Giving teenagers the right to change gender is ‘flat earth’ stuff
Fine Gael has recently indicated it will support a Sinn Féin bill to permit teenagers aged 16 and 17 to self-select their gender, regardless of their biological and physiological characteristics, and to “open a legal pathway” to extend this to children.
Parents and voters really need to apply this to their own families to even begin to understand the full implications of such proposals.
The Government’s legislative agenda of recent years has been driven by gender theory, so it’s not, perhaps, all that much of a surprise.
History demonstrates that societies can easily become desensitised to pretty well any kind of mind-set, including the conferring of putative “rights”.
Also, social media has made the manipulation of ‘normalisation’ much easier.
It is contrary to reason – and common sense – to assert that science, in this instance biology, doesn’t matter and to deflect away the certainty of consequences when science and common sense are ignored.
Climate change highlights the folly of ignoring science. Gender theory is no different. It is entirely speculative, a mutant form of Marxism, and lacks any robust scientific basis – indeed, 10 years ago you would have been hard pressed to find many people who had even heard of it. And yet in its name the country is being impelled to believe that ‘you are what you identify with’ and that children, as well as teenagers, have a “right” to arbitrarily change their gender at will.
This is “flat earth” stuff. It is also incalculably irresponsible. Childhood, and the teenage years, are formative – they are often a time of enormous psychological pressure in the search for affirmation of personhood and purpose in life. Against this background – and the common life-experience of parents coping with the changing and often confused emotions of children and young adults – these are deeply damaging proposals.
The problem is that the politicians who perpetrate ideologically driven nihilistic nonsense are seldom around when the consequences make themselves felt for individuals as well as for countries. Examples are legion, from China’s Cultural Revolution to the Washington Consensus in the 1980s and, more recently, austerity.
Irish politics will indeed be a bleak place should TDs stand behind these proposals in the Dáil which they would baulk at, and reject out of hand, in their own homes. Professor Ray Kinsella Ashford, Co Wicklow