The Radical Gender Movement and the cost of letting the Left define Freedom
“If we believe in a particular social character, a particular set of attitudes and values, we naturally believe that the general education which follows from these is the best that can be offered to anyone: it does not feel like ‘indoctrination,’ or even ‘training’; it feels like offering to this man the best that can be given.”
— Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution
At least for decades now the Left has recognized that schools must be converted to a type of national church, emphasizing and focusing on secular values. But the movement needed converts. And so Americans were warned that the country would “lose its soul” if it did not turn Left before it was too late; or as Richard Rorty suggested at the end of the 20th century, America must fully “devote itself to ‘a conscious social ideal’.”
Students — or more appropriately, their targets — were to be able to recognize, through instruction from the State, “the struggle for social justice as central to their country’s moral identity.” Of course, one would rightly assume the country’s moral identity, in the progressive view, must be consistent with the individual’s moral identity. We might even go as far as to identify that as the merger of Church and State.
But the greatest danger of forced State instruction, or what we might otherwise call “public schools,” is what will be compelled. Today, the latter is decided not by what is moral or what is right, and certainly not by the parents — but by whoever is in power. Courts won’t help us if kids are victimized by curriculum, having consistently and repeatedly held that “the education of the Nation’s youth is primarily the responsibility of parents, teachers, and state and local school officials, and not of federal judges.”
In fact, one of the deficiencies of our current system is that Supreme Court precedent is itself used to uphold instruction on Critical Race Theory and other damaging movements. When a Las Vegas prep school was sued in 2020 for instructing students that the families “reinforce racist/homophobic prejudices” and that “people of color cannot be racist,” the defense argued that according to the Supreme Court, “the First Amendment affords educators broad discretion to set curriculum, and those decisions do not violate the First Amendment as long as the curriculum is reasonably related to a legitimate pedagogical concern.”
They know just what they can get away with.
Recognizing the limitations of court intervention, many conservatives have rightly fought back, arguing we should limit what instructors can teach to kids and thus prevent the promotion of evil and the corruption of young minds. The liberal-right joins forces with progressives in condemning these efforts, saying we should simply “propose better curriculums and enforce existing civil rights laws.” Those proposals however ignore the limitations of our civil rights laws (which do not prohibit indoctrination) and most importantly the motivations of the pro-CRT crowd, which has no appetite for mediating the educational wars. They demand total victory, and their spoils are the young.
Faced with all this, what is a parent to do when their legislators and educators have teamed up to promote “gender identity” to 5-7-year-olds? For right-liberals like David French, it’s up to the parents to help children “unlearn lessons they’ve learned at school.” People like French would have the parents do the impossible so that the current order can be preserved. Yet the current order will not be preserved.
What lies beneath the Regime’s decision to give elementary school kids condoms and birth control, is the idea of childhood sexual agency. Similarly, childhood transgenderism – which now includes puberty blockers and top- and bottom-surgery – is based in part on the belief that children have the capacity to make these decisions for themselves. But how much further will they try to take the sexualization of children? Or, put differently: if children can make those decisions, then what other decisions can a child make?
Those are dangerous questions, and you can see where their philosophy ultimately leads. As Henry A. Giroux wrote in Stealing Innocence: Corporate Culture’s War on Children back in 2000, public schools are now the tool by which “learning becomes indispensable to the very process of social change, and social change becomes the precondition for a politics that moves in the direction of a less hierarchical, more radical democratic social order.” Taking them for their word, the radicalization and sexualization of the young is a means to an end, and one likely to be taken to ever-more extreme lengths. This is one of the reasons we see the progressive politicians and corporations attacking Florida’s new bill that “bans classroom instruction on ‘sexual orientation’ or ‘gender identity’ in kindergarten through third grade.” Florida is thwarting their plans for your child.
Those in the press and the ‘moderators of decency’ on the Right can object to the label of “Groomer” all they want, but they can’t (or simply refuse to) tell us where the craziness of the movement will stop.
If we are to view the latest progressive instruction as new freedoms (liberation from religious or moral constraints), then we must also recognize that they do not come without costs. Redefine the family unit and watch your sons be incarcerated and your daughters become single parents. Throw aside Christianity and be subject to the trends of secular morality, wherever those might lead you. Grant the people “choice” and observe the bodies processed as biological waste and the flirtation with infanticide (or, what the Left repackaged as “perinatal death related to a failure to act”). Albert Camus was right when he wrote that once cast off the fetters of religion, “hardly was [man] free, when he created new and utterly intolerable chains.” Liberty becomes bondage.
Who will pay the price for the sexualization and indoctrination of the young? And at what cost? The answer to the first question, of course, is the young themselves. As for what the cost is, on the large scale – the question of its effects on society – that answer is unknown. What is the impact of adding more broken people to an already broken society? We might soon find out, but for the time being, we can only speculate.
But for individuals who fall victim to their influence and delusions, the cost is already quantifiable, and ultimately devastating. While the teachers and activists and politicians of the New Religion push the boundaries of human freedom (“You can be whoever you want to be”) to the cheers of their small but vocal constituency, it is ultimately our children suffering from confusion, suicidal thoughts, and gender mutilation. We must stop this before it’s too late.
Not long ago, there was a time when children dreamed of who they would be when they grew up. Now they have more pressing questions: Who is my father? Am I a girl? Should I chop off my penis? Unless we collectively act now, those who will be there to provide the answers to such questions are the same ones who made our children question their identity in the first place. Dare I say: the Groomers.
Techno Fog is a lawyer. He writes on technofog.substack.com.
