One of the characteristics of our declining civilization is that, more and more, reality seems like satire. A good example is a recent New York Times article titled “From He to She in First Grade.” Yeah, you guessed it, this is about another boy allowed to masquerade as a girl, aided and abetted by parents and teachers who belong in rubber rooms.

In the piece, a Seattle resident (first red flag, as Seattle is Lib-nut Central) and aspiring author named Laurie Frankel writes about how her six-year-old lad ultimately “decided” to attend school in a dress. However, it’s plain that she and her capon of a husband — I get the feeling he’s sort of a non-entity “Yes, dear!” type — steered her son into a Made-up Sexual Status (MUSS), which some people call “transgenderism,” a term new enough so that my Word 2007 program still flags it as a misspelling.

Frankel tells us that this MUSS adventure started when she and her capon bought their boy a puppet theater and dress-up clothes for his sixth birthday; the sartorial assemblage, she tells us, “included high heels, a pink straw hat, a dazzling fairy skirt and a sparkly green halter dress” because she didn’t want to limit her son’s costume choices. Frankel then writes, “He was thrilled with these presents. He put on the sparkly green dress right away. In a sense, he never really took it off.”

She goes on to explain that he began donning the dress more and more; where he would initially wear it only when the family was alone, he eventually started keeping it on even when friends and guests were over and when leaving home. About this, Frankel writes, “My husband and I were never of the opinion that girls should not wear pants or climb trees or get dirty, or that boys should not have long hair or play with dolls or like pink, so the dress did not cause us undue alarm or worry.” Yeah, your son is just cross-dressing. Nothing to see here — move along!

But when school was set to begin, Frankel actually had a dilemma. Should she protect him by limiting her kid’s drag-queen ambitions to the home front or say, she writes, “Wear whatever you’re comfortable in to school”? Now here’s a quiz question: do you think Mizz Hen and capon made the decision or that it was left up to the confused chick?

If you chose the latter, go to the head of the class. Frankel tells us her son dithered for weeks, but then made up his mind the day before school’s opening. She writes, “I later learned that this is remarkably common, that children who make decisions like this often do so as push comes to shove.”

Actually, lady, that’s called childhood impulsiveness. That’s why kids have parents (or, at least, some do).

Frankel continued, “They [children] achieve clarity when they are faced with two not-great options.”

Uh, six-year-olds don’t achieve “clarity.” Apparently, many adults don’t, either.

So Frankel goes out and buys her son a wardrobe because, she tells us, “The fairy skirt and sparkly green dress were play clothes. He didn’t have any skirts or dresses that were appropriate for school.” (By the way, if a child should be allowed to choose clothes based on his “identity” and not societal norms, which supposedly are wrong to impose, why then lend credence to norms dictating what is “appropriate” for school?) She was worried, however, that he might have to endure teasing; after all, it is possible there still are a few normal children left in Seattle. So she contacted her son’s teacher to notify her, which brings us to quiz question number two: do you think the teacher was taken aback or was all-in for the kiddy drag scene?

If you picked the latter, again, go to the head of the class. But since Frankel still was worried that normalcy could rear its head among some of the children, she writes about her and her son:

So we brainstormed. We role-played. We practiced saying, “If girls can wear pants or skirts, so can boys.” We practiced saying: “You wear what you’re comfortable wearing. This is what I’m comfortable wearing.” We practiced polite ways of suggesting they mind their own business.

Frankel tells us that while her son did endure some teasing, it was generally over within a month. At the end of her article, she was calling the boy a girl and referencing him using feminine pronouns. And regarding some thoughts she had about how his cross-dressing and MUSS confusion may just be a phase, she wrote, “He had already decided. He didn’t think about that anymore. And he — she — never looked back. She grew out her hair. She stopped telling people she was a boy in a skirt and started being a girl in a skirt instead.”

So he — a six-year-old — “decided.” Question: does Frankel let him decide whether or not he’ll go to school in the first place? Can he decide on what to have for dinner, maybe ice cream every night? Why not? After all, a common theme in Frankel’s article is that she and capon supported the cross-dressing because it was “what would make our child happiest”; in girls’ clothes, she informs, he was “grinning, glowing, with joy.” Well, I remember the night before kindergarten when, at a Chinese restaurant, I was still rationalizing and saying I wasn’t going to school the next day. I certainly would’ve glowed if I could have “decided” to skip it. And tell the average six-year-old he can choose ice cream, cake or candy for dinner and watch his face light up.

True love, and wisdom, mean giving children not necessarily what they want but what they need. After all, young children have little idea about what will make them happy and healthy over the long haul.

Nonetheless, Frankel writes, “Our child could go to school dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and feel wrong and awkward and not himself. Or he could wear what felt right….” Sure he could, but many wrong things feel right. Consider: Frankel’s son would be diagnosed as having so-called “gender dysphoria,” the sense that you’re stuck in the body of the wrong sex. Yet the psychobabblers also define something termed “species dysphoria,” the sense that you’re an animal stuck in a human body. Examples could be “Wolfie Blackheart,” a Texas girl who claims she’s a canine; and “Nano,” a Norwegian woman going the feline route. So if a six-year-old’s “feelings” can be considered arbiters of reality, why not let him attend school naked if he swears he’s a ferret? I mean, the idea of wearing clothes is anthropocentric, you know.

Raising children is all about imposing values. Because a boy is a human and not a ferret, we force not just to clothing upon him, but also manners, language and 1000 other things befitting a human. And it’s no more abnormal placing a child in a “gender straitjacket” (though the word should be “sex,” not “gender”) than in a “species straightjacket.” In fact, so called “sex stereotyping” is a good thing. Just as we train a child with a gift for music in music and not in tennis, so as to cultivate his talents, a sex-specific upbringing serves to help a child reach his potential as a member of his sex. 

“Transgenderism” is not a scientifically determined designation but an ideologically determined one, as I explain in-depth here. It is the Lysenkoism of our time, and it will likely be discarded in two or three decades. Until then, sadly, children will continue to be irreparably scarred by what is nothing but a severe form of child abuse

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