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AJ's avatar

This is a very informative article thank you! I would just like to add, it's not just that the young people may grow up to encounter people who don't share their beliefs and be shocked by this, they are going to be shocked if they ever come to know that men, women, girls and boys are actually sex categories, not gender identities expected to correspond to anatomy.

Never been taught this means children are not afforded the option of knowing to which sex class they belong. Being taught that girls and boys are social categories (not sexes), leaves children with no option but to internalise social constructs to figure out if they meet the definition of boy, girl or non-binary.

Parents may well report that their child said they were the opposite 'gender' before ever learning about gender identity. This is unsurprising, young children do not actually know how girls and boys are categorised, even older children can have very little knowledge of anatomical differences. Not grasping the extent to which girls and boys are physically different, if at all, it may appear to them that it's social differences that are categorical, if a little boy thinks liking 'girl' toys and wanting to hang around with other girls is what makes somebody a girl, it would appear to him that he must actually be a girl if he behaves in such a way. This regressive stereotyping, is exactly how girls and boys are represented by gender identity literature, but children can come up with this kind of 'logic' by themselves.

There are other examples, such as from attachment theory, where a child may say they are a girl or boy because they want to be the same as their favourite parent or sibling. Also children just generally enjoy playing make believe. There are a variety of reasons a child may say they are the opposite sex. If their parents cannot ask them why, or correct them or, worse, if they are unable to explain why their daughter is a girl and not a boy because they have subscribed to gender ideology, they disrupt their child's ability to even develop a sex-based identity because such a thing does not actually exist in gender ideology.

They shout very loudly about erasure of existence because it is their ideology that erases. Their core tenant is not that it is possible to change sex, it's that men, women, boys and girls are not sex categories at all. But male and female 'gender' categories when gender can mean anything a person wants it to mean, apart from sex. Though most literature uses the social definition so the movement mainly wants people to conceptualise male and female genders as groups that represent socially constructed characteristics (behaviours, roles, norms, personality traits etc). They teach this to our children as fact, as though we actually label them girls or boys at birth (not because those are physical categories), but because we expect people with their body type to identify with the social ideas about being a girl or boy. This is likely why those girls in the audience were so adamant they are not girls, it's quite possible they don't actually know girl is a female sex category who can take or leave gender norms, they may think she is the female gender norm category, which they understandably reject.

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M Lucky's avatar

You're brave. And that inspires more bravery, in me and others.

Reading your report on this meeting helped me realize that we must be willing and able to bear people hating us and lashing out as we speak up. Some aren't able but will be soon. We know the hatred will point our way, but we also can be sure that children who are swimming in this indoctrination need to know that not everyone agrees, there is dissent, and then they can find out why. At this point it is starting to seem like juvenile adults are driving the bus...the teachers, therapists, "clinicians," activists and the parents who refer to their children as "kiddos."

They are driving the bus smugly, with absolute surety, and, as you point out, unaware of their indoctrination.

But the wheels are coming off with every child, youth and adult who desists and detransistions, and with every brave doctor and whistle-blower who sounds the bell of reasoned truth that gets through to one more person.

As more and more young people grow into realization they were harmed by smug, shallow, criminally-irresppnsible, greedy ghouls who couldn't care less about brutal, off-label drugs and irreversible body modification that leaves them sterile, incontinent, and with no sexual function, there will be hell to pay. Glad you documented this so well...

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