Suffer the little children

Gender wars and child conscripts

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Last week I spent a few days in London, and I remembered all over again how much I love that vibrant, welcoming city of such diversity. Some say London is unfriendly, but for me, it’s perhaps the only place that we diasporic postcolonials can call home. It’s a city that belongs to everybody and nobody, even in these post-Brexit days when the horizons are narrowing and we face a cultural white-out.

It’s also Pride month. As I waited on a station platform, I stood next to a young student (he/she/they?), with a glorious green Mohican, a rainbow lanyard, fabulous tattoos, an androgynous body and clothes to match.

I want to live in a world in which people can express themselves with all the confidence and creativity of that young person. I want my grandchildren to grow up in a society in which they can break the rules that constrain and limit (and learn to differentiate those from rules that protect and liberate), choose their names, genders, and pronouns as well as their clothes, be part of a society that is shrugging off the grey monotony of conformity along with its captivity to neoliberal ideology and its patriarchal underpinnings.

Anyone who has ever parented teenage children will know that it’s a time of experimentation, rebellion, and struggle, a time to break the rules and test the boundaries, as they surf the hormonal tides of changing bodies and widely fluctuating moods. But as my grandchildren mature, I hope that that flamboyant self-expressiveness will be rooted in something more than narcissistic individualism. I hope they will learn to be at peace with their bodies, to be loyal in their relationships, willing to struggle with the challenges of loving and belonging, mindful of those who are most vulnerable in society, not so obsessively preoccupied with their own pet causes and struggles that they fail to see the wider picture. I hope that they will grow to understand the difference between those who are truly marginalised, and those who make a cult of victimhood or who seek attention through the constant reinvention of themselves.

I see these shining qualities in the trans teens I know personally or through their parents. They are socially aware, often angry with the destruction that my generation has wreaked on the planet, despairing of the politics of xenophobia, bigotry, and greed that prevail in our modern British society. No wonder they are not at peace with themselves. These are harsh and challenging times, and mental health issues may be the most threatening pandemic unleashed among our children and young people today.

That’s why I believe that adults have a fundamental responsibility to guide young people through the wonders and terrors of childhood and the turbulence of adolescence, by navigating a difficult path between acceptance and affirmation on the one hand, and tender but firm guidance on the other, rooted in unconditional love. To create spaces for young people to respect otherness and difference in terms of race, social status, domestic arrangements, gender, ethnicity and nationality; to inculcate awareness of the need to welcome refugees, to care for the vulnerable and excluded, and to develop a deep sense of respect for the natural environment and our dependence upon it, are it seems to me foundational for the kind of personal development that children need in order to become adults of dignity and self-worth, and responsible citizens. To do all this without spreading a blanket of fear and anxiety over the natural capacity of children for wonder, curiosity, delight, and, when necessary, a raw and rugged passion to survive, is a daunting task. We are bound to make mistakes and experience failure, whether as parents, educators, or in whatever other interactions we might have with young people. Children also need to learn about failure and forgiveness, about perseverance and hope, and we can help them to learn these difficult lessons through the example of how we deal with our own failures, regrets, and mistakes.

But there is a fine line between opening children’s minds and creating spaces of acceptance around gender, sexuality, and diverse forms of loving relationality and kinship, and breaching the boundaries that seek to protect children from sexual exploitation and abuse. This includes a subtle form of abuse that is disturbingly prevalent today—the appropriation of childhood to promote inappropriate agendas relating to adult sexuality, and the attempt to impose on children levels of acceptance towards forms of behaviour that they simply do not need to know. The burgeoning child pornography industry traumatises children who are both victims and viewers, and child sex abuse is a horrifying reality in domestic and institutional relationships. Yet there is a small but worrying trend among some academics and activists to push back against the protective boundaries surrounding childhood, by focusing more on the psychological needs and struggles of Minor Attracted Persons (MAPs) than on the vulnerability and trauma of their potential victims. This is not to deny that research needs to take seriously psychological conditions that are a factor in child abuse, nor is it to challenge responsible and serious research. But the language of MAPs is increasingly being used to avoid the stigma of paedophilia, and not always in appropriate ways. It is becoming depressingly common for campaigners to use the threat of suicide as a way of gaining support for their cause. This is from the B4U-Act website:

While a distinction between MAPs who obey the law and those who have not is indeed crucial to an understanding of minor attraction, it is important not to dehumanize the latter in a population already heavily entrenched in stigma. MAPs who have been publicly outed due to a crime are 183 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population (Walter & Pridmore, 2012).

