I'm British, we have this thing called 'nuance'. You know, where one doesn't need to automatically flip-flop from one extreme to the other. No where have I insinuated anything about 're-education camps' or anything along those lines, that's not my angle at all. I don't hate these people - though I will exclude adults from that statement who are bothering the children - and I have great sympathy for the children who are confused and/or being confused. Nor have I said we need to suppress feelings or thoughts either.
The whole foundation of my position is that we do not have a clear understanding of the psychology itself and that it requires thorough and proper investigation first, as opposed to irreversibly physically damaging or even killing (suicide) many children in a live experiment. If it turns out down the line that I am correct, that this condition is a mental aberration, what of all those children who are now irrevocably altered or dead? They will have been sacrificed on the altar of an ideology that should have been more thoroughly examined in the first place, which would be an absolute betrayal and morally reprehensible.
I'm not going to indulge this at all. This is pure nonsense. The 'definition' has been re-written without any scientific study, not that you actually need any new studies to determine that there are in fact just two biological genders found throughout the entire biological realm. As I mentioned with the homosexuality example, a parallel example, the language has been changed to fit a politically driven ideology.
There are two sexual genders. It is not an identity. It is a biological reality. End of argument.
You're incorrect here. From wikipedia:
History of the concept
The concept of gender, in the modern social science sense, is a recent invention in human history.[26] The ancient world had no basis of understanding gender as it has been understood in the humanities and social sciences for the past few decades.[26] The term gender had been associated with grammar for most of history and only started to move towards it being a malleable cultural construct in the 1950s and 1960s.[27]
Before the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role developed, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories.[3][1] For example, in a bibliography of 12,000 references on marriage and family from 1900 to 1964, the term gender does not even emerge once.[3] Analysis of more than 30 million academic article titles from 1945 to 2001 showed that the uses of the term "gender", were much rarer than uses of "sex", was often used as a grammatical category early in this period. By the end of this period, uses of "gender" outnumbered uses of "sex" in the social sciences, arts, and humanities.[1] It was in the 1970s that feminist scholars adopted the term gender as way of distinguishing "socially constructed" aspects of male–female differences (gender) from "biologically determined" aspects (sex).
As with many sociological, cultural, and psychological concepts, our understanding of existential concepts such as 'the self' and 'identity' evolved enormously through the 20th century. Freud to Jung to Rogers to Erikson to Skinner to Satre etc. etc. Gender is subjective while Sex is subjective - sort of like how in romance languages words have genders (not sexes).
In french (for example):
Nouns referring to the sciences and to most academic disciplines are feminine.
la chemie chemistry la physique physics
l'histoire history la biologie biology
la médecine medecine la psychologie psychology
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Exceptions:
Nouns referring to languages are masculine.
le français French l'anglais English
l'allemand German
Biologically assigned gender is called 'sex" - Gender comes from the word 'genus' - a broad grouping of organisms, with species being a specific organism.
The incidence rate of children identifying as trans is not some natural occurrence, it is clearly the result of being immersed in a culture/education that is exposing them to a pernicious idea that then takes root in their confusion.
Your
hypothesis is that the rise in gender variation/non-conformity is the result of social/educational factors, yet as we've discussed elsewhere, there is a very real possibility that exogenous chemical and biological present in our environment may be a major contributor to this increase. We are amongst the first generations to grow up in the era of widespread plastics, genetically modified foods, hormones in livestock etc. There is evidence that penis size in males from the west have decreased in size at adulthood. We've observed women experiences first menstruation at very young ages which has been suggested to be a result of hormones in milk. Factors such as obesity may also play a part, but there is no denying that 20th and 21st century humans have been exposed to chemical and biological agents that were never present in our food and environment prior to the late 20th century.
You're a thoughtful guy - I'm curious why these things seem to be less problematic to you than kids reading a book that mentions gay people sometimes. Even Shakespeare explored gender roles, gender defiance etc. in his plays. I believe in a difference between educating children about the world they live in, and liberal activism. I agree that using childhood as a political tool is wrong, and, having friends who work in education whom I've talked to about this controversy, it is much rarer than you would think based on what Christian-conservative activism would suggest. Perhaps it happens, but we are seeing the type of censorship cautioned against in Fahrenheit 451. To me, this is a far greater threat.
But it's not that clear cut is it. How many teachers out there can even teach the subject along their own line of interpretation without falling foul of culturally imposed limitations? I mean people get in trouble for just disputing the biological reality of their only being two genders (genuine intersex hermaphroditism cases aside); if a teacher were to state that trans-sexuality is possibly a mental aberration they undoubtedly would be fired and publicly vilified for it.
These are not the kinds of conversations that are happening - where are you getting this information? The teachers I have heard being fired are those who refuse to teach biblical creation alongside evolution.
Clearly it's not just the teachers, the entire subject is an actual ideology that is backed by personal feeling. The same thing happened with homosexuality, where no scientific studies were actually conducted to cause a reversal in the understanding but instead the psychological definitions were simply changed due to socio-cultural pressures of a small minority. Likewise with the trans ideology, it is not based on science but feelings of a small minority who are attempting to push their ideology on to culture whether they be correct or incorrect in the final analysis.
My position is that it is foolish to expose children to something that is little more than the personal feelings and beliefs of a fringe minority, who in the final analysis might actually be suffering from a mental aberration and not any deliberate conscious choices on their part. The fact that this fringe minority have a clear blind spot to the number of suicides of post-op children is a disgrace and lends weight to the argument that this is a mental condition and not some genuine phenomena that should be culturally reinforced.
Why does this bother you so much? What is it that you worry might happen? What is the logical conclusion of the phenomena you are so concerned may come to fruition? All kids become trans and gay?
My fear is that you have a generation of children growing up who are ignorant to the realities of the world they grow up in, who are ignorant to the complex things that could possibly happen (and which have been occurring since ancient times - there are gay animals for crying out loud, and there are animals who change sex when it's biologically favorable), and whose education is a political weapon being used to stoke fear of queerness for political gain.
That's the real conspiracy there - using fear as a weapon against a vulnerable population with children as collateral.