On April 7, Slate published this piece by Naomi Kanakia, “Wait Until You’re Older.” Kanakia, a trans activist, tells his audience, “I write books for trans teens and their parents. It’s becoming harder and harder to imagine a future for them that’s not riven with strife.” Perhaps not now that an entire industry is devoted to grooming children into falsely believing they’re not the gender they are and seeks to make them permanent medical patients (see Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex; The Body as Primary Commodity: The Techno-Religious Cult of Transgenderism).
But you don’t have to imagine a past in which the lives of gender nonconforming children were not riven with strife. If they haven’t forgotten the world of only yesterday, they know that nobody from our generation (I was born in 1962) or the generations before ours, would remember one of every five of us identifying as LGBTQ. That’s not because they were hiding their identities from us. It’s because the queer contagion hadn’t yet swept up impressionable youth into the fad. There were other fads. What Kanakia and his ilk want is for us to forget this and to assume that what is novel is eternal.
“Last year, a staggering 22 states across the U.S. banned gender-affirming care for minors,” writes Kanakia. “The conservative politicians behind this wave of legislation didn’t care that it went against the near-unanimous medical consensus that parents and doctors ought to be able to decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether puberty blockers, hormones, or other interventions are what’s needed for a given teen to flourish and live their life authentically. These lawmakers felt the consensus was wrong, that the government should take medical transition entirely off the table, at least until the kids grow up and can make ’informed,’ adult decisions. And in their eyes, there was a bonus: Removing the option of affirming care would surely lower the temperature in afflicted homes; it might well preserve the parent/child relationship until the threat hopefully passed—trans teens could no longer blame parents for not “allowing” them to transition. Parents were now free to say ’There’s nothing I can do. You’ll simply have to wait until you’re older.’”
Articles like Kanakia’s function to cause anybody conditioned by the eternal present to forget the world as it was only a few years ago and feel as if the travails of the trans child has always been an issue, that children have always enjoyed access to “gender affirming care,” only to suffer the oppression of fascists who, suddenly and for arbitrary political and religious reasons, are passing laws forbidding it. The motive to restrict this to those who can consent to it couldn’t possibly be from the rise of GAC and growing awareness of its horrors (see Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy; Thomas Szasz, Medical Freedom, and the Tyranny of Gender Ideology; Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy). It must be because they’re bigots.
Kanakia would never consider whether suicide rates were through the roof back then. In fact, for the general population, after falling in the mid-90s for males and the mid-70s for females, suicide rates for both genders rose steadily during the period of the proliferation of gender clinics and gender ideology—as well as SEL programming and the proliferation of wellness centers in educational institutions. When the data are disaggregated, among youth aged 10-24 years, suicide surpasses homicide in 2008 and soars, while homicide remains relatively stable at less than one percent per 100,000 (and, as readers of Freedom and Reason know, is concentrated in black-majority inner city neighborhoods). As Business Insider reported in 2019, at that time, suicide among Gen Z is the second leading cause of death, and “a worse epidemic than anything millennials faced at that age.”
It is necessary to believe instead that those denied their authentic selves always preferred death to living as the gender they were born as—to believe that there were millions whose authentic selves were being denied. It is a lie.
George Orwell warned us about organized forgetting in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the story, the Ministry of Truth is a government institution responsible for historical revisionism and the dissemination of propaganda. The Ministry of Truth manipulates information to align with the ruling Party’s ideology. Its workers constantly rewrite history to support the Party’s agenda. The memory hole is a mechanism used by the Party to eliminate inconvenient information. Documents, records, and even people are thrown into incinerators, erasing any evidence of their existence. This ensured the Party’s control over the historical narrative and suppresses dissent by eliminating opposing viewpoints.
Likewise, Guy Debord, a French Marxist theorist and filmmaker, wrote about the concept of the “society of the spectacle” and the notion of the “eternal present.” In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord explores the idea that modern society has become dominated by images and representations. The spectacle is a system of alienation and social control, where authentic human experiences are replaced by mediated representations. The eternal present refers to the way in which the spectacle perpetuates a state of constant distraction and superficiality, preventing individuals from engaging with the past or the future.
We are close but not yet submerged in Orwell’s world, and while Debord spectacular society feels ubiquitous, the truth is still available—if you seek and speak it; and the truth is that there is no historical record of centuries of families torn apart because states prevented the administration of puberty blockers, opposite sex hormones, and surgeries to minors. The “need” for health care and compelling everybody to accept gender ideology is recent invention, manufactured by the medical-industrial complex and the crackpots of sexology and queer theory.
To believe articles like Kanakia’s have any validity is to pretend as if we haven’t been alive for decades to know that this is novel phenomenon—and for those who know a bit more to know that this is a social contagion, only this one invented and sustained by power and profit. We were the freaks in high school. We were the clique who would have known before any body about the boys and girls who thought they were the other gender but were oppressed by parents and government. Our generation and the generation before us protested a lot of things, but we never protested sexed reality because there was nothing to protest. Quite the contrary. We were busy trying to get into each other’s pants.
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