The One Million March

 

Today I attended the “One Million March for Children.” It was a festive occasion, despite a smaller group of counter protesters that was not kept separate from the main protest. (It strikes me as worrisome that the police were not there separating the two groups. Did they want trouble?) Most of the “Million” marchers, perhaps a few hundred in our small city, were plainly Middle Eastern—Muslims. A few black and white faces interspersed. I saw one clerical collar. 

The counter-protesters were all quite pale; although their hair came in many colours.

The counter-protesters held signs that said “Smash the Cis-tem,” “We refuse to disappear,” and something like “Down with your ignorance.” They waved rainbow flags and pastel trans flags. The Million Marchers chanted “leave our kids alone” and “let kids be kids,” sang “O Canada,” and waved Canadian flags. Many had kids with them. March speakers stressed they had nothing against gays or transvestites.

One of the counter-protesters stood behind me when we reached the town park. She started to heckle the speaker, but was soon engaged instead in rather civil conversation by a marcher. The counter-protester, said she was concerned with every child being safe, including “trans kids.”

The marching parent said, “What about my daughter? She’s bullied at school because she attends church. Shouldn’t she be safe?”

One of the kids said “What about shared washrooms?”

 The counter-protester said she was a teacher, and three of her students had committed suicide. Trans kids. So there’s a real problem.

That’s surely alarming, and is probably true: the rate of depression, anxiety, and suicide has been rising since the end of the Second Word War. Just in the past few years, it has jumped about 28%. Not to mention the skyrocketing rate of death by drug overdose. And Medical Assistance in Dying.

An odd coincidence: there was no suggestion of gender ideology, or even the concept of gender as applying to psychology as opposed to grammar, until 1947. Once it appeared, the rate of depression and suicide began to rise. If there is not a direct connection, the gender ideology may well be a symptom of a larger problem: a general loss of our social bearings, our grip on what is and is not real, or on what is right and wrong. We’ve lost the faith.

We also know from studies that the rate of attempted suicide among kids experiencing “gender dysphoria” is about 48%. It is not lower for those who undergo puberty blocking or surgeries—those “affirmed” in their claim that they are another sex. They end up just as dead.

The obvious conclusion is that introducing SOGI—sexual orientation and gender identity—to the schools does not prevent kids from committing suicide. It murders them.

Depression is a loss of meaning; a feeling that one is trapped in a maze with no sense of the right direction, of no solid ground under your feet. Nothing around you makes sense; you cannot trust those around you, or even perhaps the evidence of your own eyes. You no longer know which way is up, or who you are, or what you are supposed to do or be. It is a loss of the sense of he rules  of the game.

This being so, nothing could be much more poisonous than challenging a young person to question their sex, their “gender.” But SOGI also seems calculated to disorient them with respect to their relationship with their parents and with their religious traditions. Cutting away all the ground on which they can stand and establish their identity.

It could hardly be more sinister—even aside from the fact that it looks like deliberate sexual grooming, an often leads to sterilization and cutting off body parts. Something a depressed kid is already too easy to persuade to do to make the pain stop.