In a bizarre tweet last week, the British Broadcasting System featured a video in which toddlers were dressed as the opposite sex. The goal was to ask if parents are forcing sex stereotypes on children. The short video’s undertones made it appear to support a transgender agenda rapidly redefining, or even destroying, traditional ideas about sex. Then the BBC’s hashtag left no doubt: #NoMoreBoysAndGirls.
Are you sure you don’t gender-stereotype children?#NoMoreBoysAndGirls pic.twitter.com/iThZ2P6REW
— BBC (@BBC) July 28, 2018
It seemed perfectly clear that the tweet intended to make parents more open to the possibility that their little bundles of joy may not turn out to be the boy or girl they thought they were raising. In fact, it strongly suggests that being too forceful in teaching such once-elementary realities as “boys have penises, girls have vaginas” is dangerous and antiquated.
Although the video made no mention of sex-change attempts, it clearly suggested that behavioral differences between boys and girls are a product of societal and parental stereotypes, not biological reality.
The Experiment
In the video a two- or three-year-old boy and girl switch clothes, names, and gender roles and volunteers are asked to play with them. Most of the volunteers, both male and female, chose toys to play with that are more traditionally aligned with what they believed the child’s sex to be. The specious conclusion was that the reason men dominate STEM fields is that we parents direct girls toward play that does not develop special awareness of these skills in the same way that we develop them in boys.
The answer to this problem, to the extent that it is a problem at all, is apparently to make no distinction between young male and female children. No more boys and girls, just humans, for whom gender is whatever we say it is. This is entirely in keeping with a trans movement that now embraces at least 70 gender designations, pronouns that sound like an Abbot and Costello routine, and ultimately an entirely subjective understanding of gender.
Mission Creep
When I began writing about the trans movement about five years ago, I was met with mockery and claims of bigotry. Who cares what anyone calls himself, people said. Why is that your business? What harm can it do? Half a decade later, the United Kingdom’s most important news outlet is urging parents to de-sex their children. Boys and girls are just a social construct, they say. We are all a blank slate of gender, which is, after all, just a set of stereotypes.
But where do these stereotypes come from? Did some patriarchal council of male elders led by an ancient ancestor of Mike Pence convene 10,000 years ago to set in stone the behavioral tendencies of men and women? That seems to be a remote possibility. More likely evolution, over a much longer period of time, rewarded certain behaviors and tendencies from both men and women that led to the distinct biological and behavioral differences we still see in the vast majority of human beings today.
Those of us who have been paying attention have known for some time that the transgender movement was never really about respecting the choice of a very, very, few people who choose to live as the opposite sex. It was always about destroying the very idea of binary sexes. This is exactly why so many feminists, who fought long and hard for sexual equality, reject the trans notion that being a man or woman is a just a set of stereotypes. “Sisterhood is powerful” has turned into, “Well, what is a woman anyway.”
Believe What They Say
When the tweet began getting spanked by conservatives and others on Twitter, the reaction from the anti-sexes Left was swift. We were making too big a deal about it, they said. It was simply meant to show that parents too often fall into a trap of thinking too much about their child’s sex. It wasn’t presenting some radical idea. As for the hashtag, the one that literally said, “No More Boys And Girls?” Well, that was just a hashtag, don’t take it too seriously.
But what on earth can “No More Boys And Girls” mean, if not that parents should treat their offspring as androgynous proto-adults whose sex is up for grabs and should not be steeped in the ancient traditions surrounding those sexes? Perhaps we have reached a point where the evolutionary forces that molded behavioral differences between men and women are dissipating, at least in the advanced first world. Maybe we no longer need to raise boys to be protectors and providers for families, or girls to be mothers who bear and raise children. In fact, in short order science may relieve women of that burden.
What is important to understand regarding this position from the most mainstream of mainstream outlets is that the progressives who increasingly control culture want to destroy traditional concepts of the sexes and replace them with something entirely different. This is not innocuous, or a small change. It is an entirely new idea about what sex is, and a few decades old, at most.
Today in London and Brooklyn and Los Angeles, woke parents are raising kids without reference to their sex. Boys will be girls, girls will be boys. It’s all just a cultural construct anyway, so why not construct new ones? But construction is hard. The traditional concepts we have of sex-driven gender roles took tens of thousands of years to come into being. This new idea, that biology and gender have nothing to do with each other, is a novelty being tested on kids who really can’t consent to the experiment.
The BBC needs to take a timeout and really think about what it is doing here. There are real consequences to this kind of thing, consequences that can confuse and hurt kids. Men and women, boys and girls, are not different because of bigotry and discrimination. They are different because they are different. Eradicating gender in children is a radical and dangerous idea being played with by lazy Prometheans who have little understanding or care about what harm their new fire can do to kids.
It is up to us parents to reject the BBC’s radical sexual agenda. As for the BBC, maybe a little more Monty Python and a little less social engineering would be better for all of us.
