All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: Part 2
If you tolerate this, your children will be next
Undefinable women and pregnant men
When U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked in March 2022 by Senator Marsha Blackburn to provide a definition for the word ‘woman,’ Jackson infamously responded that she could not.
“I’m not a biologist,” the judge said.
It was the stuff that political memes are made of. Jackson’s creative non-answer was mocked and lampooned across the Internet.
It also inspired the 2022 documentary “What is a Woman?” in which filmmaker Matt Walsh puts that very question to a conga line of gender experts, academics, health workers and people in the street. Walsh nets only a few straightforward responses. After some awkward verbal gymnastics, most fall into either mumbled confusion or say something to the effect that, ‘if you believe you are a woman you are one.’
“But if you believe you are a woman, what is that?” Walsh asks.
Silence or circular arguments ensue.
Walsh travels to Africa and tries to explain American identity politics to an amused Masai tribe. He poses the film’s central question to a Masai woman, who sensibly responds that a woman is someone who who can give birth.
Of course, the Masai aren’t nearly as sophisticated or progressive as westerners. Imagine the woman’s primitive puzzlement at seeing this item from England:
The boundary between male and female, man and woman, can be porous in societies both past and present. It’s nothing new. Gender ambiguity is found everywhere from the shamans and medicine men who dress and/or identify as women to the sexually ambiguous stars of the late sixties and seventies, like David Bowie and his fellow glam rockers. The ‘transgendered’, though historically a vanishingly small part of the population, have always been with us, and they are often among the most creative in artistic expression.
Also, most of us have little problem with redefined roles and expectations in the postmodern age, even if we’re not likely to sign off on turning a male blood donor away for not ticking a box on pregnancy status.
However, we tend to be more guarded when it comes to the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. We’ll get to that in a moment.
What’s historically new is the promotion of physical sexual alteration as a praiseworthy lifestyle choice. Across the United States, Canada and Britain, children who are found to be conflicted, unsure, or “dysphoric” about their gender identity are actively encouraged by therapists and health professionals - sometimes in the space of a single consultation - to proceed with puberty-blocking hormones and even surgical procedures, to transition to an identity in which mind and body are presumably aligned.
The problem with this is that children are making life-altering decisions at an age when they can’t even legally buy cigarettes or alcohol, at a time when their brains are still in the process of forming.
In British Columbia, a father was jailed for speaking out against his biological daughter’s gender transition.
Professionals enthusiastic about gender reassignment surgery (which is a massive new profit pipeline for the medical-industrial complex) position the sex-at-birth distinction as both problematic and provisional. The boundary between boys’ and girls’ physical bodies is up for grabs. But what of confusing the boundaries between children and adults? What of the corporate endorsement of adult male cross-dressing for kids, as mass entertainment?
Generation Drag is a television series that features 5 children, ages 12 to 17, preparing for a drag ball along with their families. The show premiered on June 1 of this year, and reception has been mixed. Some have praised it as liberating; others have condemned it as literal “grooming.”
This is not some obscure corner of the media promoting this. Discovery Plus is owned by the corporate entertainment monolith Warners.
This production echoes the phenomenon of cross-dressing men reading children’s stories aloud to kids. Once mostly limited to the San Francisco Bay area, “drag queen story times” have exploded to libraries and public spaces across the United States.
I don’t have any objection to drag queens performing for adult men in night clubs, and you probably don’t either. But normalizing this subculture for young readers is peculiar, to say the least. As for entertainment companies fashioning drag into an acceptable or even praiseworthy pathway for celebrity-seeking children and their parents, that’s something else entirely.
Why might it be problematic for children to publicly ape adults who celebrate sexual decandence and shattered boundaries, dressed as clownish and whorish caricatures of women - “the female equivalent of blackface,” as Matt Walsh puts it? Do I really have to ask this question at all?
Check out this warning to parents from a self-identified drag queen.
Child beauty pageants are now widely recognized as exploitative and abusive. Yet Warners has seen fit to resurrect it’s corpse, decked out the ghoulish makeup of drag. The company - which also owns ABC - appears to have been jonesing for this since 2018. It’s instructive to watch the extraordinary clip below all the way through. You’d be forgiven for thinking this as a trial balloon for promoting children in drag.
Where is all this heading? The endorsement of children self-identifying as adults, or adults self-identifying as children, by playing the ‘ageist’ card? I can imagine some future confirmation hearings, with a Supreme Court nominee asked to define a child and responding, “I can’t answer that, I’m not a biologist.”
The Disappearance of Childhood
The blurring of adult/child boundaries was in embryo decades ago.
Almost twenty years back, I met with the brilliant media theorist Neil Postman, author of the seminal work, Amusing Ourselves to Death. In his gravelly Brooklyn accent, Postman sounded something like a Mel Blanc cartoon character. He told me the work he was most proud of was The Disappearance of Childhood (1982). He felt it had stood the test of time. Reissued in 1992 with a new introduction, the book has indeed held up well.
Postman held that childhood, as it’s commonly understood, is disappearing, in large part because parents have lost control of the information environment in which their children are raised. Television’s easy availability resulted in a near-ubiquitous commodification of adult vices and desires.
“One might say that the main difference between an adult and a child is that the adult knows about certain facets of life – its mysteries, its contradictions, its violence, its tragedies – that are not considered for children to know. As children move toward adulthood, we reveal these secrets to them in ways we believe they are prepared to manage. That is why there is such a thing as children’s literature.”
With its round-the-clock programming, the tube made such guarding impossible. “Television requires a constant supply of novel and interesting information to hold its audience,” he adds.
“This means that all-adult secrets – social, sexual, physical and the like – are revealed. Television forces the entire culture to come out of the closet and taps every existing taboo. Incest, divorce, promiscuity, corruption, adultery, sadism – each is now merely a theme for one or another television show. And, of course, in the process, each loses its role as an exclusively adult secret.”
The author came up with his thesis for The Disappearance of Childhood in the pre-digital era. Of course, the Internet is like television on steroids, with ‘adult-only’ entertainment only a click away for kids. Many parents have given up on policing what their smartphone-weilding kids are exposed to as an impossible task. And the tech monoliths have no problem with that. It’s just more “engagement.”
Living messages sent into the future
The blurring of distinctions between boy and girl, and between child and adult, is not some aberrant outlier in contemporary culture: such boundary-breaking very much defines modernity. From Mark Zuckerberg’s credo for Facebook staff, to “move fast and break things,” to The World Economic Forum’s promise that by 2030 “you will own nothing and you will be happy,” to the recommendation of unsafe vaccines for children nearly entirely resistant to COVID, we are witnessing a controlled demolition of long-standing borders, from bodily autonomy to private property and beyond.
Neil Postman described children as living messages sent into the future. With children’s minds and bodies becoming possessions and playthings of the corporate state, what messages are we sending, into what sort of future?
Interesting article Geoff. When seeing the varying and opposed opinions on gender politics I'm reminded of the First Nations tribes who have a tradition for their medicine men or male shamans to sometimes self identify as women. I think that extraordinary people in our own culture who raise human spirits have done the same; the glam rock scene and performers like David Bowie or comedians like Eddie Izzard. The important thing to note is that these people are exceptions; incredibly valuable exceptions but exceptions nonetheless. Our culture seems to be set upon making this a norm and actively conditioning all of this, whilst devaluing the spiritual side of the equation; in my opinion at least. People should self identify and express themselves however they want, but I really think something else is going on here.
"We’re losing our marbles. Let’s hope our kids have a few of their own left when they grow up". I can't add anything to your statement, but to thank you very much Geoff for your dedication, work and drawing public attention to this rather sad state of affairs.