“The Emperor’s New Clothes” Redux

Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is a tale of swindlers who sell a boldfaced lie to the emperor by convincing him they have made magical clothes from invisible fabric and that the clothing can be seen only by ‘highly intelligent’ people. So, of course, everyone, including the emperor admires the suit of clothing when, in actuality, the emperor is parading around butt naked. This continues with increasing degrees of ridiculousness until, one day, a small boy steps out of the crowd and exclaims the truth that everyone knew all along - the emperor has no clothes. This tiny act of childlike honesty breaks the spell and everyone returns to normal. I hope, but it is not clear, that those swindlers went to jail.

Today’s trans-insanity is perfectly predicted by Andersen in the 1800’s with what he thought was a fable. It’s a relief that Andersen is not alive to see his fable brought into reality - not just in Denmark but around the world; and, in particular (because Americans tend to add steroids to everything we do), in the United States.

Today we are living in Andersen’s world where the deluded emperor is played out through our precious children and young men and women who are fragile enough to be swindled by the fable that they can actually change their sex. There are many swindlers in this story. They include:

• New online ‘friends’ who, either sadly uncomfortable in their own skin or perverted in sexual desires and salacious in intent, encourage our teens to change perfectly healthy and whole bodies. They are mentally ill people pulling down other mentally ill people - swindling our kids for their sick benefit.

• Activist teachers with the hubris to think they know better than a loving family, who believe every word that our teenagers say (and we all know teenagers don’t fabricate, exaggerate, or create drama) - never letting parents know the distress they see in school but instead helping our children gain access to spaces to see how angry they can make the school board. Ah, yes, they are swindling our kids to provide evidence of their ‘wokeness.’

• Professors who ‘taught’ transgender falseness in their classrooms - encouraging, facilitating, salaciously engaging with fragile students to pursue their own predilection for weirdness claiming it is for the sake of ‘academic research’ or, even worse, ‘science.’ Like the swindlers in Andersen’s story - they knew exactly what they were doing as they further damaged a fragile group of students to promote their own careers. I wonder if they look back on regret from the seat of the Chair of their department?

• Politicians who know the transgender world is a made up fable but continue to vote in its favor because, after all, that is what the party says to do. They lie not only to their constituents but also to themselves in thinking that supporting the destruction of families and the permanent damage and possible early death of fragile young people is justified. (It’s ok, they reason. These kids are sick anyway.) They are swindling our kids and families in order to leverage their reelection campaigns.

• LGBTQIA advocates looking to add others to their ranks possibly because they are perverts, possibly because they are not mentally stable themselves, or possibly because they like the power of leading a growing organization. They disregard any evidence that even slightly tarnishes the false construct of the fable - facts and true science are utterly ignored and even buried. I wonder what older gay men and lesbian women think of an organization that used to fight for their rights that is now swindling fragile youth into ‘transing the gay away’?

• Unethical surgeons. At best they believe the Frankenstein experiments they are conducting on our children is actually ‘helping’ - at worst they know what they are doing but proceed anyway (usually over the exclamations of parents). They are certainly smart enough to know they have been swindling our children by creating damaged and broken bodies to match their damaged minds. Maybe they reason it will pay for a nice retirement and make them quite ‘famous’ in the medical field by being the ‘first’ to add a squirrel tail to the coccyx of a human.

• Affirming Therapists. Colluding with a mental illness is, to me, a sign of mental illness itself. At best you believed this and if this is the case, I hope you can be healed. At worst you consciously and systematically drove our children to further fragility (despite parental objections) - encouraging them toward a fable instead of helping them align their minds with reality. I wonder if your swindling was part of a larger context where you were proving your worth to a medical community made up of giant swindlers? Or, are you just a low level swindler trying to pay your mortgage by driving our children down a rabbit hole?

• Now we come to the king (or queen, depending on who is doing the defining) of all swindlers. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s very existence relies on the perpetuation of the lie. Anyway, WPATH is the impetus behind the fable, the driving force that pushes it into the public sphere, and the leader in providing false science and research to all the other swindlers so all of them can continue to promote the lie. But, take heart friends, like all swindlers this one will eventually be run out of town. It just takes one small voice speaking the truth as the story goes.

• Then there are the ‘kind’ family members and friends who have been swindled themselves and now truly believe the emperor has a fantastic set of clothes on - or they have consciously made the choice to say so. They hear their beloved child saying ‘these clothes make me feel good, these hormones make me feel happy, these new friends make me feel well’ and love the child so very much that they agree - at least on the surface - with the fable set before them. Of course this fable was embellished by unethical medical professionals who inquired, with a serious all-knowing tone, ‘would you rather have a dead child or a live transgender one?’ My heart aches for them. I don’t blame them one bit as I almost went down that same route. They, too, have been victimized right alongside their child. They, too, need to hear the small voice of truth that can - and will - eventually break the trans-spell.

For whatever reason - maybe we are more disagreeable than other folks and are always questioning authority, or maybe we are more easily able to spot a swindler, or maybe we naively put our faith in honesty as the best policy no matter the personal cost - whatever the reason is, there are those of us who have never been entranced by the trans-spell. If this describes you in whatever role you play in this fable, then I believe you, me and the rest of us disagreeable folks are obligated to stand out from the crowd and speak the truth. Like the little boy in the “Emperor’s New Clothes,” we must bravely say the truth as we see it, no matter the cost. It is the singular way that the trans-spell will be broken for all those enraptured in it.

We must do this because we know in our hearts of hearts that, after all, it’s the truth that everyone has known all along.