Transphobes Take A Firm Stance Against Thinking

This article is dedicated to Colin Wright, specifically in honor of his 9/2/2022 Twitter thread on the topic of pronouns. According to Wright, asking children to tell you their pronouns is the exact same as forcing them to undergo medical transition:

Asking a child about their pronouns is the 1st step of indoctrination into gender ideology and creating “trans kids.” It separates the terms he/him (as referring to men & boys) and she/her (as referring to girls & women) from biological sex and roots it in “gender identity.”

This is bad because, especially if the child is gender non-conforming, they’ll start to think more about their gender identity. This could lead to them thinking they’re transgender and non-binary — oh, by the way, we’re running under the assumption that’s bad — or they’ll be confused about their identity, which is also bad for reasons that are not explained:

This causes children think about their own “gender identity,” which is based on their understanding of stereotypes and social roles associated with males and females. Gender nonconforming kids will then come to believe they’re “trans” or “nonbinary,” or they’ll be confused.

I think Mushroom Girl had the best response to this idea that gender identity confuses children — so can anything they learn in school. Math can confuse children, and I’d argue it does much more often than gender identity, but that doesn’t mean that math should be banned from children’s grasp.

Colin goes on to warn that this confusion is what actually causes gender dysphoria — which is not even close to how dysphoria works, but I don’t expect Colin to know that — but many of these children are put on puberty blockers which, which gives them more time to think about their gender identity:

But far from being a mere “pause button” that allows kids time to think about their “gender,” studies show that almost 100% of kids who are put on puberty blockers continue on to cross-sex hormones, and some of those will pursue irreversible “gender-affirming” surgeries.

I should note: If a child is actually constantly thinking about their gender identity, that is not normal. Coming from a cisgender person who was aware of the concept of transgender people as a child, I never once thought I could be transgender nor did I ever question my gender identity. In general, if a child is cisgender and they hear about transgender people, they are much more likely to think of it as something weird they don’t understand the logic behind as opposed to something they think about becoming.

I want to point out that this logic also implies that being transgender is some kind of contagious mental illness spread through the knowledge it exists. There’s a well known idea on the internet called Roko’s basilisk, which states that a hypothetical benevolent artificial intelligence would torture those who know about the possibility of it existing but did not attempt to bring it into existence. The use of the term “basilisk” is in reference to a creature in Greek mythology which harms you through knowing about its existence.

I mention this because Colin seems to think of gender identity as a basilisk by itself. According to Colin, allowing children to even be aware of the concept could harm them — assuming you think being transgender is some massive harm to your child, which only makes sense if you’re transphobic.

Yeah, that’s another thing I want to point — even if Colin was right and telling children about the concept of gender identity turned them transgender, why is that a bad thing?