The Gender Revolution Dehumanizing Our Kids
A handful of years ago, who could have imagined that the grandest, most advanced civilization in history would go off the rails to such a degree that a Supreme Court Justice – herself a woman – declares herself unqualified to define what a woman is because she is not a biologist? Who could have imagined that authoritative medical institutions in the Western world would promote the biological impossibility that men can give birth and have periods, or would encourage the medical mutilation of children supposedly “assigned” the wrong “gender” at birth? That the language with which we define our shared reality could be perverted so successfully that we have traded “mothers” for “birthing persons,” “women” for “uterus-havers,” and “vaginas” for “bonus holes”? That we would celebrate men for dominating women’s sports, winning women’s beauty pageants, and usurping the coveted cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue?
The only people who could have imagined this were the ideologues who committed themselves fanatically, for many decades, to making the long march through the institutions in order to normalize this insanity among our ruling elites. And just when you think the culture can’t get more shamefully stupid, a fresh hell arrives: a whole new frontier of “gender hybrids” is opening up among impressionable young children, who are being encouraged to embrace labels like “minotaur,” “Prius,” and “smoothie.”
According to a public presentation recently reviewed by Fox News Digital, a self-identified feminist named Diane Ehrensaft has been spreading the word about ongoing developments in what she calls a “gender revolution” led by children. “It’s a wonderful thing to see,” she enthuses.
During a 2018 talk at the San Francisco Public Library, Ehrensaft declared that children “know more than we do about this topic of being gender expansive,” so our job as adults is simply to listen and respond with support and encouragement as pre-verbal, poopy-diapered toddlers enlighten us about who they truly are. After all, the doctors who “assign” children their sex at birth were just guessing and could very well have made a harmful mistake. It’s important that we grownups pay attention to the signals from our kids, who can’t tie their own shoes but who Ehrensaft thinks are wise enough to reject the oppressive straitjacket of our outmoded, binary way of thinking.
Ehrensaft is not just any San Francisco gender activist. She occupies an influential position as the director of mental health and chief psychologist at the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital gender development center. Specializing in pediatric “gender-affirmative care for transgender and gender-expansive patients,” she is also a professor at the UCSF School of Medicine, and the author of well-regarded (by other gender ideologues) books in the field, such as The Gender Creative Child and Gender Born, Gender Made.
Ehrensaft is also notorious for claiming that one of the signs to watch for in your child who may be trying to tell you his or her (their? zir?) true gender identity is: if your female toddler irritably snatches the barrettes from her hair as if to say, “I don’t want to wear these girly things because I’m actually a boy.”
Anyone who has children knows that toddlers are very easily annoyed by hair clips or diapers or other articles of clothing, and try to take them off. No one in history – until our unhinged postmodern era – ever read this behavior as a message that one’s toddler wants a sex change.
Ehrensaft is also fond of employing the standard woke terminology about the sexes such as nonbinary and gender fluid. “Language is political,” she says, like a true leftist. “So what’s good today will be politically incorrect tomorrow. So we’ll just keep changing as we go.” In other words, language is fluid just like gender, and so we can and must redefine words at will to conform to our ever-evolving ideological needs. This is one of the strategies of control that totalitarians use: perpetually redefining words and concepts in order to keep people anxious about using politically approved terminology.
Dr. Ehrensaft is introducing terms and ideas that take gender language to a new level. She believes, for example, that transgenderism is derived from a “gender web” which is influenced by culture, nurture, and nature. “Each person’s web will change over time as they age,” reads the description of her presentation. “What’s Your Gender? Don’t answer until you hear all your options…” Then, revealingly, it adds, “Ehrensaft wants you to get off the binary measurement scale.”
Among those many gender options, Ehrensaft includes “minotaur,” which you may recall from Greek mythology is a creature with the body of a man and the head of a bull. The original Minotaur was the monstrous offspring of what the later poet Virgil called a “polluted love” between a bull and a Cretan queen whom the god Poseidon caused to fall in love with it as a punishment. This seems like a disturbing metaphor to use for children with gender confusion, but I’m not a credentialed gender expert.
