Western Hypocrisy: We Are Failing Our Children

Commentary

Adults can do what they wish when it comes to surgically altering their bodies, but Western society has long considered the genital mutilation of children—particularly young girls—to be a heinous crime.

Cutting and destroying the sexual reproductive organs of young girls to satisfy the religious and ideological marital demands of controlling men caused a scandal when it began appearing in the streets of first-world nations following mass migration from majority Muslim nations and those with rural tribal cultures.

FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) remains classified by the World Health Organisation as a violation of human rights for women and girls. They state:

“The practice also violates a person’s rights to health, security, and physical integrity; the right to be free from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; and the right to life, in instances when the procedure results in death.”

Aid organisations and child protection authorities have been fighting to protect these young girls, only to find their efforts hobbled by progressive politicians and law enforcement agencies preaching “cultural tolerance”—allowing the perpetrators off with very soft wrist slaps.

In Australia, there are estimated to be over 50,000 girls and women living with FGM. As far as authorities can tell, Australian girls born to refugee families, particularly from Somalia and Sudan, are still taken “on holidays,” where they are mutilated by relatives before being brought back into the country (pdf).

Authorities are getting nowhere when it comes to protecting girls from FGM, and on the rare occasion that charges are brought against abusers, they are subsequently overturned.

One stomach-turning example involved a mother and nurse from Sydney’s Islamic sect who were originally convicted for cutting two children, aged six and seven, in Sydney’s north-west. The New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal let them go despite there being no doubt that the illegal procedure happened.

Today, the subject is rarely—if ever—brought up by politicians. From the beginning, avoiding “offence” has been more important to our elected leaders, who are scrambling for the migrant vote, than the protection of migrant children who (wrongly) thought Australia would be a place of safety.

The Same Thing Is Pushed in Our Progressive Western Society

The real crime of the so-called “Woke” philosophy is that it has abandoned objective morality and instead sacrificed the health and safety of innocent children to placate the feelings of politically useful voting blocks.

It is within this environment that progressive politics found another way to normalise the surgical mutilation of healthy children.

Disguised by the feel-good rhetoric of “gender affirmation,” minors are put under the knife or chemically castrated in medical interventions that permanently and catastrophically alter their reproductive organs.

The World Health Organisation hypocritically supports gender-affirming care, including “interventions designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity.”

While it is widely acknowledged that a child cannot consent to sex, the medical community in Australia is happy for a child to consent to life-altering damage to their sexual organs, even if that child has been under the influence of a gender-confusing environment or held in the care of adults with a conflict of interest related to the outcome.

This includes, but is not limited to, parents seeking money and attention by publicising their child’s progress stories on social media platforms such as TikTok.

In the same way that radical religion is used to convince little girls to embrace their role as the victims of male sexual preferences—taught to be thankful that they were spared the sin of pleasure—children of both sexes are being radicalised into an ideology that encourages them to treat gender as a hermit crab views its shell, sometimes changing hourly, in defiance of the original premise of true gender dysphoria.

Neither parents nor children can consent to the genital mutilation of a minor. Any irreversible medical intervention should be postponed until adulthood.

Prior to 2017, the vast majority of all gender dysphoria resolved on its own as children grew out of their confusion, with many realising that they were homosexual, not trapped in the wrong body. Putting children in the express lane toward surgery defies both logic and available data.

The idea that gender is “fluid” and can be changed readily through drugs and surgery is, at best, misleading and, at worst, the foundation of a profitable medical industry that pressures children into a lifelong subscription to expensive medical intervention for commercial benefit.

No one can change their gender, just as no one can change their species.

Imitation—which is what the gender transition industry operates on—used to be seen solely as a treatment for those suffering a rare and extreme version of gender dysphoria.

Sadly, even for adults who have a genuine debilitating condition, gender-affirming surgery has mixed results that include a high level of suicide. It is not a mindset that should be encouraged or artificially induced in otherwise healthy children during vulnerable parts of their life.

Instead of a cautious society that tries everything possible before putting a young adult under the knife, we have a rapidly growing medical industry of surgeons, therapists, activists, and educators with thriving careers based upon leading toddlers on the path of genital mutilation as soon as legally viable—with state legislators across the world racing to lower the age of “gender affirmation.”

There is currently a legal debate in America where progressive states are offering “sanctuary” to medical professionals who performed gender-affirming surgery on children.

Protecting Children Is Our Responsibility

While there is a fringe layer of morally reprehensible individuals happy to argue in favour of both Islamic genital mutilation and gender affirmation surgery for minors, the bulk of society fights against the former but supports the latter. Both have the same result for children—a life of sexual dysfunction.

Gender affirmation, through clever language that hides the glint of its scalpel, has pushed itself into our primary schools.

How many parents would have allowed this to happen if “puberty blockers” had been referred to by their real name of “chemical castration”?

How many parents would allow schools to have absolute legal authority over the “gender development” of their children if they were forced to sit down and watch disturbing videos of bottom surgery and its horrific side effects?

We pretend to revile at the archaic practice of creating eunuchs and yet that is exactly what happens to little boys caught playing with Barbie dolls.

Gender affirmation is an ideological movement that took a serious and tragic mental condition and turned it into a gimmick—a “fad” that kids adopt en masse in order to feel virtuous and popular.

In the UK, those children are growing up and taking medical practitioners to court. It won’t be long before the same happens in Australia, the United States, or other parts of the world.

While most childhood obsessions wear off, gender ideology has permanent consequences and severe physical repercussions. Exposing children to this ideology as though it were “normal” and “desirable” may be one of the most monstrous failures in our duty of care seen since children were sent to work in the cotton factories.

But who will challenge Woke culture? Who has the courage to stand up to politicians as they pass laws designed to silence opposition to gender affirmation as “hate speech” and prevent parents from protecting their children from the clutches of activist educators?

We are treating our children just as badly as radical religious sects, leaving them with permanent scars and emotional damage they may never recover from.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.