Hostility to children's genitals and human sexuality has never been 'only a right-wing thing'.
I remember wanting to hit puberty, to stop being a little girl.
Breasts! Yes! A gorgeous body like I saw on The Love Boat! Boys falling all over themselves for me! And nothing, nothing said ‘I’m a woman now’ like that magical moment (which I was afraid would never come) of getting my first menstrual period.
My best friend Vera and I, in eighth grade, read Judy Blume’s classic YA novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and laughed at the four friends in the book who cocked their elbows, pulling their arms back and forward again, all the while chanting We must! We must! We must increase our bust!
While Vera and I never did that (she didn’t need to), we did, I confess, keep Boy Books, just like the four girls, with lists of Cute Boys we liked.
Puberty turned out to be a bit of a letdown, although I spent less time waiting for my period than for cleavage. After a half-dozen or so grody time-of-the-months I spent the next forty years wishing menopause would hurry up and get on with it.
Vera already had boobs when I met her, at thirteen, and my body wasn’t cooperating with the whole Love Boat love goddess thing (an affinity for sugary snacks and an aversion to exercise apart from bike riding might have played a considerable role).
Also, there was acne, oily hair, dorky glasses, braces for a few years, a complete ignorance of makeup and a careless approach to fashion.
But at least I had Become A Woman, finally.
Okay, puberty ain’t actually fun. Maybe it is for the girls who turned into cheerleaders and future Love Boat goddesses, but I remember Rachel, unquestionably the most beautiful girl in our grade. She was a tall blonde ‘fox’ with blue eyes and the body and mature-looking face of a 21-year-old woman. At fourteen. I used to envy her, but years later, I wondered what her life was like as a young teen trapped in a beautiful woman’s body. Oh, the slavering old perverts! The unsolicited, embarrassing comments! The surreptitious feels by filthy old men with no filters in the late ‘70s when Second Wave feminism was adolescent itself and girls hadn’t yet learned that boys and men didn’t have unfettered right to their bodies.
I knew puberty wasn’t a joy for boys either, as Judy Blume’s book, Then Again, Maybe I Won’t makes clear. It’s about a 13-year-old boy who falls in with a kid who shoplifts, drinks, makes prank phone calls and reads inappropriate adult fiction. He develops an attraction to his friend’s beautiful older sister and spies on her while she dresses and undresses, since she doesn’t close the blinds.
The book alerted me to just what kind of stress boys are under as they never know when they’re going to pop a boner, even when they’re in a supremely sexually unstimulating environment, like math class—and just as they get called to do a math problem at the board in front of everyone—with a boner! Blume’s male character and many of her female characters deal with masturbation, probably the first YA novelist to do so.
I remember my male counterparts in school who failed to mature into Love Boat-worthy male shuffleboard and pool gods, whose height didn’t meet exacting female standards, who were pudgy and dorky and probably wondered if they’d ever get laid. One teen was losing his hair at sixteen. By the ten-year reunion he was a billiard ball.
Even a mega-dork like me wouldn’t have dated them, had they even asked.
Puberty isn’t easy. I remember.
But it’s still the first major life change we humans endure, with more to come, and who the hell wants to be a kid their entire life, right? We spend our childhoods wishing we were older so we could do things we weren’t currently allowed to do, and puberty is the first promise that you’re not going to be a kid forever, beholden to your parents’ dictates, that you won’t be ordered around for the rest of your life, that one day you’ll be able to eat nothing but desserts for lunch if you want, stay up late and watch Johnny Carson and Saturday Night Live, and this shitty school thing will eventually come to an end.
No one trained us to believe puberty was a nightmare. Books, ABC After School Specials, TV sitcoms and movies depicted kids navigating a difficult phase of their lives, but no one questioned it. We read teen fiction to try and understand better what was happening to us and what to expect. No character seemed entitled to live a life they couldn’t. What we all hoped for, and not all of us achieved, was to be as ridiculously gorgeous as TV kids and Love Boat guest stars. No one committed suicide if they fell short.
So why are kids and adults so terrified of puberty today, and so in denial of the reality of being human, that they’re joining a body modification cult to change their bodies into something they’re not, starting with puberty blockers because the cool kids on YouTube say it’s the best thing ever, and assure them they were born in the wrong body even though their parents are like no you’re fucking not, and their older brother thinks they’re a complete idiot?
How have mostly ‘progressive’ adults managed to fuck up the most important job in the world—raising new human beings—so badly that they’re willing to let their kids self-mutilate? They share more concern when their daughters cut themselves. How have so many come to believe it’s okay to steal children from their parents if they don’t go along with gender insanity? At what point did so-called responsible educators, administrators, and teachers decide that it was more important for kids to ‘figure out’ whether they were really boys and girls or not instead of, say, learning about the founding of America? Or multiplying fractions? Or learning how to compose a coherent essay in their native language?
Or teaching them the truth - that you’re assigned your immutable sex at conception?
As Jonathan Haidt notes in the research he did for his new book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing An Epidemic of Mental Illness, the mental health of girls from progressive/liberal families sank quickly and much further than any other group of kids, including their brothers. His research makes it clear that liberal, progressive girls lead the whole Gen Z mental health crisis phenomenon. It’s they who have embraced the most the whole ‘born in the wrong body’ article of faith purporting to explain everything wrong with their lives.
The Gen Z mental health crisis is horrifyingly evident. Today the number of young girls identifying as trans in the UK has increased 4,000% according to one British study. And that’s on an island with 20% the population of the United States.
