The trans war on the family
Gender ideologues are driving a wedge between parents and their children.
The great thing about parental love is that it is unconditional. Mums and dads love their children for who they are; quirks, flaws, warts and all. But rather than seeing this as a good thing, as a powerful instinct that protects children from harm and bonds families together across generations, transgender ideologues see it as a problem.
These activists hate it when loving parents question the idea that their beautiful child was somehow born in the wrong body and now needs a new name, pronouns and clothes. They get irate when a mum and a dad ask why their perfectly healthy daughter should sign up to lifelong medication and surgery. Having created the myth of the transgender child, activists are now waging a war in its name on parents and families.
The argument that parents are a threat to transgender children is made so frequently it risks becoming accepted as common sense. Campaigners point to surveys purporting to show that LGBT people regularly suffer abuse from their parents (without questioning why such research was commissioned in the first place or how ‘abuse’ is defined). Guardian columnist Owen Jones sees parents’ ‘failure to affirm’ the identity of their transgender children as a form of abuse. If mums and dads do not take their child’s word at face value when they call themselves trans, if they would prefer to wait and see whether a child persists in their new identity, he writes them off as child abusers. Actual parents, with real experience of gender-confused children, might see such waiting as being motivated by love. But not Jones. He is happy to tell them they are wrong and that ‘the lives of countless LGBTQ+ children have been ruined by their parents’.