May 11, 2021 - 4:02pm
“We are so proud of him and so proud of the choice that he has made”.
Yesterday Matthew and Klara told This Morning about Stormy, their transgender-identified child who decided that she was a boy at two-years-old.
'We love him so much. We're so proud of him and the choice that he's made.'
At the age of two, Stormy told his family, 'I'm not a girl, I think I'm a boy'. We speak to his parents, Matthew and Klara, who hope that their story helps raise awareness for other families. pic.twitter.com/AiVR2HhNlX
— This Morning (@thismorning) May 10, 2021
Viewers were told that what the child has decided should be celebrated. As a transgender adult, I beg to differ.
Stormy is still only four years old. Children of that age believe in all sorts of fantasies. Sometimes we correct them, sometimes we humour them — Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy come to mind. But by the same token, we should not be cheering them on as their parents bring them up in a fantasy world where children can be whatever the sex they decide to be. Or, more frighteningly perhaps, the sex that their parents decide for them.
While nobody will be proposing physical treatment on a child so young, letting your daughter believe that she is actually a boy from such a young age will only complicate things down the road. By affirming the child as the other sex, they are set inexorably on a course that will lead to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and possibly surgery. That is the real danger.
Presenter Holly Willoughby appeared to be spellbound, but missed the point spectacularly: “as a society we tend to want to put people into a girl or a boy box … it makes us feel comfortable.”
Sadly this child is being forced into a trans box, and it should make us all feel very uncomfortable.
The real culprits, though, are not these parents or Holly Willoughby, but the snake-oil salesmen who have sold this lie to society. We have been told so many times that gender identity distinguishes men from women and now too many people now believe it. But human beings are sexually dimorphic, not ‘genderally’ dimorphic. That is biology, and while people can be led astray, the science does not change.
Too many politicians and policymakers have bought into this lie. Whether they genuinely think that sex is complicated (it isn’t) or doesn’t matter (it does) is not the issue. What matters is the impact on children like Stormy.
Stormy was apparently born with female genitals and that alone makes Stormy a girl. Stormy might develop into a girl that climbs trees, plays with trucks, wears trousers and cuts her hair short, but she will still be a girl. For Stormy, like everyone else, transition as an adult remains an option. At least then it would genuinely be her decision.
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SubscribeI find liking Woolf (and women like Dorothy Parker) very easy. Sharp, witty, opinionated, different – women who lived in a time when they were supposed to be polite, compliant and almost voiceless.
Yes – ditto Patricia Highsmith or Leonora Carrington
“It would be easy to cancel Woolf today — parts of her, at least. Emre’s notes introduce critical debates about Woolf’s racism: the diaries are full of unacceptable remarks about Indian people.”
I hate it when people in the past fail to live up to modern ways.
A down vote? Come on, that is why classic literature is being removed from mainstream education.
Perhaps they didn’t get the irony. You were being ironic weren’t you?
It would indeed be easy to find reasons to cancel Woolf. Only last week I discovered the n-word in one of her early short stories…
Nothing new about the sneering metropolitan elite
The Bloomsbury lot had such a hard First World War doing ‘war work’ on a country estate.
What I recall about the private Virginia Woolf was her depression, her revulsion with her own body and her desire for her own space – A Room of One’s Own. It almost seems to me that she was a free spirited intellect, confined within a body she disliked and a life she felt trapped in. Or maybe I’ve been reading the wrong biography.
I am often guilty of generalising my faults as a means of excusing them. We don’t actually know how other people think, only how we think they think, which is really just us thinking. I know I can be very nasty. My problem is taking responsibility for that regardless of what other people do and to try somehow to be kinder.
Perhaps, because she was trying to consciously break free from the more submissive role she was brought up with. In trying to be more assertive, she became rude.
It reminds me of this: ‘Women can do the job as well as a man, but they cannot be a gentleman’ (or words to that effect)
Would anyone ever have paid any attention at all to Virginia Woolf, had she not been a woman?
Mrs Dalloway is actually a very good novel indeed.
Yes it is.
No, Jane Austen and the Brontes were of course also heavily over promoted because they were women…