By @peak_up (YouTube)

On August 16, 2017, BBC News posted an experiment in which the clothing of a boy and a girl baby were switched to see what effect it would have on peoples’ interactions with them. The babies looked about ten months old. A variety of toys were provided, and passing adults were invited to play with the babies while the experimenters observed. Both men and women consistently offered the pink, fluffy, quieter toys to the baby they assumed was a girl, and the mechanical, solid, and riding toys to the baby they thought was a boy. Adults also physically handled the child in boy’s clothing significantly more than they did the one in girl’s. The adults were surprised at themselves when they found out about the experiment, and admitted that they had stereotyped, in other words, “gendered”, the babies. It made them aware that they had done it subconsciously, and that they had different ways of acting toward children based on whether they perceived them to be male or female. 

“Gender reveal” parties have become an accepted custom for expectant families, and what they really reveal is how sexist the culture is. There is no good reason family and friends should need to know the sexes of children in order to get them wonderful, suitable, useful gifts. Gender reveal parties, and the need to know a baby’s sex, have come to be expected as the culture’s gendering process has escalated to the point of stark polarization between the sexes. People feel that they need to know because they intend to place ideals on the baby and decide how to treat the baby based on his or her sex. Even when people realize that is true, they still may not see how it is harmful. Stereotyping is one of the main tools used by oppressors to promote and justify hateful acts, and sexual stereotyping is no different. Sensible people understand how racial stereotyping is harmful, but the general public seems to accept sexual stereotyping as harmless. It is considered normal in this culture to believe that if it’s a girl, she must like and wear a certain set of soft, decorative, idle things, and if it’s a boy, he must like and wear a certain set of active, strong, practical things.      

A fundamental component of the culture’s stereotyping, and subsequent heteronormalizing of children, is linked to the fact that toys and clothes are designed so that boys and girls generally appear in alignment with traditional gender roles. Take a look the next time you’re in a department store, and see if you can find any clothing that doesn’t scream the child’s “gender” loudly, whether it suits her personality or not. Do all little girls feel comfortable in fluffy dresses or wearing spring colors all the time? Do all boys dislike wearing those colors and styles? Why not mix all of the colors and styles together and make all options available to all children? Their body types are the same up to a pubescent age, so why not let them choose the colors and styles they like without making them feel like they’re shopping in the “right” or “wrong” aisle? 

Why not mix all of the toys together and offer some pink trucks and some boy dolls wearing soft, decorative clothing? Why are there no dolls representing women without makeup and carrying tool boxes? The only possible reason is to influence a profitable gendering process that promotes and preserves heteronormativity. The culture’s industries sell the hatred of women to boys, and program girls to quietly accept their subjugated role. They need boys to reject parts of themselves that like “girlie” and other “weak” things. This leads to them being convinced of their own supremacy, which makes them able to do violence to anyone they see as inferior and deny any tender feelings they have about it. 

Parents are unwittingly drawn into this gender indoctrination when they buy the “appropriate” items for their girls that say “PRINCESS” and for their boys that say “HERO.” Children are learning and wearing the labels industries generate for the perpetuation of male dominance and heterosexism, not the labels these kids might choose for themselves. If boys grew up knowing that girls are just as human and awesome as they are, that girls are tough, daring, and not just ornaments; that strong boys have tender feelings, cuddle with stuffed unicorns, and are not just machines, it would damage the profits of too many industries. 

Pornography is one of those industries. A simple Google inquiry tells us that pornography generates about $12 billion a year, and that kids are starting to watch it when they are twelve years old. The medical industry also profits from the harms of gender role polarization. Another Google inquiry tells us that a single pharmaceutical company makes over $22 billion a year, and there are many of them. These companies benefit hugely from “gender-affirming” procedures that would not be necessary if people didn’t feel the strong need to conform to one or the other. Both industries pay for lobbies and politicians to pass laws to normalize and keep these profitable services available. Some medicines are great, of course, but many are extremely harmful and not adequately tested, cross-sex hormones among them. The US military is one of the biggest industrial complexes known to man. It controls the way the media operates, and depends on women growing up to be producers of generations; particularly boys who can be taught to kill without empathy getting in the way. Money is at work making sure that things stay profitable and beneficial for these powerful industries, all the way down to the toys, shows, and clothing that are made available for children as well as adults. 

Self-hatred about body image has become a standard issue for many people as the media has gotten more gender-polarized and sexualized. Television shows made for small children today look distinctly more sexual than they did twenty years ago, which causes kids to think about their sexed bodies much earlier and more often than generations past (accompanying image is from children’s TV show “Winx Club”). This feeding of unhealthy and distorted ideals to children has led to self-hatred at a very young age in a significant portion of today’s youth. Advertising works by convincing people that they are not good enough as they are, and that they need more products, so when populations show signs of discontent–or dysphoria, if you will–that is a marker of successful advertising. 

