If you think your son really is a boy, or your daughter a girl, you’re the worst bigot on the planet. It’s “science”. At least, according to a so-called “social scientist” – only slightly more scientific than voodoo. In fact, parents who refuse to bow to the sleazy intellectual fad of gender theory are “abusers”.
As Orwell so rightly said, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that”.
A prominent transgender specialist has likened sceptical parents to perpetrators of abuse and given therapists tips for getting time to speak to the child alone.
Even outwardly supportive parents might be engaged in unconscious “gaslighting” — causing children to doubt their trans declaration — and committing a form of “identity-related abuse”, according to the academic paper by lead author Damien Riggs of Flinders University. Gaslighting may involve parents who “overemphasise safety concerns for their child in an attempt to limit actions which affirm their gender”, the paper says.
Tips for getting time to speak to the child alone. Which sounds uncomfortably like grooming behaviour.
The Riggs paper says “gaslighter” parents may refuse appointments for a child alone because “it is well known that in abusive contexts perpetrators will try to segregate themselves and the person they are abusing off from others”.
Which sounds like a humungous case of pot, kettle, black from these odious gender whisperers.
“Requests for individual appointments, however, can be couched in clinical terms, for example in regards to building rapport,” the paper says.
It’ll just be our little secret. Nobody needs to know.
Clinical psychologist Dianna Kenny, a critic of the “affirmation model”, which reinforces a child’s trans self-declaration as vital for mental health, described the Riggs paper as “appalling”.
“It’s setting up parents who dissent from affirming as the baddies, as abusive,” she said.
The Australian does not dispute that Dr Riggs and co-author Clare Bartholomaeus believe their advice serves the best interests of children. They did not respond to request for comment yesterday. A worried mother found their 2018 paper on the internet after puzzling over a complaint from her female-identifying teenager that she was “gaslighting” him.
The term refers to a film in which a malevolent husband manipulates his wife into questioning her sanity.
Even worse than the crepuscular gender grooming is the fact that Australian taxpayers have paid good money to fund such pseudo-scientific nonsense.
In 2013, Dr Riggs won a prestigious Australian Research Council Future Fellow grant worth almost $700,000 for a study of “family diversity” challenging “social norms”. One result was a paper critiquing “the hegemonic status of genetic matter” in kinship.
In a 2016 comment on media images, Dr Riggs faulted a 60 Minutes profile of a trans girl, Emma, for saying she was “born a boy”. This was “a problem because it asserts assigned sex as a truth,” he said.
theaustralian.com.au/nation/sceptical-parents-of-trans-kids-likened-to-perpetrators-of-abuse
Because it is truth. The only untruth here is the idiotic claim that sex is “assigned”. Sex is not “assigned”, it’s a brute fact of nature. Of course “genetic matter” is “hegemonic” in kinship. You can choose your friends, as the saying goes, but you can’t choose your family.
This plain denial of basic biological fact brings to mind Camille Paglia’s brutal dismissal of similarly fashionable Marxist taradiddle from “ignorant frauds”.