This Poor Child is Confused, Not ‘Transgendered.’
By Matt Walsh
Is this it? Have we reached the basement? Is this our cultural rock bottom moment? Is this when our society wakes up behind a liquor store dumpster in the middle of the afternoon, stumbles to its feet, catches its reflection in a puddle of urine and finally whispers, “I have a problem”?
Have we reached the depths of our own delusions? Can it now be said that we have nowhere to go but up?
Stop. Don’t answer these questions. Let me have my silver lining.
Let me fantasize that this story will be enough to cause many of us to snap to our senses. It’s a story about a poor, confused child and a predatory, confused culture eager to use her as a mascot for their latest ‘civil rights’ cause de jour.
It’s a story about Jeff and Hillary Whittington, who were given the coveted Inspiration Award at the famed and prestigious Harvey Milk Diversity Breakfast (you might remember Harvey Milk as the statutory rapist who had sex with a bunch of drug addicted teenage boys). How have the Whittingtons earned such a high and pointless honor? Well, they’ve made some YouTube videos and bragged to the media about their daughter, Ryland, who began to “transition” into a boy at the age of two.
A wild claim, you would think.
…If you’re a bigot.
Yes, the debate is over. The tale of the “transgender” 5-year-old was told to unanimous national applause. Media outlets hailed it as “moving” and “inspirational.” Articles from mainstream sources promised that the story would cause you to weep tears of joy. Millions of people flocked to Twitter and Facebook to shout their undying praise and admiration. A consensus was formed: toddlers can determine their own gender, and that’s it. The matter is settled. Another bit of progressive mania that now must be accepted as infallible doctrine.
Oh, but not just accepted — believed, honored, celebrated. So much as furrow your brow or scratch your head when the Whittingtons talk about how their daughter became their son when she was five, and you will expose yourself as a dangerous, backwards, ‘transphobic’ Neanderthal. To question the existence of ‘transgender’ toddlers is to question the existence of the sun. To defy the transgender-baby-dogma is to believe that the Earth is flat and the moon is made of cheese.
Pull out the stone tablets. Engrave the words ‘transgender toddlers.’
It’s here to stay.
It’s part of our new reality.
It’s the wave of the future.
And it’s nonsense.
A tragedy. A tragedy of nonsense. Horrible, abusive, pathetic, sad, bizarre, tragic nonsense.
This child didn’t ‘choose’ her gender. She didn’t choose to cut her hair and dress like a boy. Kids that age can only wear what you put on them, sport the haircut you assign them, play with the toys you give them, and mostly believe what you tell them they should believe. Tell them there’s a magical fat man who flies down the chimney to bring them presents every Christmas, and they’ll believe it. Tell them that they get to choose their own gender like it’s an ice cream flavor at Baskin Robbins, and they’ll believe it. Their reality is whatever you construct for them.
They are still years from approaching the age of reason. They are not reasonable beings. That’s why they can’t be left at home alone. That’s why they don’t vote. That’s why they don’t own homes or take out loans at the bank. They can’t be trusted to refrain from eating your pocket change, yet these parents think they should be able to exercise radical control over their ‘gender identity’?
That’s insane. This girl did not choose to be a boy. She can’t. She also didn’t choose to be a world famous face for the transgender movement. Her parents made that decision. Her parents decided to make her a ‘boy’ and alert the press.
It’s interesting, when you think about it. If a girl declares that she’s a lesbian, progressives would tell us that this identity cannot be modified. It is ingrained in her soul and nothing can ever alter it. Her sexual preference is immutable. Her sex, however? Fluid. Subject to change. And what if she ‘becomes a boy’ and still finds herself attracted to girls? By their standards, she’s just turned herself straight. But isn’t that impossible? So is she still gay? But if she’s still gay then she’s still a woman, which means she’s not a man, which means your sex can’t be changed.
Any of this making sense?
Hello?
Anyone?
Indeed, the moment you wade into liberal “gender theory” you will be violently assaulted by a gauntlet of glaring contradictions.
