They want our children

The left is obsessed with queering kids. Look at California, where a spate of bills aim to do just that. Just consider SB 497, which would, as the California Family Council explained, make “California into a sanctuary for child sterilization” by “hiding medical records.” During a hearing on this bill Democrats spent their time looking bored or angry as a young woman testified about the harms transition had inflicted upon her, including having her breasts amputated when she was only 13.

Meanwhile, another new measure, SB 418, would force health insurance companies to pay for cross-sex hormones and other transition procedures. Another proposal, AB 1084 would, (1) “Allow minors to legally change their name and sex on state documents based on self-declared gender identity,” (2) ”Force courts to override parental objections” and (3) “Facilitate easier access to gender transition procedures for minors.”

An example of the reasoning behind these bills was provided by Anna Marks, an editor at the New York Times. In an attack against an Ohio Parents Bill of Rights that restricts sexual content in public schools and prevents school officials from secretly transitioning kids behind their parents’ back, Marks insisted that government workers are “trusted adults” while parents are under suspicion as threats to their children. Marks declared that, “Should their parents be at all queerphobic, the consequences of state-mandated outing will be dangerous, if not deadly.” Marks, who is best-known for a piece speculating that Taylor Swift is secretly “queer,” called parental notification an attack on “queer kids.“

Of course, the real attack on kids is labeling them as “queer”—defining children by sexuality, or encouraging them to believe that they were born in the wrong body. The left’s inverted moral imagination invariably denigrates parents while sexualizing children, with “queer kids” always in danger of being murdered by disapproving parents.

This view presumes that sexual orientation and gender identity are innate and immutable—that we are, as Lady Gaga sang, “born this way”—and that these aspects of the self are the most authentic. This is the basis for Marks’ assertion that “Exploring your queerness, especially while growing up, is a natural way of figuring out who you are and who you are likely to love. Encountering, or even experiencing, queer identity or culture doesn’t harm kids.” That is, “queerness” is intrinsic and authentic, and therefore only harmful if repressed.

But this is a lie. “Queerness” in its various permutations is not something we are born with. There is no gay gene. The sources of sexual desire are complex, but it is clear that our sexual desires are neither wholly innate nor entirely immutable; they are influenced by many factors including our choices and our environment. As lesbian New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen has admitted, “I certainly did not experience myself as being born any particular way. … I think most of us know intuitively that sexual orientation is not binary, and is subject to change over the course of our lives.”

Likewise, there is no basis for claims of an innate, immutable gender identity distinct from and at odds with one’s bodily sex. Even Jack Turban, a leading enthusiast for medically transitioning children, admitted in another New York Times piece that “gender identity” is “influenced by everything from the TV shows we watch to how we interact with classmates and our families.” Thus, the narrative of unenlightened parents as oppressors of their children’s true “queer” selves, and activist teachers, therapists, social workers and doctors as liberators of “queer kids,” is also a lie.

From New York Times editors to California legislators, activists claim that they want to protect “queer kids” but what they actually mean is that they want to “queer” kids. The ideological source for this is queer theory, an offshoot of critical theory. Its adherents view cultivating queer identities as revolutionary acts against the supposed oppression of a society build around the natural family. Thus, queerness as an intellectual, political, and personal project is always revolutionary, and therefore eager to try to recruit children and to turn them against the natural family. Queerness is not about love, or even just about lust, but about a fermented, would-be revolutionary hatred for the complementarity of men and women, and the natural family formation that follows from it.

Queerness promises liberation, but it delivers only slavery to desire and ideology. By setting people against the created order it seeks to sabotage the goods that fulfill human nature. The essence of queerness is revolt against the God-given order of creation in which we are embodied as male and female—the two halves of the human race that are meant to unite in marriage, which is simultaneously the foundation of human life and culture in this world and a symbol of our fulfillment in the world to come.