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The gender ideology movement sort of feels out of the news cycle where I live, but remains very top of mind for me.
As I see it, the whole umbrella is actually multiple, almost unrelated strands, queerying category activists, social engineering progressives, AGPs, internet cults, all underpinned by unthinking legal activism and of course corporate profiteering. Did I mention an overtly political and enabling media environment bereft of any journalistic values?
I am fascinated by all these things but mainly I want to talk about the social mania aspect. I'm very interested in how smart people, who would inevitably class themselves as above-average in rationality and morality, are able to brush off child-safeguarding concerns, discarding the previous medical ethics consensus (first do no harm, evidence based medicine) in favour of ideas that barely existed even 15-20 years ago.
I have been looking into previous social manias such as the satanic panic and the child care workers given wrongful convictions and it's shocking how difficult it is to reverse the tide of mania once it's begun. Parents, police, the justice system, and media all fall into lockstep and condemn innocent people to terrible fates they and their families bear in almost total isolation, with only a few supporters able to parse the information in front of them and figure out what is going on.
I mean this is just human behaviour - we make movies about the Salem witch trials, we are modern people and have access to perspectives of humans across evolutionary time. Is it really true that people still don't know who we are, how we behave in herds?
I understand apathy, I understand things moving out of the news cycles, but I can't understand how people can maintain a neutral view on unnecessary surgeries on minors. When institutions such as medical bodies fail in their basic safeguarding responsibilities, suppressing dissent within their ranks, it is not hard to work out what is going on. How many manias does history need to present before people learn what we are?
A failure of courage I understand in any given context but the neutral middle doesn't even seem curious in private.
Can anybody enlighten me why people aren't more curious, why they're happy for children to be groomed into lifelong medicalisation, with their life choices pre-emptively narrowed before they even understand what consent means? The true-believers I understand, it's supposedly smart, moral people that aren't engaged that I'm confused about. Are they secretly true believers but just don't want to say?
Plain old cognitive dissonance?
The one thing that unites everyone I know, ranging from the most hardcore SJWs to alt-right RETVRN types, is that nobody cares about children at all, especially not more than our respective political convictions, and especially not the abstract children of others. If you come from a genuinely more old-fashioned or natalist bubble, you may underestimate just how insignificant children have become in younger elite circles; on a gut-feeling level it is genuinely difficult for me to imagine how someone would pretend to care about children for any reason other than as a mysterious ancestral ritual that may score points against the outgroup.
(It may not be surprising that birthrates in my mid-30s cohort are very low, and the few people who did reproduce have largely dropped out socially - not, as far as I can tell, to socialise with other people, but to be alone.)
Well that's sad to me but I sense it, and it becomes reinforcing- as less people are having children society seems to have also become less accommodating of having children. I have to say it's a stressful business in the current age.
How much is fear of global catastrophe? I wonder if all the environmentalism has curbed the instinct, or is it that we've become more online and less physically connected.
I haven't encountered an authentic version of the "I don't want children because they will have to suffer through the warming apocalypse" sentiment in the wild, but then for myself a certain general feeling that I can't imagine a life on earth 50 years hence that will be worth living (though my blackpill of choice is more about AI and/or technologically fueled turbo-authoritarianism) certainly has been tipping the scales further against having children, so perhaps the general sentiment is not so rare. I think that the most pervasive cause is still that none of us have any mental conception of a (capital-g,l?) good life that features children. A parental generation that was never shy to resort to guilt-tripping over all the sacrifices they made to raise us certainly isn't helping there, but the understanding that millennials value experiences (which children get in the way of) over things (which children don't get in the way of as much) has been around for a while too.
I agree that this is a big reason, but imo it's so much more than that. Our society strongly incentives childlessness through multiple channels: Companies actively try to punish you for having children as far as the legal system allows, the government itself guarantees a pension for childless people that we barely can afford, both the culture and the government work hand-in-hand see it as their prerogative to judge parents as they see fit and take away parental rights if need be and finally, possibly most of all, the culture strongly pushes teens and young adults to delay pregnancy and in fact most contact with younger children until both their biological fitness has atrophied so much that a decent percentage of people struggle to have kids despite wanting to, while another part has, as you point out, no conception whatsoever what a life with children actually looks like. It doesn't help that media very consistently pushes an image of children as just getting in the way of the adventure that is usually central to the plot.
And I think another big issue is that society pushes exceptionalism in general - everyone is supposed to find their one true calling, be it an amazing career, true love, personal self-realisation (which conveniently always ends up to be some kind of hedonism) etc. Children are not only too mundane to fit the bill, they also make many of those things very difficult to achieve, especially with the limitations modern life heaps on parents.
Imo doomerism has always seemed much to convenient to me. Most people, especially women, know that not having kids is a thoroughly antisocial choice in general (there are exceptions of course, such as having serious genetic disorders), so doomerism allows them to reclaim the moral high ground. They get to continue their life of short-sighted hedonism while also feeling morally superior. Of course, there are people whom I believe their doomerism to be sincere, but it's quite rare. Much more common is partying all the time, except the parties are totally for a cause and not just for fun. Perfect example is fridays for future, which consisted of 99% getting to skip school and 1% thinly-veiled excuses how that's the moral thing to do.
Ironically this is a great example of your earlier point. As a parent, I'd actually say it's the opposite: With kids, you get a ton of amazing experiences entirely for free, so much that experiences you used to enjoy such as travelling start to become boring & pointless in comparison. On the other hand, kids are genuinely expensive, so you can afford a lot less things.
Protests themselves are a fun group activity, when they're not outright parties/festivals.
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