A new sort of news has become startlingly frequent in the media during the days surrounding Christmas. Specialists: psychologists, psychiatrists, analysts, therapists, journalists (who seem to be able to assimilate all of the aforementioned areas of expertise), and all other -ists, have gathered together in a grand alliance and their message is brave. It is certainly new. Well sort of. At least it is worldly.
It seems (certainly unbeknownest to ourselves, but really only because of how we have been educated) that parents are the single greatest threat to their children's freedom. The Ists concur: it is a scientific fact. For instance, and most relevant to recent media enlightenments, parents are the primary historical cause for the continuation of the last great social myths: gender roles.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, according to media reports, we parents have treated our boys and girls like... well...boys and girls. Yes, it sounds absurd when you put it like that. But to suggest that the Ists are just that--evidently absurd--cannot be fair. Right? Hm.
Perhaps the problem is in our language! Perhaps if our ancestors had been as enlightened as our Journalists they would have never developed the words "boy" and "girl" to begin with. So here then is the charge of the Ists: we parents have been treating some of our Its like boys and then some of our Its like girls. Now that sounds much less absurd.
We have been cookie cutting our Its into the form of our own inherited traditional, cultural outdated social norms. But this is not fair to the Its! This will cause suppression and/or depression. The Its should be allowed to be free, to freely choose their own identity. We do not want them to find themselves, we want them to create themselves.
The assumption here of course is that life is not a gift, with inherent purpose and meaning. Freedom is not the ability to pursue one's purpose. Life is a void and to be free is to be unformed within that void.
The assumption is that bodies are meaningless. Our children's bodies are meaningless. Their bodies are disconnected from themselves, identities which must be thought of as some dislocated ego floating in a void.
Of course I am then left with a question: according to this brave new line of thinking, how can we as parents protect our Its' freedom?
Clearly, we do not want them to receive any sort of outside influence (it is never the case that a lack of influence is itself influential on a child's development). This would immediately impede upon their freedom. We would never want to engender them with our own "values", convictions, beliefs, customs, traditions (which of course were not themselves ultimately given to us but which our ancestors created out of thin air), etc. We must always speak vaguely and non-objectively when the Its are present.
We should also hide their genitalia from them. It is simply too dangerous to their freedom for them to ever come into contact with sexual difference. They might, once they noticed this difference, develop words to distinguish these differences, like "womanhood" or "manhood." They might think, since children often innocently believe that things have purposes (idiots), that this difference actually meant something and that they were called to respond to this meaning.
If they noticed such a seeming contradiction between their bodies and what we told them, they might think that we were trying to hide this meaning from them, that we were trying to force them into a matrix of genderless sterility, that we were trying to take their bodies away from them, that we were depriving them of purpose, that they were left without meaning and feel pressured to generate new and strange identities to compensate for this deprivation. They might believe that they now lived in a totalitarian regime.
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