Pity the Based children of Woke parents

There are some Substacks in existence (like Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans) dedicated to sharing the stories of parents whose children who have been indoctrinated online into believing themselves to be trans, and who have cut themselves off from their parents, or been prescribed puberty blockers or hormones without their parents’ knowledge, or many others things. They are a sad and sobering read - a common theme is one of bereavement, when the child that they brought up has decided that their previous persona no longer exists. The concept of deadnaming explicitly imagines a trans person’s original name (and therefore personality) as ‘dead’. It’s horrifying to imagine a child declaring their former self dead, and being angry with their parents for not simply accepting this traumatic statement as fact.

It’s a tragic and criminal state of affairs that a cult can exist and have mainstream acceptance, whose purpose is nothing more noble than convincing people - with a particular focus on children - that they might have been born in the wrong body, and that the solution to this wrong-body problem lies first in others ‘affirming’ their gender identity, and then in medicalisation. If such a cult were not created purely to support the medical industry then it sure is a huge coincidence that that is precisely what it does, at the expense of predominantly young people’s mental health and relationships.

If creating a market for unnecessary medical procedures was the goal, then a side-effect of the cult’s doctrine (like any cult) is isolating the cult member from family and friends. This is not limited to people who decide that they are trans: ‘trans allies’ are often as vociferous and aggressive in their defence of ‘trans rights’ as trans people, even if they are equally unable to define those rights beyond nebulous aphorisms like ‘the right to self-identify’, and the ‘right’ to get ‘gender-affirming’ ‘care’.

A situation that I have yet to see documented publicly, is that where a child’s parents are believers in trans/queer ideology (even if they do not identify as trans/queer themselves), but the child resists because they can see instinctively that it doesn’t make sense. Children don’t ask “why” a lot just to be annoying; they are filled with curiosity and want to understand the world that adults navigate so effortlessly. Asking why, for example, we wait to cross the road until the little green man appears, is a legitimate question that will lead to a load more legitimate questions, and a parent can give satisfactory answers to all of them, even if they really might not feel like it at the time. The child trusts the parent’s judgment, because they can see how the action they are being required to do has a reasoning behind it that might not be immediately apparent.

Trans ideology upends all that. All of a sudden and only in this one particular case, physical facts and reasoning matter less than what a certain type of person thinks about themself and wants everyone else to believe about them. Before children are old enough to understand the extent of the differences between men and women, they might have no problem with the idea of men who like wearing dresses going into women’s bathrooms, if this is accepted as normal by the adults around them. As children get older and start to understand why certain spaces were sex-segregated in the first place, they are going to have the kind of concerns that ‘sex realist’ or ‘gender critical’ (i.e. sane, mature) adults do. Especially the girls, one would imagine.

If a child asks a - for want of a better word - woke parent why it is that men who say that they are women (or a gender other than male) should be allowed into female spaces, or how puberty blockers work, or why someone’s idea of themself is more important than their physical body, or why a single person should be referred to by plural pronouns, how can that parent respond in such a way that they retain the child’s trust in their judgment? How do these wokesters respond to people who aren’t their children, when confronted with these kind of questions?

The response is usually a passive-aggressive mix of condescension and dismissiveness, a kind of angry disbelief that they should even have to answer the question - which they never do, beyond offering further slogans and aphorisms. The pattern is generally to accuse the sceptic of hating trans people or of being ignorant, or essentially of being in some vague sense A Bad Person. They might say “I have lots of trans friends”, as if that were an answer in itself.

Essentially, the wokester will hold their relationship with the sceptic hostage, on the condition that the sceptic acquiesces to the woke viewpoint, or at least shuts up about it. There isn’t much else they can do, since the real answer to the question of why they profess to believe these things is that gender ideology can allow no questioning of its tenets, and punishes transgressors mercilessly. They know that it doesn’t make sense, because if it did then they’d be happy to explain it without resorting to emotional blackmail.

Surely the wokester wouldn’t respond to their child the same way. However, based on my experiences with trying to talk to woke folk about topics on which they have been programmed to have strong opinions without adequate reasons, I can easily imagine them taking a softer, but still emotionally manipulative, approach with their children. I know a man who has been ‘identifying as non-binary’ and going by they/them pronouns for four years, and he has a daughter who must be about seven, so I presume this situation has actually played out there.

In a place like Brighton (the tip of the spear when it comes to sexual progressivism in the UK), where I tried to talk to my friends about this blog and they used “trans rights in Russia” as one of several incoherent reasons why they disagreed with my blog despite not having read it, it’s undoubtedly more socially isolating to be ‘gender critical’ than to go along with the hipsters. Telling your children to believe because everyone else believes must be very tempting, certainly easier in the short term.

I can easily imagine any of those people softly telling their child that it’s all about love and acceptance, and if the child pushes the question, perhaps acting hurt that the child would question their parent, or resorting to “I don’t want to talk about it now” or “you’ll understand when you’re older”. The answer can’t be anything other than a softer version of the emotional blackmail they would use on gender critical adults, because trans ideology simply isn’t based in reality, and there’s no way of hiding that. It’s a fundamentally childish and self-centred ideology, and a child is bound to see through it, Emperor’s New Clothes-style.

What if the child holds their ground, and refuses to be emotionally blackmailed? The child has the moral and logical high ground, but the parent is… well, their parent. The one paying the bills and shit. They can hardly disown their own child for not going along with their delusion, the way trans teenagers have disowned their parents, but they can still make things mighty awkward. What if the parent acknowledges that it doesn’t really make sense, but tells the child to just go along with it anyway?

It seems inevitable that there is going to be a sizable chunk of young people, who are currently no more than ten years old, whose faith in their parents’ judgment will have been severely damaged by the trans cult. The probable reason why it hasn’t received much attention yet is that those young people are still too young to be on social media, and to have shared their stories. Perhaps they are also embarrassed or confused, if not ashamed - after all, most of mainstream media is aggressively pushing the notion that trans identities are a real thing, and there’s no shortage of obnoxious trans rights activists online ready to mercilessly disparage anyone who questions them.

How can you have the respect necessary for a parent, when that parent denies biological reality, and demands you do too? How will the parents deal with the child getting lessons in human biology and sex education, where they surely will be taught things that go against what their parents have said they believe? Will the parents pull the child out of such classes, the way strictly religious parents have in the past? What do those parents want their children to think about sex?

These are the kinds of questions that are going to cause a lot of problems in the near future, when the rubber hits the road and all those people who have gone along with the trans cult for whatever reason are forced to explain themselves to the one group on whom they absolutely can’t call HR or the manager - their own children.