Sex is frightening for children. That’s why responsible parents go to great lengths to keep their sex lives private, and to avoid exposing their children to overtly sexual behaviour. Displays of physical affection, the rough and tumble of bodies at ease with each other in play, the touchability of people bound together by family ties of love and care for one another, are a vital and beautiful part of healthy kinship relationships, but there are good reasons why these are surrounded by sexual taboos. Too often, those taboos are breached, by abusive fathers and stepfathers, by brothers and uncles, by family friends. In wider contexts, we know how vulnerable young people are to individuals and institutions entrusted with their education, care, and spiritual formation: priests and church leaders, teachers, media personalities, the list is tragically long. We are aware as never before of the extent to which survivors and victims carry the wounds of abuse throughout their lives.

Women can be abusers, but the vast majority of sexual predators and abusers are male. They may be a minority of men, and I’m aware of how unfair it is to good and decent men to make this kind of claim. I wish it were not true, but wishing will not make it so. An added complication is that when these crimes are committed by trans women, they are often recorded and reported as women’s crimes, thus blurring the evidence. The men I trust and respect understand the statistics and facts, and they recognize the need for women to put protective boundaries around themselves and their children. They are as ready to challenge misogyny as they are to challenge racism or homophobia.

But there are too many collusive networks of men who, while they themselves might not encourage or participate in abuse, are willing to indulge or ignore the bad behaviour of other men. We see this in the Catholic Church’s continuing abuse scandal when the all-male hierarchy has been willing to cover over and often excuse sexual predation, but we also see it in many other institutional contexts, from London’s Metropolitan Police to the running of care homes and other institutions entrusted with the care of children and vulnerable people.

The fact that men are far more likely to be sexual predators and abusers than women has nothing to do with sexual orientation. Victims of sexual abuse and rape range from babes in arms to octogenarians, and they include people of both sexes. The dark drives that lead a person to abuse are not about desire, orientation, or attraction in any conventional sense, but about deeply rooted and little-understood impulses to do with power, control, fear, rage, sometimes arising out of a person’s own childhood traumas and neglect.

Two stories this week have haunted me: a Woman’s Hour interview with a woman who discovered that her live-in fiancé was viewing child pornography and was secretly filming her in the shower and sharing the videos on porn sites, and a man who was drugging his wife of fifty years so that he could film dozens of men raping her. Such stories of rape and abuse are more often than not about heterosexual men, many of whom pose as moral custodians of the social order. I suspect that the vast majority of women have at some time in their lives been on the receiving end of unwanted sexual advances, from leering and flashing to physical abuse and forced intercourse. There are good reasons why, for many women, the protection and preservation of female-only spaces, and the protection of children, take precedence over other rights claims around issues of gender and sexuality in the relatively few situations when these clash.

We have to be cautious about allowing a legitimate desire to promote acceptance and diversity to provide a cover for abuse and exploitation. Take, for example, the fuss being made over drag queens reading to children in libraries. Tim Squirrell, writing in The Guardian, attributes recent campaigns against “family drag shows” to “British extremists” influenced by “the US hard right”. This may be true of some who are waving placards and protesting outside libraries, but I refuse to be silenced and bullied by the growing tendency to associate every dissenting voice with US culture wars. Catholic culture warriors have hounded me for years because I dissent from church teaching around issues of same-sex marriage, women’s ordination, and women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. The fact that these fanatics weaponise some legitimate concerns should not force us into silence about those concerns.

Nor is it appropriate to dismiss all such concerns as “moral panic”. Catholics like myself have good reason to mistrust assumptions that some groups are immune from the risk of abuse. If there had been a “moral panic” about abuse in the Church in the 1950s, how many ruined lives might have been saved? But people did not want to know. Phobias and moral panics are irrational and lacking in any justification. There is ample justification to raise the questions I’m raising here.

Squirrel makes an argument that

Drag and cross-dressing have been a part of British cultural expression for centuries. From Shakespeare plays to pantomime dames, and the late Barry Humphries’ creation Dame Edna Everage; playing with representations of gender in all its forms has long been widely enjoyed by audiences.

This is true, and in principle there is no reason why such performances shouldn’t be offered to children for entertainment, preferably purged of the smutty sexist jokes of pantomime humour. But doesn’t the significance of such shows change when they are intended not to entertain but to promote adult beliefs about sexuality and gender under the guise of story-telling?

A story in The Guardian earlier this year had drag queen Sab Samuel, aka Aida H. Dee, saying that his drag readings could “act as a ‘catalyst’ for children to begin ‘living their true selves’”, which he equates with gay children learning to accept themselves. He says, “All I want to do is be the role model that I wish I had when I was five years old. If I was told that gay was a good word and gay is fine, I wouldn’t have gone through the horrendous mental health battle and somewhat self-loathing that I had to go through to get to the point I’m at now, where I don’t just tolerate myself, I love myself.” The article concludes with Samuel saying that, “Femininity is not just something to be tolerated, just like LGBTQ, we want to embrace it, it’s fabulous—why wouldn’t we?”

