The Gender Oracles and Their Holy Children

The radical gender theorists see a potential holy child in every crib.

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Billions of people believe in reincarnation. I can see that if one lived in a society where this belief was the norm, it would make perfect sense, a year or two after the spiritual leader of this vast community died, to assume the new leader might well be a toddler—“assigned at birth” as ordinary—but who was in fact hiding in plain sight as the reincarnated new leader.

That’s how it works for Tibetan Buddhists. A state oracle is consulted to guide the search party to the most likely district. They visit many homes. Once they get a strong vibe about a particular child, they present him with possessions from the former Dalai Lama, along with other unrelated objects. If the boy chooses the non-sacred objects to play with, he is ruled out as the former leader’s reincarnation. If he chooses the former Dalai Lama’s possessions, his world is turned upside down.

He is immediately removed from his parents’ home and set on his lifetime journey, segregated from the people and experiences he would otherwise have known. His parents may be saddened by this transfer of guardianship, but they are compensated for it by the honour and reverence their new status in their community bestows on them. Imagine—if you’re a believer—the thrill of having produced this holy child without realizing his uniqueness until “searchers” proclaimed it through their simple but infallible test.

On the other hand, if you happen not to believe in reincarnation, you don’t consider the child innately holy at all, but simply a victim of circumstances set in motion by a mere coincidence.

And furthermore, if you don’t believe in reincarnation, and you live in a culture formed under the (once) liberal rubrics of rationality, logic, and respect for individual rights, including children’s rights, you would be distressed by, rather than admiring of, any parents who handed their child over to the high priests of a belief system grounded in superstition.

I’m sure you can see where I am going here. So let’s say goodbye to the real Dalai Lama, and turn our attention to today’s myriad pseudo-Dalai Lamas, holy children, and their proud parents who constitute the faithful flock in a belief system that deserves exactly the same degree of intellectual respect as the theory of reincarnation—radical gender theory.

These “True Believer” parents are not only willing to turn their children over to the holiness “searchers” on the flimsiest of alleged signals of their child’s special aura, but they bruit their pride in doing so, and then bask in the sunshine of the honours heaped on them by their fellow “village” believers.

A case in point: Noella McMaher, a boy who identifies as a girl and was socially transitioned at the age of four, is now ten years old and reportedly the world’s “youngest transgender model.” By an amazing coincidence, Noella’s biological mother identifies as transgender and has a transgender spouse. According to Noella’s mother, Dee McMaher, the child knew he was meant to be a girl at two years old. Dee accordingly treated and dressed Noella as a girl and “apparently has plans for surgery when Noella turns 16.”

Dee told Forbes magazine in February: “At two years old, she started telling us she wasn’t a boy. At four and a half, she socially transitioned and at seven she legally transitioned.” Since then, Noella has become a seasoned runway performer.

Sure, it’s possible that Noella McMaher actually has gender dysphoria, and whatever she was “telling” her mother at age two coincided with reality, just as it is possible that every Dalai Lama chosen actually is the reincarnation of the former one. But based on what we actually know about children and their tender-age development, the odds are that Noella was going through a meaningless phase that his mother zapped into permanence by “affirming” and reinforcing the child’s perceived disparity between their psychology and anatomy. The Dalai Lama seems happy and serene. Maybe that’s his personality type, and he would have been a happy and serene farmer, husband and father. We’ll never know.

At least the Dalai Lama has led a physically healthy life. Who but a true believer in radical gender theory actually looks hopefully for signs that her child is destined for an identity that requires permanent dependence on drugs, sacrifice of sexual pleasure and fertility, and in this case a strong possibility of extreme, high-risk body modification?

Rather than simply judge Noella’s mother as a conduit for child abuse, which I believe she is, I’m more concerned for polemical reasons to know how she came to the understanding that, at the age of two, her child “started telling us she wasn’t a boy.” What does she mean by that? Did the child show an interest in dolls? Did he show a preference for the gender equivalent of the former Dalai Lama’s “real possessions”?

Where, any rational person must wonder, did the mother get the idea that any behaviour whatsoever at the age of two is a reliable predictor, worth taking drastic, life-altering action on, of a permanent, authentic identity that is completely at odds with his corporeal being?

She got the idea the same way as the parents of the Dalai Lama: from spiritual authority figures she was conditioned to trust. In the case of Ms McMaher, it is possible, even likely, that Dee McMaher has been exposed to the theories of “oracle” clinical and developmental psychologist Diane Ehrensaft, and author of The Gender Creative Child. Ehrensaft is one of the most influential voices in the pediatric transgender movement, yet her train of thinking on children and gender is so risibly anti-logical that she makes the searchers for the Dalai Lama look like Aristotelian geniuses.