(Real) boys aren’t left out, either. The number of ‘transgender’ children overall has doubled since social media introduced it to a generation of mobile-addicted kids, and Pod Parents automatically do what their Pod People medical professionals urge them to, put their children on puberty blockers which may sterilize them among many other unpleasant and probably permanent side effects.
Never mind the lack of evidence behind the alleged suicide rate for kids who are set parental boundaries. What is this incomprehensible fear of puberty we find on the progressive left? How come kids in previous generations didn’t off themselves every time their parents said no?
In a recent interview with gender researcher Eliza Mondegreen, she notes that gender transitioning may be a way of avoiding growing up.
“You come to a point in life where some kind of transformation is being asked of you and there's this diversion from whatever kind of growing up or changing that you need to do into trans. You see it with kids who are having trouble navigating puberty and moving into adulthood. You see it with college students who aren't sure what they want to do when they grow up and maybe it's really scary but if they're trans now they have this road map and also this excuse to not hit the other milestones that they might be afraid of because they're trans and how could you expect them to.”
It’s Peter Pan and the Lost TransBoys.
How badly have we fucked up growing up when kids feel the need to go on puberty blockers not because they’re actually ‘trans’, but because, to twist Socrates, the examined life isn’t worth living? What if they had to confront their genuine mental health challenges rather than the problem everyone has, if they’re lucky enough not to have died within the first thirteen years of their lives?
Since when did adulthood become something to be ‘cured’?
Maybe it’s just the seemingly universal human fear of our own sexuality, probably the only species that spends as much time obsessing about our genitals and everyone else’s.
Hostility to children’s private parts is hardly anything new; Jews and Muslims have mutilated little boys’ genitals for centuries under the guise of religious practice; the Catholic Church famously castrated young boys to preserve their high voices, then demanded they not marry because it would be a ‘sin’; marriage was, they instructed, strictly for making babies, and since the castrati couldn’t, they shouldn’t avail themselves of female love and companionship. Tough shit, kids.
Only human beings live in terror of children masturbating, even though ultrasound shows that even fetuses play with themselves.
It didn’t stop the medievals and the Victorians from devising contraptions right out of a torture chamber to stop children and horny adults from, it was believed, driving themselves mad with ‘self-abuse’ and maybe even growing hairy palms. (Has that ever happened?)
I began wondering about the liberal hostility to female sexuality (no, it’s not just a right-wing thing) and the mania to 'trans' willing young girls (just like the 19th-century oviarectomies performed on women to treat every neurosis they had, as detailed in a brief history section of flagrant medical profession patient abuse in the WPATH Files). Any liberal still in control of their pre-frontal cortex recognizes the rise of misogyny on the left expressed through the trans movement. The TERF Is A Slur website catalogues the violent transmisogyny of heterosexual fetishists still battling the scourge of feminist opposition while Let Women Speak and other rallies are characterized by violent trans-identified male aggression and physical assault.
It’s quite clear that the fuss about violence against so-called trans or queer people isn’t always as ‘transphobic’ as advertised, as emerging details in the Nex Benedict suicide demonstrate. Transactivists have engaged in far more violence against women than anyone has against them, which is not to say that anti-trans violence and murders don’t happen, because they do. But it points to a hidden agenda within the largely heterosexual trans movement to force women to bend, ultimately, to male desires. Especially sexual.
Which is where most of this ‘trans’ stuff is coming from.
The medical profession and parents aren’t the only ones hostile to human sexuality, nor are the major world religions. Certain parts of Africa have been viciously taking a knife to female genitals for thousands of years, completely excising any part that could deliver sexual pleasure and obsessively sewing up vaginas to keep girls ‘pure’ for their husbands.
Human hostility to sexuality is nothing new, it’s non-partisan and universal.
I see in the liberal progressive transgender denial of puberty—which they’ve been told also often denies a lifetime of sexual pleasure with butchered genitals—that exact same traditional, conservative hostility. Conservatives didn’t invent fear of sexuality, they’ve just historically hid it less. The so-called liberal ‘hippie generation’ wasn’t much different from their anti-sex ‘Establishment’ foes; a friend who used to be a Yippie told me of how ostensibly, everyone could practice ‘free love’ but it was much easier for men because women were already trained to be accepting and submissive; when a woman chose multiple partners she was ‘punished’ with passive-aggressive behavior by The Main Boyfriend designed to discourage her from relations with other men. It became easier to just let him do what he wanted and suffer silently.
“We were ‘smashing monogamy!” she said.
“Sounds to me like you were preserving the Establishment,” I replied.
The UK government’s Cass Report is out now and adds further fuel to the growing transgender medicine dumpster fire. In particular it goes after puberty blockers, which we’re instructed by the trans movement and their medical professional lapdogs are absolutely necessary to keep kids from killing themselves. Never mind how much that’s been debunked; Thou Shalt Not Question Holy Sacred Writ.
What’s certainly being taken more seriously is the emerging evidence that children and young adults are ‘transitioning’ for many different bad reasons, almost none of them actual ‘gender dysphoria’. What needs to be discussed more—in sealed vaults if necessary to keep out violent disruptive transactivists—is the ongoing adult obsession with children’s genitals and the willingness to allow them to agree to medical mutilation without any hard evidence that it relieves emotional distress.
And why puberty became a ‘problem’ to be fixed rather than a perfectly normal life transition handled by humans for millions of years, which is now believed to cause suicide if it’s not immediately halted.
Adults have seriously fucked up childhood, rendered their children permanent consumers for the medical profession, sterilized many of them (who needs Roe anymore?) and ruined their ability to enjoy sex. Not to mention establish unquestionably that hostility to inconvenient science is not only a ‘right-wing thing’.
This is on us, the so-called ‘responsible adults’.
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