When parenting online is abusive to children

Technology saturates everything we do and are in modern life. It is the means through which you are reading this. It is the infrastructure that undergirds everything we hear and say. New technology, and innovations to existing technology, are celebrated and heralded by society. We know collectively that technology benefits us. This is what drives the development of new technology and the evolution of existing technology, after all. A technology with which we are perfectly happy is not developed further because there is no need. Its users are satisfied with its development to that point. The reverse is true sometimes, in that we often develop technology that does not need to be created. We confuse the fact that we can do something with the notion that we ought to do it.

There are two areas of technology we ought not be developing further, or which we ought not be using as we are using them. One of these is an aspect of medical technology. The other is an application of pervasive social media. The misuse of both is not just improper and not merely inconvenient. These misapplications of technology are hurting people. Worse, they are also spreading the problem to people who might not have suffered from it otherwise.

I have just finished watching a "viral" video. In it, an 11 year-old-boy who is dressed as a girl is presented on camera with hormone treatments. This confused boy, who is male , is delighted to be handed the instrument of his own biological undoing. His mother, likewise, is very proud of herself. She is a good, progressive, tolerant parent who believes wholeheartedly that what makes her child happy is what is good for him (or her). This mother has been widely heralded on social media as a hero. This is because, as we have been told so often in recent months, there is no greater hero in the world than someone who rejects his or her biological identity, poisons himself or herself with chemicals that were never meant to be injected into his or her body in such volume, and begins living the charade of being whoever or whatever he or she "identifies with" rather than what is real.

I have no problem with anyone whose sexuality differs from mine. If you are gay, fine, be gay. If you are straight, fine, be straight. I might offer the quaint notion that who or what you put your genitals on or in should not be a matter of public discussion. I'm not sure when it became the norm for each and every individual to post to YouTube his or her sexual preferences just to make sure everyone in the community is on the same page. But that brings me to the first aspect of technology that is being misused here. That is parenting online, in which possibly well meaning people vomit forth onto the Web everything they do with regard to their children.

Whether it is publicly shaming misbehaving teens, basing decisions about your life on whether an image gets enough "likes," or asking strangers on the Internet for life advice about the most intimate decisions you could possibly make, certain things simply do not belong on social media. Among these are the intimate and ongoing details of your child's struggle with confused sexuality. Posting all of this to social media turns what should be difficult decisions and personal choices into a public spectacle. It also turns well-meaning parents into attention-seeking whores whose viral videos are intended to garner applause rather than promulgate whatever cause is being forwarded. That, however, is also a problem, because spreading videos or viral images that celebrate deviant sexuality only put these ideas into the heads of young people who need guidance.

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Simply put, medical technology is being abused to pervert the human body into twisted simulations of the opposite sex. It may be the case that you cannot control whom you love or what you like. Social scientists and doctors argue that concept to this day. But it is the case that no amount of flooding your body with hormones or carving your body into different shapes can make a man a woman or a woman a man. Just because you "identify" as something you are not does not make you that thing. Moreover, It never will.

A misshapen boy will never be a woman. It doesn't matter if you use female pronouns to refer to him; he will always be male. Instead of allowing young people to be gay or straight, we are foisting on them this idea that they can be something they are not. This is abuse – and it is spreading wildly throughout society. Social media is partly to blame, but the rest of the blame falls squarely on us for permitting these delusions to be treated as reality.

Our society is built on the concept that under a certain age, young people lack the ability to make certain decisions about themselves or take certain actions within society. Someone who is too young to consent to sex is too young to make informed decisions about the nature of his or her sexuality. Some of these ideas are things only teenagers and adults can work out. We need to leave our children alone from the standpoint of meddling with their biology until they are old enough to make rational, long-term decisions about their lives. It does not make sense to let someone who is not allowed to determine his own bedtime to decide his own gender. It makes even less sense to spread this wildly reckless behavior through social media.

The "trans" delusion is just that. Allowing your child to live in delusion is not parenting; it's abuse. Propagating that delusion online is not affirming; it's infecting. Using medical technology to alter a child's body is just as wrong as using social media technology to tell other children this is "normal."

The harm we are doing to our society and our children is undeniably our fault. Unless we do something about it, this problem will only get worse.

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