch it. I’m not going to discipline you. They can throw us out of the market if they want. I don’t care. I love you. You need to understand that these corporations don’t love you. They don’t care if your teeth rot, if you get too fat to run around and play, if you get diabetes and need to take lots of medication by the time you’re forty. All they care about is making a profit, and if they kill you in the process, they don’t care. Well, screw them. I’m gonna tell everyone I know not to discipline their kids in the check-out line. Let the markets move the candy or throw us out of the store. I’m not scolding you anymore. I’m not falling for their designs. I love you too much for that.”

(Pro-tip: They never begged me for candy again! They didn’t even bother to play with it!)

So when I had what struck me as a very strange “indoctrination session” at work about transgender ideology, and then heard from another mom with an older child that her daughter had suddenly decided she is not a girl but rather a “they,” and then heard from my mother that a naked man had been prancing around the local YMCA women’s dressing room showing his junk, and that no one could make him stop because he claimed to be a woman, I figured there was something very menacing in the air, and decided it was important to research and then talk to my children about.

I shared with them that a man in a skimpy dress with too much make-up and huge, fake watermelon-sized breasts came to lecture me and my colleagues at work about how much privilege we have as “cis-gender” people, spouted off sexist stereotypes about girls and boys and how he knew he was a girl because he liked playing with dolls, and complained about how sexually harassed he was. I told my kids how everyone at work looked afraid to speak.  I told them about the naked man at the gym and the they-girl.  I told them that pharmaceutical companies could make a lot of money convincing people that they needed to take hormones, and that doctors were prescribing drugs to children without concern for the long-term effects. (People say there are no studies about the long-term effects of puberty blockers, but people who took Lupron for precocious puberty have plenty of sad tales to tell about the long-term effects).  I told them that therapists and doctors can now get in trouble for not affirming a child who wants to transition.  I pointed out that a man can never become a woman, and vice-versa, but doctors can get rich convincing people to try.  I reminded them about homonyms:  A transwoman is a woman and I am a woman the same way a wooden stick used to hit a baseball and a flying marsupial are both bats. We have nothing in common, just like the two kinds of bats.

I told them that people aren’t allowed to question this stuff in public; that anything we are forbidden to question is very probably a lie.  

I explained that only the very powerful can force others to shut up; anything you can’t say, therefore, is very likely a lie that protects the powerful; absolute power corrupts absolutely; and might does not make right. If you aren’t allowed to say something, you probably should.

At one point, my son, then 13, assured me, “Don’t worry, mommy. If I ever become trans, I’ll identify as a blueberry, not a woman.”  

My daughter was a little more inclined, even after all my attempts to educate her, to go with the cultural flow.  The first time I had to sign us all up for COVID-testing, I was asked to give our “genders.”  I asked my kids how they identified, and put them down as male and female, but for myself, I put something like “Don’t Know,” or “Neither” in the gender box. And I told my kids this. I told them that I was told that a woman, these days, is anyone who identifies as a woman, which is a circular definition, and a word with a circular definition is meaningless, and educated people can’t in good faith identify with meaningless terms.  

My daughter stared at me, incredulous.

“Are you questioning that you might actually be a man?” she asked.

“Of course not,” I told her. “Look, if I were to suddenly decide to identify as a man, would I then start to pee standing up?”

She looked horrified.

“I hope not!”

“Why?” I demanded.

“Because you would sprinkle all over the toilet seat!” she said.

“Of course, I would sprinkle all over the toilet seat, even if I claimed to be a man, because I am a woman!”

She seemed to get that. But she still wants to be “nice.”

I get being nice, I told her. I think it is absolutely transphobic – and not nice at all - that sports teams should be divided by gender.  Having men’s teams and women’s teams, with “men” and “women” referring to gender, excludes all the non-binary, other-gendered, and genderless people.  The only fair way to divide teams is by sex.  Genders, given that there are so many, are a hurtful and exclusionary way to divide people.  I mean, there are obvious reasons for dividing people by biological sex, which is objective, but dividing people by gender identity, which no one can understand except for the person who claims the gender identity, is a nonsensical way to divide people. And it leaves out people like me, who have no clue as to what their internal sense of gender identity is and couldn’t give a rat’s rear end to find out. How is it nice to exclude non-binary individuals and those with unusual gender identities, and people, like me, who have no gender identity? Seems a cruel and senseless way to decide who can and can’t compete in a race.

I also keep my kids abreast of the latest news—women being raped in prisons by men identifying as women, men beating women in women’s sport, and ask: “Is this nice?”

I point out that many of the teenagers and children identifying as trans are on the autism spectrum, and/or have mental health disabilities, and many come to regret their decisions. Is it nice to make money from children with disabilities?

I point out that trans ideology also targets children who don’t conform to sexist stereotypes, and remind them that I was once a tomboy, that my son used to love his baby doll and playing with make-up, and it didn’t make me a boy or him a girl. Sexist stereotypes aren’t nice, especially when followed up with drugs and surgeries.

I tell them that little children who might grow up to be gay are being pressured to identify as the opposite sex, that trans is the ultimate conversion therapy, hence the popularity of gender-affirming surgeries in Iran. It isn’t nice to convince young people to a lifetime of medical intervention simply to avoid “being gay,” is it?

My children are in high school now. So far, they seem uninterested in trans ideology, but willing to go with the flow.  They tell me I’m a far-right nut. My daughter says I’m an anarchist who doesn’t play well with the other anarchists. My son says I’m “exhausting” when I bring up trans issues. “If you drank alcohol, mommy,” says my son, “you’d be like Jack Sparrow.”

But all kids think their parents are nuts, no?  To be a little nuts is a parent’s prerogative. Especially a mother’s. After all, if women weren’t crazy, the human race would have died out with the advent of the birth control pill. Children should have some respect, right? I tell them that, too.

I think these conversations about trans ideology would be much more difficult to have with pre-school-aged children, who are exposed to trans ideology in school. But kids aren’t stupid at any age, they simply lack perspective and information. Sharpening our children’s critical thinking skills, and their confidence in their own ability to think things through, is our only hope. I definitely think you want to start with non-trans-related issues when strengthening their critical thinking skills, and then go for the big-game: trans ideology. If we were raising our young in a jungle, we’d share with them, as early as possible, the skills to avoid being bitten by a snake or predator.  We live in a modern sort of jungle, and we need to teach our children how to avoid and outsmart the dangers that await them.

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