My introduction to Ehrensaft came through a video of her presentation to 400 attendees at an all-day 2016 conference and continuing-education event in Santa Cruz in Feb, 2016. This presentation has been referenced many times by critics of radical gender theory. But it bears any amount of reinforcement, because what she says in it is the ne plus ultra of radical gender crazy. It’s voodoo psychology, but representative of the nonsense at the heart of this child-sacrificial belief system, so it really does need to be seen to be believed by the widest possible audience.

Ehrensaft is contemptuous of the “watchful waiting” school of thought in treating gender non-conforming children. A leading light in the affirmation model, her motto is “listen and act.” Ehrensaft is aware, and admits she is aware, that most children will outgrow their gender confusion in time. And yet, when asked in the Q and A following her presentation how one might know if a child is transgender when he or she is “pre-verbal,” here is her answer (starting at 2:06:08):

[Preverbal children] are very action oriented. This is where mirroring is really important. And listening to actions. ..

They can show you about what they want to play with…and if they feel uncomfortable about how you are responding to them and their gender… if you’re misgendering them. So you look for those kinds of actions….like tearing a skirt off. …There was one on that Barbara Walters special, this child wore the little onesie with the snap-ups between the legs. And at age one would unsnap them to make a dress, so the dress would flow. This is a child who was assigned male. That’s a communication, a pre-verbal communication about gender…. And children will know [they are transgender] by the second year of life…they probably know before that but that’s pre-pre verbal.

“ … TO make a dress, SO the dress would flow.”

With no evidence, she is connecting the baby’s action to a gendered motive. That’s her premise. You could put a onesie on a baby monkey, and it might unsnap the snap-ups. Would there be a motive in that case, or would the monkey be randomly playing with whatever his paws could reach? Her premise is crazy, right? So when she made these statements, I waited for audience laughter. But it was not forthcoming. When the camera panned the room, I saw thoughtful faces, nodding with pursed lips.

These were educated people. What had happened to their brains?

A baby is not aware until the age of seven months that he exists as a separate entity apart from his mother. And yet we are expected to believe that a mere five months later he not only knows he is separate, but he also knows he has something called a “gender” that is related to, but vastly different from, the little knobbly thing between his legs. Innately, we are to believe, the child realizes he should not have this funny little protuberance, but rather he should have nothing there. More than that, he also knows at the age of 12 months—according to the “onesie” snapper example—that the “gender” he belongs to wants to wear a garment that “flows.”

Of course, knowing this would also mean knowing that he lives in North America, and not, for example, in Saudi Arabia, where it is common for males to wear a flowing garment called a thawb. Or Pakistan, where both males and females wear the same pants-and-top combo called the Shalmar Kameeez.

So really, what a clever little tyke that was featured on that Barbara Walters special! And how lucky he is to be born in the age of snap-close onesies, instead of when I was born and there were only buttons that no infant could undo. He knows what his sex is, he knows it is different from his gender, he knows he would prefer to look like the opposite sex (whatever that is), even though at this stage of life only his genitals distinguish him from the opposite sex, and he has likely never seen any genitals but his own (and he hasn’t exactly “seen” them either). And of course he also knows that sartorial gender customs in his culture differ from cultures elsewhere. All this long before he knows what a toilet is for. And all this information he conveyed to his parents by unsnapping his onesie.

Sheesh, maybe this kid is the next Dalai Lama!

How is it that not a single person in that hall of 400 people stood up and yelled, “WTF?” I assume they were all reasonably well-educated people. Were they hypnotized? I realize it’s asking a lot to be the one person to stand up and tell the emperor he is naked, but how come there weren’t at the very least ripples of spontaneous laughter, or strong murmurings as a bunch of attendees turned to their neighbours and asked, “Is she kidding or for real?” and “I can’t believe I paid good money for this conference,” and “Beam me up, Scottie, this planet’s inhabitants are making me nervous.”

Is it any wonder, if 400 educated people sat there and listened to this bilge with furrowed brows and nodding heads, that a less-educated woman such as Dee McMaher might believe it is the most normal thing in the world for a somewhat verbal two-year old toddler (so much more advanced in his understanding of gender than a pre-verbal baby) to know with absolute certainty that he is meant to be a girl and live as a girl and then as a woman forever and ever?

I will say this for the Tibetan Buddhists: they only choose one child every 60 or 70 years to deny a normal life in order to perform the sacred task of spiritual leadership that binds their community in fellowship. But the radical gender theorists’ religion sees a potential Dalai Lama in every crib. Their “oracles” are preaching from a million pulpits, and their “searchers” are coming for your onesie-snapping babies. Please forego the “honour” of handing them over.

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