In a California high school, a male athlete is playing on a female volleyball team. This cheating was allowed by the school district to occur despite on ongoing lawsuit against the state of California for their clear Title IX violations. In other breaking news, the sun rose in the east this morning.
The male player, AB Hernandez, has been in the headlines before. Last spring, he competed on the Jurupa Valley High School girls’ track team, stealing two state titles in long jump and triple jump that should have gone to females.
Increasingly, high school girls are finding themselves the only adults in the building, and it has fallen upon their shoulders to make a stand for their rights. Rather than play against a school which openly allows cheating, at least two high school volleyball teams have forfeited their scheduled matches. Good for them.
And for the girls – the actual girls – on the Jurupa team who just want to play volleyball and want nothing to do enabling AB Hernandez’s untreated mental illness? Mere pawns to be used by district officials to virtue signal. What a shame you sacrificed years of your fun evenings and free time to practice. If only America weren’t the transphobic, fascist hellhole that it is, those other teams wouldn’t have forfeited.
As the controversy rages, AB Hernandez’s mother Nereyda has a message for all us detractors. And the message is this:
I understand the discomfort some may feel, because I was once there, too. The difference is, I chose to learn, to grow, and to open my heart. Believe me, I know some people genuinely don’t understand what it means to be transgender. I’m still learning too, right alongside my child. That is why I choose not to respond with anger or disrespect. Instead, I choose empathy, because learning takes time, and compassion makes all the difference.
My baby is petite, what sets her apart is not her size or strength, but her skill and the way she plays the game… This is a child, and I can assure you that she sees your daughters as peers, as teammates, as friends, not through a lens of anything inappropriate. I know it may be hard to understand, but she is just another girl who wants to play.
Finally, I leave you with this: My child is so innocent, she didn’t even realize the forfeited games were because of her.
At a school board meeting, she berated a board member for appearing on Fox News, and added, “My daughter is not the problem. The problem is coordinated external efforts often led by individuals that travel from district to district… to spread fear and put parents against each other using religion as a shield for discrimination. This has nothing to do with fairness in sports and everything to do with erasing transgender children.”
Oh boy.
Where to begin? Well, for starters, the message is dripping with condescension masked as compassion. She speaks as one who is woke would speak to the unwoke. She used to be as ignorant as us, you see. But the difference is that she chose to learn, to grow, to open her heart. Translation: If you disagree with me, you haven’t learned or grown, and your heart is closed.
She knows that some people “genuinely don’t understand what it means to be transgender.” Translation: If you disagree with me, you don’t understand.
She “chose empathy, because learning takes time, and compassion makes all the difference.” Translation: If you disagree with me, you chose indifference and bigotry, you haven’t taken the time required to learn, and you certainly are not capable of compassion.
She refers to her teenager as a “child” and “my baby,” and makes the absurd claim that he is “so innocent” that he doesn’t realize he’s the cause of the forfeited games (and if the vision of her forming in your head is a mix between Natalie Portman’s mom in Black Swan and Dr. Evil gently petting Mr. Bigglesworth, you’re not alone).
She concludes at the board meeting with the usual scapegoating of religion, and claims that this controversy is aimed at “erasing transgender children.”
Lady, we have compassion, and plenty of it. We have compassion for girls and women who have trained the better part of their lives to compete fairly in a sport, only to have all their efforts stolen by mediocre males who couldn’t make the cut on their own team.
We “chose empathy” with the idea that women’s rights means women’s rights, and that this encapsulates a lot more than just the narrow leftist understanding of it as only to mean abortion on demand at any month for any reason.
We aren’t “using religion” as a shield for discrimination. We are using science as a shield against the ludicrous notion that one’s gender is whatever one declares it to be. But if you’re interested in what it looks like when the trans movement meets religion, you should check out the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. It’s been in the news lately.
And no, we “genuinely don’t understand” how a parent could choose to keep hurting her “child,” her “baby,” rather than get him the medical and therapeutic help he requires.
Lady, your “daughter” is a boy. He always was a boy, and always will be a boy. No amount of hormone treatment or bodily mutilation will change that. Nobody is “erasing” him. We are simply acknowledging the medical fact that he suffers from gender dysphoria, which, if you cared about your “baby,” you would know is a secondary mental illness that usually masks a deeper, more severe mental illness.
But hey, I get it.
Learning takes time.
I say that with no snark and with all seriousness. As someone who has worked for years with special needs kids, the difficulties faced by parents are enormous. Different parents react in different ways to having a child with a special need or a mental illness. I begrudge none of them for reacting in ways or making decisions that, from my lofty perch, seem irrational or poorly thought out.
But once their decisions start adversely affecting the lives of other children, the game changes. Public schools across America are being forced to “fully integrate” students with severe behavioral disorders, emotional deregulation, and autism into normally functioning classrooms. The result, as anyone with enough common sense to see past their own savior complexes could have easily predicted, has been total chaos.
It’s hard enough for teachers to manage their classrooms on a good day. If you “fully integrate” an autistic child with little or no impulse control into that classroom, that teacher spends an undue amount of time catering to that child alone, at the expense of the rest of the class.
And who benefits? Not the teacher, who hasn’t been trained in special needs, and now is burdened with an unreasonable amount of extra lesson planning, therapist meetings, and the stress of a significantly more difficult classroom management setting. Not the other students, whose own learning is being negatively impacted by the constant classroom disruptions.
And certainly not the special needs kid himself, who, far from feeling “normal,” more often than not incurs the resentment of, and ostracism from, his fellow classmates.
So who benefits? The parent. At a certain point, the parent needs to be asked the hard question. Are you doing this so that your kid feels “normal”? Or so that you feel “normal”?
Again, I get it, but that can’t suffice as a justification once it negatively impacts others. If your son suffers from gender dysphoria, and if you find it easier to enable his illness rather than get proper treatment, that’s your choice (though I would classify that as child abuse). But once you insist that the rational world in which you live play along with that delusion, you’ve crossed a line.
If your son was a schizophrenic who told you that he was hearing voices, would you tell him the voices are real? Would you find some quack “doctor” who let your son self-diagnose his condition and self-prescribe medication? Would you make demands to his classmates that they acknowledge the reality of those voices so that your son would feel “normal” and not have to deal with being schizophrenic?
Or would you get him professional help?
If you chose the former, that’s not “compassion.” It’s not compassion to tell a paranoid schizophrenic that the voices are real. It’s not compassion to tell a cancer patient to start smoking cigarettes. It’s not compassion to urge a drug addict to use more heroin.
A transwoman is not a woman. A transwoman is a man who has a mental illness which makes him feel he’s a woman.
A transman is not a man. A transman is a woman who has a mental illness which makes her feel she’s a man.
A whopping 80% of kids and teenagers who identify as “trans” during their early years end up accepting their gender and identifying as gay. As for the remaining 20%, the current “treatment” is the only one in modern medical history in which enabling the delusions of the patient and blaming society rather than their ailment is preferable to actually treating to minimize and manage the disorder.
The scientific reality of gender dysphoria is neither good nor evil. It simply is. It’s based on objective, neutral, unbiased facts. How you deal with that reality is another matter. To deny it for your own psychological benefit is selfish. To deny it to the detriment of your son is selfish. To deny it to the detriment of the girl volleyball teams is selfish.
Make your choice, Ms. Hernandez. But have no illusions about what your true motives are.
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