Would You Rather Have a Living Son or a Goth Daughter?

Or: How to Trans-Proof Your Kids (maybe)

Canadian readers (and many American ones, too) may remember the brave and hilarious Catholic writer Kathy Shaidle, who passed away a little over two years ago. The path from a Governor General’s Award nominated poet to the country’s most popular conservative blogger is not an oft-trod one, and if that wasn’t unexpected enough, Kathy then became an acclaimed classic movie essayist for Mark Steyn. Before it all, however, Kathy was a punk.

Mollie Hemingway, who needs no introduction, has mentioned her own youthful affinity for the punk scene.

Allie Beth Stuckey, to round out our trio of faithful and fearless Christian voices, was born too late for the punk era, but made up for it with an adolescent goth period – with dyed-black hair, the awful music, the whole nine yards.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you have to have grown up listening to the Dead Kennedys in order to be an outspoken Christian. The most virtuous, brave Christian I know, my wife, is a classical musician who grew up loving Shostakovich, not Siousxie. But it doesn’t seem to hurt, either.

I am no punk and never was, but I have been ruminating on an observation by Stephanie Davies-Arai in a recent interview with Jordan Peterson. Davies-Arai, the founder of Transgender Trend, has been a leading voice in Britain opposed to the, er, transgender trend. In the interview, she makes the point that transgenderism is the new counter-culture. That is to say, there are no more goths, punks, hippies, or whatnot around anymore. So for a teenager looking for a bit of a rebellion, it’s change your pronouns or bust.

I can’t think of a single goth or punk patient I’ve ever encountered this past decade, and I see my fair share of teens. Nor, from my admittedly distant appraisal of current teen culture, am I aware of any new identities rising to take their place, the way the grunge kids once displaced the disco crew. It all seems very… anemic. Again, I am judging from a distance, but for too many of my teen patients, their inner lives seem as mass-produced as the phones they are constantly staring at. To return to Kathy Shaidle’s example, she was a star of the ‘blogosphere’ when it was the Wild West, before Facebook and other corporate forces took over, centralized everything, and neutered every contrarian voice. This boardroom-controlled, pharma-funded, tightly censored (though not for pornography, which is aplenty), thoroughly generic social media world is where so many teens now spend the majority of their days.

The completely normal adolescent need to develop an identity of one’s own – the ‘coming of age’ described in so many books and movies that we know – thus seems to have no popular outlet apart from the trans path. Popular that outlet most certainly is, celebrated by teachers, peers, mass culture, and of course, childhood’s oldest enemy, The American Association of Pediatrics.

I am deeply sympathetic to the teen identity crisis. So how do we allow our children to have a crisis of their own, without permanently castrating themselves? Destroying the trans grooming industry, at the educational, medical, and cultural levels – as activists like Matt Walsh and leaders like Governor DeSantis seem bent on doing – is obviously the top priority. We cannot stand by and allow this irreversible damage to continue. Yet shouldn’t we also be providing alternatives, some way teenagers can rebel without getting a sex change operation? Is it time, in other words, to re-open CBGB?

Let me put it this way. I am as outspoken against smartphones for kids as it gets. Do not get one for your children; if you already have, please smash it. Yet I also understand that one reason kids spend so much time on social media is that it’s one of the few spaces they have left to be on their own. The typical unsupervised childhood of yesteryear is gone; as I put it, “we are robbing our children of the space and freedom to mature by placing them in a state of constant, infantilizing surveillance.” It’s not enough to take the phones away, you have to kick the kids out of the house til dinner, too. More on this to come.

Nobody who has encountered Joyce Carol Oates’ classic short story “Where are you going, Where Have You Been?” would argue that youth counterculture is harmless; Oates unforgettably depicts the seedy underbelly of the Woodstock generation. Michel Houellebecq became a literary sensation with Les Particules élémentaires, his (very NSFW) novelization of the price we pay for “free” love. So no, I’m not saying your teen is safe from harm in a mosh pit. But at least, with God’s grace, they will be left with the opportunity to mature from their youthful rebellion, learn valuable lessons, and teach this hard-earned wisdom to children of their own. With the trans ‘rebellion,’ there is no future, no children, there is nothing but death. We have to offer some other option, even if that option involves industrial doses of mascara – don’t we?

The good news for those parents who can’t stand The Cure: there is no more rebellious identity these days than one found in Christ! As Victoria Marshall explains this month, “In A Culture Full Of Sam Smiths, Christianity Is The Real Subversion.” Pastors, this is not the time to water down those sermons. Parents, this is not the time to skip Sunday School for soccer games. The good news about having an entire culture, government, economy, school system, and medical elite arrayed against us? Your kids won’t need to look to the Sex Pistols to rebel… they can stand on the now far more controversial words of St. Paul.

Clothe yourself and your children with the armor of God. Raise some rebels. Don’t panic if they go through a garbage music phase – think of Kathy, Mollie, and Allie! And at least it’s not Shostakovich (sorry, darling). As they go off in search of their own identity in a world of pharma-funded satanism, pray that, no matter what color their hair is, Joshua’s words will be in their hearts: “as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”