One doesn’t have to identify with shouting protestors campaigning against Drag Queen Story Hours, to observe that something doesn’t add up here. Who is this “we” embracing some grotesque caricature of femininity as an expression of gay self-acceptance?

I can’t speak for gay men, but as far as I know none of my gay friends associates coming out and being themselves with dressing up as drag queens. How does this kind of performance reassure gay children that they are okay just as they are, while giving them the space that children need to grow to adulthood without being pushed into the confining categories of gender stereotypes? How do these drag queens help young boys to develop healthy attitudes towards and relationships with women and girls? Can somebody explain to me how a parody of exaggerated pantomime-dame style “femininity” is a role model for gay boys or for girls already indoctrinated into suffocating models of femininity? Every time I take my grandchildren to a playground, I mourn for little girls navigating climbing frames in fluffy skirts, while boys are free to romp in clothes made for adventuring. We still have a very long way to go before achieving anything like sexual equality and freedom from gender stereotypes. I fail to see how drag queens imparting confusing and indeed incoherent messages about self-acceptance, LGBTQ+ and the glories of femininity are in any way contributing to that complex and multi-faceted task. By all means encourage drag queens to read stories to children in libraries, but please, let’s just do it for fun and entertainment. Not everything has to become an ideological battleground about gender.

But also, Samuel reveals that he was diagnosed with autism and ADHD. Children with gender dysphoria often have complex mental health needs, and it’s highly questionable how far encouraging them to identify as trans is a solution. Given how widespread children’s mental health struggles are, wouldn’t it be more affirming and inspiring for adults who have learned to cope with such struggles to offer themselves as examples to children in that context, rather than channeling everything into a focus on gender and sexuality?

Adult gender wars have intruded into children’s lives to such an extent that they are beginning to take priority over the educational and formational needs of children, at a time when childhood is already under intolerable pressures from so many directions: the continuing trauma of Covid-19 and lockdown; the financial pressures on households struggling to pay mortgages and put food on the table; the apocalyptic threat of the climate crisis; the long shadows cast by wars and conflicts, and added to all this the ordinary domestic tensions that are part of every child’s experience.

Consider for example this secret recording of a confrontation between a teacher and some students questioning ideas about gender in a British school:

I’ve re-recorded it to get rid of the odious framing by the right-wing media, but it is a chilling example of the extent to which educational institutions risk being taken captive by a gender ideology that allows for no debate, questioning, or dissent. Unless the left-leaning media and liberal intelligentsia are willing to take on this kind of issue, it will continue to be weaponised by populist politicians and commentators. A fake news story has also been disseminated about a passing reference to a cat in the recording. We have for now rid ourselves of the tosser of dead cats, only to acquire tossers of trans cats. This Byline piece by Otto English puts it in context, but he misses the point, which is about how the teacher handled this conflict. Setting aside the rather important fact that she/he/they is/are wrong about intersex constituting a third sex (it doesn’t), and even if one agrees with his/her/their ideas on gender (which up to a point I do), this way of dealing with children’s arguments violates fundamental principles about the learning environment and ethics of teaching. The issue is not transphobia but the shutting down of children’s legitimate debates by the teacher’s aggressive and threatening response. I wonder if she/he/they was/were nervous or even panicked about how to react. Either way, this scene is repeated time and again in so many institutional contexts affecting children, from classrooms to children’s books.

I’m not aligning myself with those US bigots who would ban books but not guns to protect their children, but this pseudonymous post by a children’s author raises worrying questions about the extent to which children’s literature is becoming part of the ideological battleground.

On the Silence of Children's Authors

US culture wars are toxic. They are fuelled by zealous ideologues on both sides, resulting in conflicting absolutes that create a confrontational abyss where the messy middle ground of public debate and intellectual diversity can be accommodated. Liberals who label as extremist or right-wing all those of us who question any aspect of the politics and ideologies of LGBTQ+ activism are themselves fostering extremism, for they are driving a wedge through society that fuels fanaticism and silences respectful dialogue. I’m accustomed to being bullied, trolled, and canceled by conservative Catholics, including cardinals and bishops, for my views on sexuality and gender. If I now receive the same treatment from those who wish I would stay in their little box of like-minded people at the other end of the spectrum, I’m sorry to disappoint them but, unlike many others, I have little to lose by speaking out. Every time I feel nervous and reluctant about addressing these issues in posts such as this, I encounter people who thank me for saying what they are unable to say. Those are the people who give me the confidence to continue, and they are not foaming-at-the-mouth extremists.

Nothing in this post has anything to do with restricting the freedom and privacy that are appropriate for sexual expressiveness between consenting adults. Neither does it have anything to do with the rights and freedoms of trans persons to be treated with the same respect, dignity, and legal protections that every person is entitled to in a civilized society. It is about fundamental codes of behaviour that make society possible, by agreeing boundaries and accepting the vulnerability of all desire to dark and deceptive distortions.

To be continued.