Something that needed to be said

in our therapy-obsessed, increasingly insane, culture - from Brendan O'Neill in the The Telegraph:

"...As if five-year-olds are capable of undergoing serious mental anguish about anything, least of all that issue which even most adults who are not teachers at a Polytechnic never talk about: "gender". Yet according to yesterday's Sun, five-year-old Zach believed he was "trapped in the wrong body" – doctors agreed with him and now his teachers refer to him as a girl and his school uniform includes "black boots with a pink trim", allowing him to "express his femininity". This is bizarre. I spent a significant part of my childhood wanting to be E.T, sometimes even waddling like that Spielbergian creation. Thankfully, though, no one diagnosed me as suffering from EID (Extraterrestrial Identity Disorder) or set up toilets-for-aliens at school so that I could relieve myself in a non-human, non-judgemental environ. That's probably because I was just a child and didn't have a clue what the hell I really wanted or needed.

The elevation of childhood confusion and immature desires into a mental disorder reveals far more about adult society than it does about children. It is the adults – the doctors, the schools, the social workers – who are really screwed up in the GID debate, not the kids. It is normal for kids to want to be all kinds of things – girls, boys, robots, dogs – but it is not normal for the adults around them to scratch their chins and say: "Yes, you clearly have psychological issues. I propose reorienting your whole school and home life around your desire to be a [insert crazy childhood dream here]." What is really motoring the GID bandwagon is modern adult society's weird combination of not wanting to tell children what to do anymore (it's too judgemental) and its inability simply to chill out about what children get up to....

Read it all here