MARILYN PENN: ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH
http://politicalmavens.com/
Something must happen to sound judgment at high altitudes. In Colorado, the state’s civil rights division has ruled that a six year old boy who dresses as a girl must be allowed to use the girl’s bathroom The state ruled that “compartmentalizing a child as a boy or a girl based solely on their visible anatomy, is a simplistic approach to a difficult and complex issue.” This is an interesting conclusion which can be rephrased as stating that a six year old’s personal evaluation of his own gender and sex is more accurate than the biological evidence of same. Even more to the point, it implies that the willingness of parents to give in to the demands or supplications of a very young child, or for them to shape those demands willfully or unconsciously, must be valued above biological facts. In the photograph accompanying the news story in the NYTimes of Jan 24th, the mother is wearing pants that are several inches longer than her legs. Perhaps her own dysmorphic disorder has her believing that she is six feet tall and needs to dress accordingly; is this someone whose judgment about how to dress her own son should be automatically trusted?
At six, children are usually in first grade learning to read and write and deal with rudimentary lessons in socialization and the three R’s. If the concept of gender determination is so complex, should it be left to children that young and immature to decide? Shouldn’t parents delay acting decisively on such important matters until their child is older and more mature? Coy, the six year old boy in question, is viewed as having made his own choices as to what to wear, selecting dresses and growing his hair long. Anyone who has been a parent knows that children can choose only between choices they are GIVEN – not every parent would agree to let a boy wear his fantasy clothes to school. Not every parent would allow a young child to be the sole determinant of his haircut.
There’s an old joke about a doting mother watching her son march awkwardly in a parade. She turns to the woman next to her and muses proudly, “Everyone is out of step except my Johnny.” This is what the Colorado civil rights division has concluded; they preferred to ignore the trauma of little girls seeing their girl friend urinate through male genital paraphernalia in favor of considering it harassment for a boy dressed as a girl facing the reality that to the rest of the world, at six years old, he still remains a boy.
The gay lobby has been extremely influential in shaming people who wonder about the emperor’s new clothes. The fact that Colorado has extended its civil rights law to include special protection for transgenders is a testament to that influence and a similar bill has been submitted in New York. If gender dysmorphia is a psychological problem, is it more worthy of special protection than schizophrenia or manic depression? It is fairly uncommon for childhood dysmorphia to persist past childhood into adulthood – only 1 in 30,000 men and 1 in 100,000 women request gender re-assignment surgery. Wouldn’t it be more logical to take the attitude of wait and see instead of forcing an entire school to accommodate the whims of one very young boy?
If a young child believed in ghosts or saw “dead people” would it be reasonable to require the school to provide security against their malign influence? We don’t allow young children to drive, drink, vote or walk to school alone at six years old in large cities. It’s also far too young to discard their biological attributes in favor of imaginative role-playing. And it’s certainly inappropriate for a civil rights agency muddled by political correctness to force the first grade girls outside of Colorado Springs to have to tinkle with a boy in the bathroom marked GIRLS.
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