OnlySubs Episode 58: On the Political Rejection and Affirmation of One’s Kids is now available exclusively for New Discourses contributors on the following platforms:
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I’ve recently been seeing a rash of posts on social media from Leftist parents who are rejecting or even disowning their kids because of something political, usually Trump support or Covid vaccination status. I don’t find this shocking, but I do find it sadly ironic. That’s because the parents taking these stands are the same ones, speaking generally but not particularly, who take a stance of what might be called radical acceptance (or enablement) with regard to other political issues. For some time I’ve wanted to say something about what I believe is one of the main drivers of “trans parents,” meaning parents who seemingly inexplicably have a large number of trans kids, which should be a statistical extreme rarity unless something else not unlike gender Munchausen’s by proxy is the driver. I strongly suspect these parents are in identity and social-identity milieus in which they are overreacting to strict conservatives of yesteryear rejecting gay and trans children and trying to prove their virtue by being so “affirming” in the opposite direction that they are helping to groom their children into identity issues while mopping up tons of “brave parent” status for themselves. This is a particularly nasty Woke poison, I think, and in this episode of James Lindsay OnlySubs, my subscribers-only podcast, I dive into a short discussion of it. Join me to hear some of my thoughts about the tragedy of politicizing parenthood.
Previous episodes of OnlySubs can be found here.
1 comment
So tragic that politics is driving families apart so frequently these days. I think there are explanations other than Munchausen’s by proxy for parents with lots of trans kids, like social contagion or an interplay between society and genetics (not that gender Munchausen by proxy never happens – I can think of a couple of cases where it sounds like it has).