Essays in Idleness

There was a nasty incident in school, when I was a wee boy in Pakistan. It happened in a washroom, after a muddy school recess. (No showers there; instead, taps over a trough along one wall.) A child had been put up on a stool by the other children, in the middle of this dank, slippery, concrete chamber. It was a boy’s school, but the child was a girl. She had been stripped naked, and all around the boys, mostly older, were taunting her. Viciously. She, for her part — who had been “he” before the incident — was beyond tears. I recall the terror in her face: the strange amazed silence of a six-year-old, with no defender. I recall, only vaguely — I was seven, then — running for authority. (This was what my parents had taught me to do.) Later, being told at the school to hush up about it. For the parents of this child were Very Important People.

I knew this little girl, slightly; in memory as a “little boy lost.” Always stiffly uniformed, and scrubbed; never wishing to play. Her parents were neighbours in our Nedou’s compound, and this was their only child. I knew the story, though it is hard to reconstruct what I knew when. They had wanted a boy, so badly, that having a girl they dressed her as a boy, and gave her a boy’s name, and made her behave as a little soldier-man, even before enrolling her in a boy’s school. The deceit was quickly exposed at St Anthony’s. (We might ask: What were they thinking?)

Today, I suppose, now that sex can be told before birth, that little girl would just have been aborted. (Through our pre-Christian ages, too, people were not sentimental about the despatch of unwanted children.) The preference for boys is now an established demographic fact, in India, China, much of Africa. The first-born, especially, “must be a boy,” when childbirth itself is publicly discouraged. Transgenderism has yet to catch on, over there. It is, however, being pressed through the United Nations and Western aid agencies. Pope Francis was dead right, on his plane ride back from Georgia and Azerbaijan, to call the export of the latest Western “gender theories” a form of “ideological colonialism,” a scheme of “indocrination” — as each wave before it.

A little girl of six does not choose her sex, in this or any other situation. But small children are imaginative, and will play along with the phantasies of adults, having yet no anchors of their own to hold them, by the rocks close ashore. They are suggestible and manipulable. Their shock in discovering that this “boy” was a girl contributed to the cruelty of her persecutors. But I should think it was also a terrible shock for the little girl, who had become entirely convinced by her forceful parents that she was, instead, a little boy, whatever the evidence to the contrary.

My views on “gender theory” will be easy to predict. God made them male and female. There are, indeed, “hard cases,” of apparent hermaphrodism from birth, but these are rare. Confused sexual inclinations have often been observed in nature, but the acts which follow are not consenting: the target animal will repel the advances, if it has the strength. Only the human fancies can mature into consent — because (see the Book of Genesis) we are capable of perversities deeper than any bestial ones.

I have sometimes wondered what happened to that little girl. We never saw her again at St Anthony’s; her parents suddenly moved away.

Similarly, I wonder what will happen to the little ones who are persuaded today, by the state-imposed “gender” indoctrinators, that they are “trans.” They provide the ideologues with a moment of publicity. But what follows, for the child?

Most likely: a life of self-destruction, which the child in his innocence could not possibly foresee; which only a responsible adult could have foreseen, on his behalf.

So where are these responsible adults? When the “gender” tyranny gathers around him, will he not have even one defender?