How We Make Children Miserable - And How To Guide Yours To Joy

The Link Between Transgenderism and Depression - It's Not What You Think

“Why would you want to climb Mount Everest?” the mountaineering pioneer George Mallory was once asked. His famous reply: “Because it’s there.”

Presumably, had Mr. Mallory grown up in Kansas, with nothing but the Great Plains stretching before him as far as his eyes could see, had he never been exposed to books or films about the massive mountain ranges, his great talents would have been put to non-alpinist use. If we do not know Mount Everest is there, we do not think to climb it.

What does Mr. Mallory’s experience tell us about the latest demisexual trans-identified furry to enroll at Brown University, where almost half of the student population now identify as LGBT? Well, sometimes the answer to, “why would you want to identify as nonbinary?” is as simple as, “because it’s there.”

Yet this is not a post about transgenderism or mountain climbing. It’s about depression. What if one of the reasons we have so many unhappy kids today is because we, with the best of intentions, keep introducing the idea of unhappiness to them?

Return to what any reasonable person understands to be the massively manufactured trans contagion. Imagine being a first grade teacher and making a habit of going up to the nearest six year old to ask, “do you feel like a boy or a girl today?” It’s a question not one single human being would have thought to ask throughout all recorded history. But now it’s 2023, so you ask it, and you ask it, if not every day, perhaps every week, or every month. Your colleagues see that six year old and ask him the same question, too.

Now here’s the thing. The people asking might, if you looked within their hearts, have zero conscious desire to ‘groom’ that six year old into transgenderism. The questioners might simply think they’re doing the right thing by ‘respecting gender diversity’ or whatever stupid fad they’ve bought into. In this case, however, intent does not matter: the grooming is inherent in the question. The existence of the question itself raises the possibility that a boy can be a girl. If you ask the question to enough boys enough times, some of them will eventually say, sure, I’m feeling a tad feminine today. And, voila, a new client for the AAP’s lifelong butchery is born.

With me so far? Well, put the trans issue aside. Let’s talk mood. Picture that same six year old. You ask him, “are you feeling happy or sad today?” Maybe he’s too young to understand, so you give him a chart with drawings of faces, ranging from big smiles to tearful frowns, and ask him to point to how he feels. You ask him, ‘have you thought of hurting yourself today?” You keep asking him, week after week, month after month, year after year. The older he gets, the more sophisticated the questions. Once he’s a teen, instead of pointing to sad faces, you ask him to rate his happiness on a scale of 1 to 4: how many days he feels like people don’t care about him, how many days he feels like it’s not worth getting out of bed. Maybe you give him a form like this every time you see him. Maybe you give him an app like this.

Are you starting to get the picture? If asking kids if they’re trans spreads transness, isn’t it possible that asking kids if they’re sad spreads sadness? Let’s provide a contrast, just to hammer things home. Imagine instead a different questionnaire that teachers and doctors could give children every time they see them, from age six to sixteen. This one, unlike the very real PHQ-9 depression screen your doctor (including me) is required by the medical/insurance system to hand out, doesn’t ask about how unhappy someone feels. This imagined questionnaire has inquiries more along the following lines:

• How many people did you serve this week?

• What is the bravest act you performed?

• What hero were you most like?

• How did you imitate Jesus or His saints this week?

Now, don’t get me wrong, we will always have the depressed among us, and we will always have saints among us. But wouldn’t it be wise to aim to cultivate the latter, instead of the former?

There is a famous saying in business school (or so I’ve heard, I wouldn’t really know): “you get what you measure.” What if we’re getting all this sadness because we’re looking for it?

Let me put it another way. I never watched Sex and the City, but if you’re at least my age, you remember the cultural phenomenon that show once was. Countless people watched it, and the question in every magazine, every web site, every water cooler conversation – the question, as the Washington Post puts it, “asked a zillion times” – was: are you a Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, or Miranda? I don’t know enough about each character to provide a detailed breakdown, but I do know enough to say that, whichever door you choose, it’ll make Miss Havisham very happy. When your stable of role models runs the gamut from a miserable, lonely, self-obsessed blonde to a miserable, lonely, self-obsessed redhead, is it truly a big surprise if you turn out rather on the miserable side yourself?

Imagine instead a different cultural phenomenon. This one, unlike the heroism questionnaire above, is no hypothetical, just a little dated: up until a century or so ago, some of the most widely read books on the planet, besides The Bible itself, were Pilgrim’s Progress and The Imitation of Christ. Catholics and Protestants alike had their various books of saints and martyrs, widely read and loved not just by adults, but as familiar as mother’s milk to children. In such a world, in our world until very recently, the question asked a zillion times was more along the lines of: are you a Saint George, a Saint Andrew, or a Saint Elizabeth?

Now, before someone accuses me of wanting to turn a blind eye to misery, to repress human emotions, to ignore suffering children, I would ask you to spend a little time with those old books. Did the saints of the church suffer? I’ve never been stoned to death, riddled with arrows, eaten by lions, burned at the stake, or crucified upside down, but I presume neither is a particularly pleasurable experience. I know too that our heroes in Pilgrim’s Progress, arguably the most widely read and influential book ever (don’t tell Greta Gerwig), spend a lot of time in the Slough of Despond, to say nothing of the home of the Giant Despair or the Valley of Humiliation. The great writers and the great saints know all about sadness, misery, and pain. But here’s the catch: what gets them through it is that they’re not spending all day wondering how happy they feel. Their eyes are not on themselves, but on others – on Him. What gets our pilgrims through all the obstacles they encounter is that they keep their eyes on the Celestial City. Do our kids even know the Celestial City exists?

              Like George Mallory, our kids will climb Everests because they’re there. But they can’t climb what they don’t see. If the only mountain ranges your child is exposed to are the Andes of Narcissism, the Rockies of Despair, the Himalayas of Hedonism, don’t be surprised if they become gold medal alpinists in wretched misery. Pray instead that, with the grace of God, the help of great literature, the examples of the saints, and the wise use of the right kind of questions, the landscapes your children look upon are rich with towering mountains of heroism, self-sacrifice, and faith.

              Thank you for reading, and good luck!