You’re Pocahantas? I’m the Little Mermaid!
My sister is a real cat, and my dad is a real African American!
A few years back a prof friend told me about a colleague of his who taught a German university class of white, primarily male students. After studying US race relations, the students decided they were African American.
“They said they were "innerlich schwarz" -- black on the inside. And that this somehow put them in the position to speak as racially oppressed people,” my friend wrote me.
Seems kind of childish, if not insane, but I guess I’m behind the times.
We’ve had a few decades now of helicopter parents and sympathetic educators telling children they can grow up to be anything they want (which is unrealistic) and that anything they do is brilliant (which is deceitful). In a more recent variant, children are encouraged to identify as anything (which is insane).
Animal, vegetable or mineral…person, place or thing…anything goes. Name your poison - I mean pronoun.
Back in 2021 there was an intriguing exchange between Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson and evolutionary biologist Brett Weinstein on childhood fantasy and identity.
Peterson pointed out that “when you’re a young child you pick up one identity after another and play with them.” He gave the example of his granddaughter, who was three at the time.
…if you ask her who she is, she has two names, a first name and a second name. And her dad calls her by her name and her mom calls her by her first name. So she's Elly or Scarlet, and she's fine with either of those, but she's also Pocahontas. And if you ask her whether she's Elly or Scarlet or Pocahontas, she will say Pocahontas.
And she has said that for eight months. It's amazing. It's been that persistent in a child of that age. It's quite remarkable. But what she's doing is playing, you know, and girls will play to be boys at that age and boys will play to be girls. And they're they play with multitudinous identities and then they settle into one.
But what happens if you disrupt this natural process through technology? For years, parents, teachers and guardians in the west have supplied young children digital devices to instruct, entertain and distract them - for many hours a week.
Peterson speculates that this immersion in digital tech has interfered with the early process of identity formation.
And the insistence there that my identity is what I say it is, is actually the scream in some sense of an organism that hasn't gone through that egocentric period of play where they are in a fictional sense, exactly the way they define themselves. You can't tell my granddaughter, who's three, that she isn't Pocahontas. It's stupid to tell her that because she means it in an experimental sense, and all you're doing is interfering with her fantasy play.
And so I see a fair bit of this as delayed fantasy play with the kind of pathology that comes up when you delay a necessary developmental stage. Now, that could be wrong and probably is, but but still it looks to me like it looks to me like that's part of what's happening.
Through healthy socialization, young children guide themselves away from infantile identification with celebrities, fictional characters and nonhuman entities, he says. But digital media interferes with this. He believes it manifests later in early adulthood in a profusion of imaginary identities.
Peterson’s off-the-cuff analysis strikes me as brilliant, but I think he’s slightly off in his insistence that immersion in digital tech puts fantasy role-playing into suspended animation. I think it’s the opposite.
People under twenty have never lived in a digital world where there hasn’t been an easy identification with avatars and impossible entities - everything from monster trucks to mermaids - through online gaming and social media. Peterson and Weinstein mention how peer pressure plays a role in children abandoning fantasy role playing, and that probably used to be true. No more, because they’re al fantasy role-playing online, all the time. It’s the medium in which they swim.
Older adults aren’t immune from this either: fantasy role playing is not so much a closet activity as a lifestyle choice. In fact, imaginary beings beloved by children can be fused with gender identities in all sorts of peculiar ways.
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The more adventurous gender identities - like “mossgender”, “catbuggender” and “Disneycoric” aren’t officially recognized (yet) in schools, businesses and universities. However, the bending of reality in the service of feelings in certainly respected by teachers who, for example, refuse to discourage schoolkids from identifying as nonhuman beings.
The point here is that Peterson had an inspired guess how this mad multiplication of identities could have emerged with the help of technology. But there’s another aspect involved that they didn’t get into: how its being actively encouraged by establishment culture, from educational institutions to government healthy policy bureaucracies to large corporations. Why is another story.
Our glorious golden age of solipsism, in which you are whatever you believe yourself to be, extends from crib to campus, from the streaming portal to the newspaper front page. The problem goes beyond blurring the line between childish fantasy and adult reason - it’s blurring the line between child and adult, full stop.
In defending “access to gender-knowledgeable physicians, chest binders, puberty blockers or hormone treatments” for sexually dysphoric youth, The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently floated a new, tongue-twisting initialism: 2STNBGC. It stands for “two-spirit, transgender, non-binary and other gender-diverse children and youth.”
The initialism 2SLGBTQI+ wasn’t enough for the CBC? I suppose not, not if you want to ensure the prepubescent are in on the mix. And if a child can identify as virtually anything, why not an adult? And conversely, why can’t an adult identify as a child? (Particularly if both demographics now share the same fantasy life about mermaids and other imaginary beings.) Should be easy enough, now that they’ve squeezed the C (Children) into a new tongue-tying rainbow of consonants.
What Ricky Gervais observed comically three years ago is now within the scope of today’s identity politics. It’s literally beyond satire - but there’s nothing funny about it. Without serious pushback from parents, this slippery slope threatens to become a free fall into a boundaryless, amoral Hell.
This just in…
Speaking of pushback from parents, a friend just sent me this curious item from The Toronto Star:
In other words, the opt-out for drag queen storytime events at this public school in Ontario is being challenged as, of all things, a threat to human rights. The parents supposedly opposing the opt-out are unidentified and uncounted, of course.
A new level of derangement, equating opposition to drag queen storytime to ‘othering’ gay and trans people, is captured in the story’s quote from Toronto Pflag president Michael Ain:
“(The storytime opt-out policy) panders to the dangerous and wrong-headed belief that a drag queen reading a story hurts children,” Ain wrote in his June 15 letter. “It is dangerous as it ‘others’ 2SLGBTQ+ people, including the storyteller, and almost certainly some of the students and staff.”
Excuse me? I got told by my daughter I was a "helicopter parent" but I think I should have been a
"Lockheed Martin F 12 Fighter Jet" parent and she should have had two such parents. But since I had a 'flying partner' with no experience, a fear of flying and a habit of draining the fuel from any and all flying apparatuses, all flights were regularly cancelled with forced landings due to inclement weather if one did manage to get off the ground. The result was a total breakdown in the airline industry not to mention the seriously damaged wing and continuous curtailing of airspace.....and I tried all manner of helicopters, fighter jets, air balloons, sea planes, you name it. To no avail.
If anyone suggests that I am too thin, I tell them I identify as 'chubby' so I am trans-chubby. So there!