They tell us in one breath that it’s OK for boys to like pink and girls to like blue, and we should stop expecting our sons to play sports and our daughters to play with dolls. These are just social norms, they say. We should not subscribe to such archaic notions. But suddenly they proceed to derail their own narrative when they next inform you that a girl liking blue and a boy playing with dolls might actually be a sign that the girl is a boy and the boy is a girl.
Wait.
Are colors and toys and sports irrelevant things that have been arbitrarily assigned to certain genders by an oppressive society, or is the color pink so connected with the female identity that a female’s aversion to it is an indication that she isn’t really a female?
Who’s really enforcing gender roles and social norms here? I’d say it’s the people who call a girl transgender if she’d rather join a baseball league than the ballet.
Ryland showed signs of being transgender because she didn’t like girly toys and she didn’t like to wear dresses. My first thought is that maybe she’s a girl who just doesn’t like girly toys or dresses. But apparently girly toys and dresses are so important to the female identity that you lose the identity when you reject the toys and dresses.
The YouTube video displays photos of Ryland in cowboy outfits and Spider-Man costumes, while the text on the screen explains: “Ryland began to show an aversion to anything feminine.”
Hold on. Who says cowboys and superheroes are masculine? Who says a girl can’t be Spider-Man for Halloween? I thought liberals would be the first ones in line to condemn any idea that a girl has to be a boy if she likes things that society commonly associates with boys.
In fairness, I should mention that Ryland’s ‘true identity’ didn’t just reveal itself through her taste in toys and clothes. She came out and said she was a boy. She said it when she was two-years-old. She made fantastic and nonsensical claims about being something other than what she really is — much like, for instance, every single other toddler in the history of the world.
Walk into a room of toddlers and take a poll. You’ll soon discover that you are actually — according to the self-reported data from two and three-year-olds — surrounded by lions, dinosaurs, aliens, princesses, superheroes, and all manner of other mythical concoctions.
And, yes, you’ll find that many of the boys are girls and girls are boys. It’s extraordinarily common for kids that age to ‘self-identify’ as the opposite sex.
In most cases, you let them use their imagination and have their fun, but you make sure to offer them the proper guidance so that these games aren’t taken too far. If your kid thinks he’s a bird, let him pretend. But the moment he tries to jump out of a window or poop on your car windshield, it might be time to intervene.
Ryland’s parents took a silly thing that a toddler said and indulged it. They fed it. They snatched it out of fantasyland and made it real. Before long, poor Ryland was in the throes of a full-on identiy crisis.
They say that Ryland’s “boy phase” was more than a phase because she eventually started wearing boy suits and boy swimming trunks. “Started wearing.” Notice the way that’s phrased. You’d think she got a job, earned a paycheck, then drove to the store herself and bought her own outfits. In reality, however, one can assume that she only started wearing boy clothes because her parents started dressing her in boy clothes.
Here’s the thing about little kids: they don’t know what it means to be a boy or a girl. That’s why you have to tell them. You have to guide them. You have to show them. They are ignorant of many things. They are helpless in many ways. That’s why they have parents. If your daughter truly is confused, if she’s really starting to think she’s a boy, then you are only going to enforce her delusions when you go out of your way to put her in elaborate outfits specifically designed to foster those confusions:
Ryland — at the age of two, and three, and four, and five, and six — is much too young to even remotely grasp what it means to be a girl. How could she be in a position to reject that which she does not understand? She certainly doesn’t know what it means to ‘be’ the opposite sex. How could she rationally choose to become that which she can not comprehend?
She couldn’t. She can’t. She didn’t. She’s a child with a child’s brain saying childish things. Her parents took advantage, and now they’re using her to earn the attention and admiration of our progressive society.
Harsh? Not nearly harsh enough. This girl is being abused, and we’re all watching and applauding.
You know what they could have done? When their two-year-old daughter called herself a boy, they could have responded with one simple question: “what is a boy?”
If you cannot define it then you certainly can’t decide that you should be it. I guarantee that neither two-year-old Ryland nor five-year-old Ryland could even begin to answer that question. Being an innocent child, she’d probably say something about boys being people who wear jeans and who like to play with toy trucks.
She’s a child. She doesn’t understand what’s going on. She doesn’t know any better.
But her parents do.
And we do.
Maybe it’s time we speak up.
This article was originally posted at TheMattWalshBlog.com