LGBTQwerty: The Thief of Innocence

When I was little more than a tiny tot, I thought I was a dog.

I would crawl around on all fours and curl up in the dog basket. I asked to have my dinner in a bowl on the floor and would retreat under the table when unwelcome visitors came to call. Once, I bit one of them on the finger when a wandering hand ‘invaded my space’.

When did I stop pretending to be a dog? Probably the day I cocked my leg against  my father’s trousers.

Roll on a couple of years and I was at primary school. It was the usual school arrangement of teaching boys and girls in the first couple of years and then girls only in subsequent years. I was at the time, a bit precocious beyond my age (something happened to that initial precocity later in life), finding myself with more in common with older girls than with my male classmates. So for a while, I wanted to spend schooltime breaks in the playground with the girls rather than the boys.

It was the day I told my parents that I wanted to be a girl and could I have a doll for my birthday, that my father probably wished I still wanted to be a dog. Anyway, I didn’t get a doll: I was given an air rifle (with real pellets!) which was marvellous fun, and much better than playing with a silly girly toy. I went around trying to shoot intruding wild rabbits (without too much success), much to my relieved parents’ approval, even if it did make the garden a bit unsafe for the rest of the family (if not for rabbits). Since then I have never looked back and have been perfectly happy in my gender – lucky me, I suppose.

I cannot help compare my infantile wishes – cured quickly with parental love and firmness – with the way that today’s children are deemed fully competent to take decisions beyond their years that could be psychologically damaging and potentially life-changing. Thank goodness that in my own childhood the present plague of gender self-identification had not yet been conceived, and so I escaped the terrible, po-faced, neo-puritan liberalism that might have encouraged me to persist in my delusions.

Should small children really be allowed to consider themselves ‘non-binary’ in their gender, and told that gender is ‘merely a social construct’?

Here is a tale told to me recently by a school teacher friend: he goes into a classroom and sees a boy he knows – ‘Hello, John’.

‘I’m not John, I have decided that I am Jane.’

Next week: ‘Hello, er… Jane.’

‘I’m not Jane, now. I have decided to be John again.’

My friend informs me that such occasions during the school day are by no means uncommon.

Can I be the only one who is appalled at this manipulation of the young, and by the social conditioning that lies behind this manipulation? I am fully aware that some adults become uncomfortable in their gender and seek to change it – it hardly needs to be said that it is a very personal and private decision, taking into account many factors, clinical and social. I do not judge, or have any wish to do so. My only comment would be: ‘are there really quite so many “trans people” as the media and popular discourse would have us believe?’

Why has this suddenly become quite so common? It seems sometimes that every other person is a man who would like to be a woman or a woman who would like to be a man, and that gender transitioning has become a recreational pastime.

Of course, I want to treat everyone with the respect and dignity they deserve, but it does seem to be that the whole ‘trans issue’ has gotten totally out of hand, and is disproportionate to the numbers who are actually involved.

And why are those who raise such reasonable concerns castigated or ‘cancelled’, as recent events have shown all too clearly?

LGBTQWERTY…. how much longer is this unmemorable acronym going to grow? And most importantly: why is the young, pre-pubescent generation having their childhood innocence stolen from them?

I suggest that wielding influence in this way over impressionable small children is as clear a definition of ‘evil’ as might  be imagined.

This week I read about a girl at primary school who has self-identified as a cat. Naturally enough, the other children now bark at her – thank heavens for the saving grace of humour! It is a good thing that there is a considerable distance – both geographical and generational – between us, otherwise I might have been tempted to revert to my own early-years, short-lived, canine self-identification phase to chase her up a tree.

Alex De St Croix is a writer and journalist living in the Channel Islands.

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