Ep. 68 - Child Abuse In The Guise Of 'Gender Neutral Parenting'
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
168.19525
Summary
In this episode, we talk about the new trend of "theyeb" (they don't have any labels) and how it's ruining the way we think about our own kids. Theyeb is a term coined by white, upper-class liberal parents who want to raise gender neutral kids.
Transcript
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Maybe you have heard about the new trend in terrible parenting.
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This is the label that certain white upper-class liberal parents have given to their children
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They want gender-neutral children without gender labels.
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And then they proceeded to invent a new label, which is theybes.
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So, no, we don't want any labels whatsoever, except for these over here that we've just
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There's an NBC article about this trend, and it's gotten some attention.
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It focuses especially on the stories of Nate and Julia Sharp, who are—well, actually,
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let me just—I'll read a little bit from this article, just so you understand what
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we're dealing with here, to kind of set the stage a little bit.
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It says, three-year-old twins, Zyler and Caden, scurried around the boy and girl's
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clothing racks of a narrow consignment store filled with toys.
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Zyler, wearing rainbow leggings, scrutinized a pair of hot pink and purple sneakers.
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Zayden, in a T-Rex shirt, fixated on a musical cube that flashed colorful lights.
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At a glance, the only discernible difference between these fraternal twins is their hair.
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That's a question their parents, Nate and Julia Sharp, say only the twins can decide.
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The couple from Cambridge, Massachusetts, of course, represent a small group of parents
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raising theybes, children being brought up without gender designation from birth.
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Nate Sharp told NBC News, a theybe is, I think, different things to different people.
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For us, it means raising our kids with gender-neutral pronouns, so they, them, their, rather than
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assigning he, she, him, her from birth based on their anatomy.
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Let's pause right there for just a moment, okay?
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I don't mean to interrupt Mr. Nate Sharp, but they, their, them, those are pronouns that
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So you're saying, well, we're not going to assign he or she, so instead we're going to
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And actually, he and she are not assigned by anyone any more than your biological sex is
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Okay, it's not like you've got a bunch of ambiguous, neutral babies being born, and then
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they're all laying out in a nursery, and then you've got doctors that come by and go, we're
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going to assign him boy, make that one a girl, we'll just do two girls over there, we'll do
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that one a boy, no, you know, actually not, well, let's make that one a girl, that one
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That is not, there's no, there's no sex assignment ward in the birthing center of the hospital.
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That doesn't have, see, what happens is you've got boys and girls who are born, and then the
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doctors will look at them and say, oh, that's a boy, or oh, that's a girl.
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And then linguistically, there are certain pronouns that come attached to that naturally as part
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What you're doing here, Nate Sharp, is you are actually assigning, artificially, a pronoun
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that would not otherwise, that is not natural to the child.
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Going back to the article, parents in the U.S. are increasingly raising children outside
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traditional gender norms, allowing boys and girls to play with the same toys.
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I love it how these enlightened liberal parents, they think they're the only ones to ever, to
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ever dream up this idea of allowing boys and girls to play with the same toys.
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Do they think that we, if our, you know, if your son picks up one of his, one of your
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daughter's toys, or if your daughter picks up one of your son's toys, do they think that
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Drop it, son, or you're going to, you'll turn into a girl.
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No, because kids playing with all the same toys, that happens in every house in America.
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Most of us normal folks, normal parents, we have always been fine with our kids basically
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playing with whatever toy they wanted to play with.
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If we had seen our daughter pick up a Tonka truck, we would say, oh, our daughter's playing
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We just said, oh, that's a girl who likes Tonka trucks.
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There is one other detail in this article that I should mention that they are, so Nate
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and Julia, part of this Davies thing is that the parents hide the biological sex from, not
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only from society, but they hide it from the kids themselves.
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So they, the kids, are aware of their own body parts, obviously, but they have not been
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Nate and Julia are keeping that secret under lock and key until the, until the kids get
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to the point where Nate and Julia have decided they're old enough to decide their own gender,
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which I think is most of these parents will say around four or five is when they can decide
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So at the age of four, they're still not old enough to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
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They probably don't know how to tie their shoes.
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They're certainly not old enough to stay home alone by themselves.
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They can't, they can't do anything for themselves at all.
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I mean, they can probably barely even manage to get their shirts on in the morning without,
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Yet we're going to give them this enormous power to us to come up with their own genders.
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Now, of course, we run into some logical problems here.
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There are a lot of logical problems, but let's just focus on a few of them.
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If, and we talked about this in, on a show last week, I forget in what context, but let's
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If, if, if biological sex is meaningless and gender is just a social construct, then what
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does it mean to say that someone is choosing a gender?
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Biological sex cannot be chosen, but you can choose gender.