When a boy shows signs of liking “girlie” things, his parents, teachers, and therapists are often led to assume he is “transgender” rather than simply gender non-conforming. Perhaps for homophobic reasons, it seems that the idea of dangerous and expensive medical intervention is easier for many parents to accept than having a gender non-conforming kid with a healthy body. The horrifying outcome is thousands of young people being surgically sterilized, altered, and dependent on pharmaceuticals. Doctors operating on children’s healthy sexual body parts should be understood as an absolute outrage and a perverted abuse, but instead it is being sold as normal and morally correct. 

Government-approved groups go into some schools and teach teachers how to comply with a child’s wish to be called the opposite sex. They visit classrooms to give talks and hand out worksheets to the kids about how boys can have periods, girls can have penises, and “gender” is a spectrum that ranges from pink to blue. They teach that if you fall on the opposite side from your biological sex, then you may actually be the opposite sex. If a child decides that she wants to change her body to resemble a boy’s, and her parents disagree with that decision, some states can remove her from her parents’ care for refusing to comply with this reversal of reality. 

How can teachers explain basic biology while also being expected to adhere to the idea that some male humans are supposedly females? If that were true, which it’s not, that would dismantle everything we know and can prove about human reproductive science.

These harmful lies can cause kids to question their own sexed bodies rather than accept them as unchangeable. A child who is preoccupied with the terrifying thought that she might not be what she thinks she is may be at risk for developmental and psychological stunting. There is no reason kids should worry about their “gender” expression, or believe that they have or can get the reproductive capacities and characteristics of the other sex. That thinking can lead a male child’s mind to believe that he may be someone who can have babies. This is incredibly dishonest and confusing.  

Teenagers are notorious for questioning their identities. Young people get really into their self-expression, which is great. It’s natural and normal for them to invent and change how they present and conduct themselves, depending on many influences. If they are convinced they are the opposite sex, however, it deepens the complications of this stage of development greatly, and sometimes interminably. For most teens, the invention of self includes a rebellion from what their parents expect and want. They want to declare their independent personalities, and don’t understand when their parents get upset with this process, because they usually don’t have enough life experience to foresee the dangers and consequences of their actions.

Gender non-conforming kids can get cross-sex hormones online if they can’t get them from a local doctor, and alter their bodies for life. In some states, a female child can get her breasts surgically removed at fifteen years of age without her parents’ permission. This has become a terrifying trend, increasing exponentially within the past few years. As a result of media and advertising paid for by the pharmaceutical industry and other powerful entities, kids now feel that it’s properly rebellious to switch genders. It does the job of enraging their parents, and makes them feel like they are unique, yet trendy (while vehemently denying that it’s trendy, or that they want to fit in with any trend). 

There have never been and will never be any successful changes of sex. The fact that it can’t be done makes changing sex a ridiculous and often horrific process to inflict on living bodies. The more failures that add up, the more abhorrent this looks to those who once might have thought it feasible. One teenager had his genitals operated on, badly, and a reality television show was made about his experience, and his numerous, painful complications were a national spectacle. There is no excuse for a society that will do this to a kid and call it progressive or entertaining. 

Isn’t teaching kids that how we dress determines our sex just the same as teaching them that their appearance is the most important factor in defining who they truly are? What about the girl who happens to look and act more like the boys than the girls? Should she be altered to a “girlie” way of appearing and acting in order to be worthy of acceptance as a girl? Why are boys who wish to be girls expected to need the trimmings of femininity? If a natal girl doesn’t need these trimmings to be a perfectly acceptable girl, then why is there a requirement for a “girlie” appearance for these boys? What about the boy who hates sports and would rather stay with the ladies in the kitchen than play ball outside with the guys? Why does he have to conform to gender stereotypes to be a boy? Can’t he just be a boy who doesn’t fit the masculine stereotype? Why aren’t kids being taught to accept themselves even when they don’t fit into gender norms? These questions all have the same answer: heteronormative gender indoctrination is necessary to propel this culture’s profitable agenda of misogyny and male supremacy. 

When gender identity activists sought to normalize and medicalize a stereotyping code that women have fought against since the formation of feminist theory, they struck a nerve with feminists. When they started impacting kids with these ideas, they struck a nerve with an even larger group of women: mothers. Feminists and mothers will never back down on this issue, because it goes to the very heart of everything we stand for and love. Once we see it clearly, being silent about it is not an option. 

@peak_up was born and raised in Humboldt County, California, and now resides in southern Oregon where she teaches Yoga, volunteers for a nutrition organization, hosts a feminist consciousness-raising group, and homeschools her teenage daughter. She is forty years old and has been married for five years. She was politicized by radical feminism after her husband tried to become a woman, and speaks out to help others affected by the harms of transgender activism.