In the opening chapter of a book called The Gender Affirmative Model, edited by Ehrensaft and Colt Keo-Meier and published by no less an authority than the American Psychological Association, Ehrensaft and her co-editor assert that “children will lead the way in carving out their own self descriptions, categorizations, and assignations of gender.”
So now we’re letting children’s fantasies define reality for us. That should end well.
The editors go on to list “all the ways we have heard gender described by the children who have come to see us, along with some items borrowed from social media, other people’s writing, and word on the street.”
It’s worth listing some of these made-up classifications from the book to demonstrate the degree of lunacy that is being presented as legitimate science and becoming accepted as authoritative by psychology professionals (I have edited them for length):
Gender fluid children. Children who defy the norms of binary gender and either slide along a gender spectrum or weave their own intricate individual patterns along the gender web.
Gender smoothies. A variation on gender fluid. As one teenager described it, “You see, you take everything about gender, throw it in the blender, press the button, and you’ve got me—a gender smoothie.”
Gender hybrids. Children who combine or alternate between genders, often in a binary way.
Gender Prius. Half girl/half boy: This gender label was invented by a school age child who, from the front, looked like any boy in basketball shorts, tank top, and basketball sneakers, and, from the back, had a long blond braid tied at the end with a bright pink bow: “You see—I’m a Prius, a boy in the front, a girl in the back. A hybrid.”
Gender minotaur. Children who are one gender on top and another on bottom.
Gender-by-season children. Children who express their authentic gender during summer and school vacations but never at school, or alternatively use school as the safe place to be their true gender self but keep it under wraps during home based summers or vacations.
Gender-by-location children. A close cousin to gender by season, a child who knows the locations or is told the locations where free gender expression will be accepted and other locations where it is not, “such as conservative Aunt Mary’s wedding reception.”
Genderqueer youth. Not only a category of gender but also a social movement of young people who ask us, “Why do you even bother? We are so beyond gender.” They are any and all, never either/or, and they challenge our thinking and carve a new path in which they invite us all to both imagine and embody a world where gender is no longer a defining category.
Protogay children. Children who start out exploring and pushing the margins of gender on the way to discovering their sexual orientation identity, typically exploring their gender expressions rather than gender identity, though not always.
Gender Tootsie Roll Pops. Children who exhibit one gender on the outside but experience another gender on the inside. To follow the metaphor, the crunchy outside is often the gender that accommodates to the expectations of the surrounding world, and the soft, gooey inside is the stuff of authenticity and realness. The hard candy is in place to protect or shield the inside chewiness from an unaccepting world or an internalized unaccepting part of one’s own self.
But that’s not all, as the infomercial slogan goes. The list goes on to include more hybrids like gender-ambidextrous children and gender Teslas.
These category descriptions are mostly incoherent and so slippery as to be meaningless, and yet they have the seal of approval of the American Psychological Association. I’m no psychologist or biologist (so I’m not in a position to define the word “woman”), but I feel confident in declaring that there are no such things as gender webs, gender minotaurs, or gender Tootsie Roll pops. You don’t need a string of academic initials after your name to see that these are concepts entirely invented by crackpot intellectuals (not by wise, self-aware children) who are on a mission to fundamentally transform not only truth, but reality itself.
“I started meeting a whole bunch of other gender hybrids. And so we have the gender Prius, we have a gender Minotaur,” Ehrensaft has said. “And most of the kids who are gender minotaurs love mermaids. So make sure you have a lot of mermaid books. If you really you think about it, it works.”
On the contrary, if you really think about it, this is a whole new level of detachment from reality. Ehrensaft and her cohorts are propagating a grotesque and godless belief system, from positions of power and influence, that is warping the young minds of an entire generation.
When we encourage children to believe that half of the body can be a different “gender” from the other half; that they can be one “gender” on Tuesday and another on Wednesday (or none at all, or every “gender”), and that inside them is an ever-evolving personal “gender web,” we are not only lying to them and hopelessly confusing them; we are pushing our kids, who are made in the image of God, to believe that their sexuality and “gender behaviors” are the dominant feature of their personal identity, when in fact they are the least important.
What about their hearts and minds? Their souls? Those don’t seem to figure in the dehumanizing, desacralizing, brave new world of this gender revolution.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.