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Yet you're saying that gender is an arbitrary invented thing.
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What's the meaning of choosing this meaningless thing?
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So if a, if a boy chooses to be a girl based on his affinity for girly things, because in
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every case I've ever heard of, when you hear these parents who say, oh yeah, my, he was
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And then they start to tell their stories, the reason that they give or the, the indications
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that they give for, oh, this is when we realized that he was a girl.
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It always involves, oh, he liked to put on dresses or he liked to play with Barbie dolls.
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It's, it's, it is, they discovered in their son in affinity for traditionally girly things.
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So if you decide or your child decides that he's a girl based on his affinity for girly
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things, have you not just reinforced the very, very societal construct that you're supposedly
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And if the child makes the decision that he's a girl based on nothing, based not even on
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an affinity for girly things, then hasn't the word girl lost all meaning?
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Isn't the word girl now just another word for boy?
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I think if, if someone is going to say, oh, I am a girl, then they have to be able to follow
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So I'm a girl because fill in the blank, right?
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And if you can't fill in the blank with the because, then I'm a girl means absolutely nothing.
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But if you can fill it in with some kind of because, some kind of reason, then the word
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But if the word girl and the word boy do have meaning, then the choice must be based on something
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And if it's based on something objective and meaningful, then gender is not a societal
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If you haven't told your children anything about boy and girl, and they haven't learned
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to associate those words with anything in particular, then what in the world does it mean for them
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So let's, so little Zeiler, poor kid, has no concept of boy and girl at all.
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He doesn't have any idea what those things mean.
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And then at the age of four, the parents are going to go to them and say, what are you,
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And he's going to say, whatever he says, what, it means nothing.
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You may as well go up to him and say, um, hey, Zeiler, what are you, a gobbledygook or
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This is the, his, his, his, his, his, his natural identity.
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But these are, I could go on for, for hours, um, with the logical fallacies here, but the
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There's a more, a very serious moral problem here where Nate and Julia, in an effort to
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show off to their liberal friends, have deprived their children of identity.
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And I really do believe this is, I would like to say for their benefit to be generous to
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Nate and Julia, I would like to say that these, that, that they are just crazy, insane
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people who are not intellectually capable of understanding the logical contradictions
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that I have just outlined, but no, apparently they are mechanical engineers, upper-class mechanical
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These are people with brains in their heads and they must possess the ability to understand
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logic and understand how ideas and things all fit together.
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So they must be smart enough to understand that this whole thing makes no sense whatsoever.
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These parents that do this, it is total selfishness.
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They're using their kids as like these fashion statements.
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And they're saying to all their friends, aren't we so fashionable?
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And the price of you making a fashion statement is that you are destroying and ruining your kids
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Like you're getting right down to the core of who your kids are and just obliterating it.
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You're not freeing them from artificial cultural influences by raising them neutrally.
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Rather, you are overriding those influences by imposing a much more artificial, much more confusing,
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Look, it's easy to kind of laugh at something like babies and to laugh at these parents.
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But it's not really funny what's happening here.
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This is psychological child abuse of the most demented kind.
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They're robbing their children of even the most basic knowledge of their own selves.
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Knowledge that they need in order to decide what they want to do and who they want to be
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You may as well refuse to tell your children what species they belong to or what planet they live on.
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This is just the most basic information about themselves, about their relation to the world,
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The most basic information, like the kind of information that non-abusive parents will start with.
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one of the first things your kid learns about himself is his sex.
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One of the first things he learns is, I'm a boy or I'm a girl.
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Because that's just basic information that you need about who you are.
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And these parents are taking that from their kids.
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Like, what if we raise kids through the first part of their formative years
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without telling them anything about themselves whatsoever?
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And then they're going to just sit back and see, well, let's see what happens.
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The thing is, you could have, especially in low-income areas,
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you could have Child Protective Services knocking on your door
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or if you yell at your kid in public or something like that,
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Yet these people are turning their kids into social experience,
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They're hiding essential biological truths from their children.
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They are force-feeding mental illness into their kids.
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It is really unthinkable and awful and just disgusting.
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It's child abuse, and that's what we need to call it.
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we need to start putting our foot down about this kind of stuff.
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What you're doing to your children is unthinkable and evil.
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This is the worst kind of psychological abuse I have ever heard of.
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you know that I will sometimes deviate from the topic
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and get into entirely irrelevant rants about subjects
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And usually I do that at the very beginning of the show.
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But anyway, let's, we'll put that on the back burner.
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and I had a pretty horrific experience on an elevator.
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although that obviously is pretty horrific in and of itself.
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Okay, I had killed the small talk conversation inadvertently,
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Because if you're going to open the small talk valve,
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if you had just never said anything whatsoever.