OTT platforms increasingly normalize gender narratives. Disney is one such OTT that has been disseminating gender narratives aimed at impressionable children. Here are a few facts which matter:
A.) Sex a Biological Construct:
Sex is a biological construct based on reality. Sex is fundamental to humans, primates, mammals, and various life forms. Sex evolved at least a billion years before the nervous system did. So, if there’s something we could call an undeniable and non-negotiable fact then it’s sex. Scientifically, there are only two sexes: male and female. If we plot the entire population using their sexual classification then we would get a bi-modal distribution. Just 0.0018% of the population suffers from gender-dysphoria, i.e., they identify with a gender they were not born into.
B.) Gender Dysphoria a Psychiatric Disorder:
Gender dysphoria is a psychiatric disorder. There’s a tremendous correlation between a person being gender dysphoric and also suffering from depression and other disorders, at least two such comorbidities. While the causation of gender dysphoria is unknown, this correlation is too significant to be dismissed.
C.) Gender as Social Construct a Pseudoscience:
Gender as a social construct is an argument that was originally advanced by John Money, a Johns Hopkins psychologist, in the 1950s. Money claimed that gender identity is malleable. Money was also a quintessential fraud. He is infamously known for the Reimer case. David Reimer suffered irreparable damage to his genital during a botched-up infancy circumcision procedure. Money then advised the parents to raise the child as female. He also constructed rudimentary, and functionally useless, female sex organs on Reimer. Money then pompously and fraudulently promoted this as a success story. In reality, Reimer suffered from depression and committed suicide. Despite being raised as a female, he only self-identified as male. However, Money succeeded in promoting his gender hypothesis because his rise coincided with the rise of the feminist movement. The message of gender-fluidity and the malleability of sex resonated with feminist ideologues. As a result, Money’s pseudoscience gained popular currency.
D.) Empathic Treatment of Gender Dysphoric Patient:
Gender dysphoric patients must be treated with kindness and empathy. However, you do not normalize or promote gender dysphoria any more than you normalize or promote anorexia.
E.) Contrived Gender Dysphoria:
Even though medically, according to the DSM- V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition) criteria published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), only 0.0018% of Americans are gender dysphoric, 5% of the population in the age group of 16-29 self-identifies as trans-gender. This indicates that either the gender narratives are contagious or that at least a section of these youth fakes it for other gains. I think it’s both. Lisa Littman’s studies have shown that in most cases it is a social contagion. She points out that until a decade ago, virtually all gender dysphoric patients were male whereas a vast majority of those who self-identify as trans-gender now are females. Until a decade ago, only 12% of students at Brown self-identified as trans-gender whereas now it’s 34% which indicates that students fake trans identity to gain admissions.
F.) Gender Dysphoria an Ephemeral Phenomenon:
In a vast majority of cases (92%), gender dysphoria is an ephemeral phenomenon that goes away when we do nothing about it. So, hormonal and surgical sex-change therapies, which are irreversible, cause terrible damage than do good to the patients.
Gender Propaganda on OTT
Now, with this background summary, look at the gender propaganda unleashed by the likes of Disney. They target impressionable children in their teens. Girl children in particular are vulnerable to this. We do not know exactly why but girl children are also vulnerable to other psychiatric disorders such as anorexia. This may be due to several reasons but primarily due to the uncertainties which accompany the onset of puberty. It takes a few months and assurances from other adult women for a female teenager to come to terms with her physiological metamorphosis. This uncertainty is further exacerbated by the fact that the onset of puberty happens earlier in modern society than ever before. However, an adolescent girl of today has the same brain that an adolescent girl had 4,000 years back. This makes the coping mechanism more difficult for the girl child. She is, if only ephemerally, confused about her sex. This is where it becomes so easy for ruthless predators such as gender ideologues to manipulate such defenseless children.
In the US and Canada, these ruthless ideologues have also gamed the system to exclude parents from protecting their vulnerable children. Activist teachers and sometimes even pediatricians actively target children as young as 6 to plant the idea that gender is fluid in their heads. If a confused child affirms this then he/she could be put through surgical or hormonal procedures without even the parents’ knowledge. This is nothing but child abuse by some of the worst predators mankind has ever known.
What motivates these gender ideologues? One reason is virtue-signaling. Historically, trans-gender people have been persecuted in Abrahamic societies. Hinduism is the only exception that treated them as equals and with kindness and empathy. A case in point is the episode of Shikhandi – but for the sake of brevity let us not elaborate on it. So, identifying with gender identity politics gives a white westerner an opportunity to signal virtue: look I am discharging white man’s burden by fighting for trans-gender people. I think most gender activists fall under this category. Many fear being branded trans-phobic and silently affirm gender ideology. However, as Jordan Peterson points out, at least in a substantial minority of cases, gender activists are narcissistic and sadistic people who actually derive perverse pleasure by exercising control over and abusing defenseless children.
This is why we must treat gender narratives as not just pseudoscientific but also as the vilest form of abuse targeting defenseless children. A child has every right to go through her formative years without being abused by predatory ideologues and activists. Traditional societies such as Hindu society evolved very healthy mechanisms and rites to help a girl child embrace puberty and the changes which accompany that in a healthy and natural way. We cannot allow a handful of OTT and gender ideologues to abuse our children.
Ban Gender Narratives on OTT Platforms
I have an appeal to the Government of India. Ban all gender narratives on OTT* platforms. If a platform doesn’t comply then ban it altogether. I have an appeal to Hindu parents too. Why are you tolerating gender propaganda in American schools which could put your own child in danger? Do you want to sacrifice your own child’s well-being on the altar of political correctness just to be in the good books of leftists? I would hesitate to partner with Islamists on anything. However, at least in gender activism, they are acting in the interests of their own children by openly protesting against it. Why can’t Hindu and Sikh parents do the same? Do you just want to be a useful idiot of the left?
There is a crying need to teach biology rigorously in schools. Just as biologists debunk Christian creationism or its variant Intelligent Design by presenting biological evolution in textbooks, they must also present the biological fact that there are only 2 sexes and that trans-gender is not a gender, but a psychiatric disorder known as dysphoria. Needless to say, in the rich Hindu tradition, textbooks must teach that dysphoric people are as human as we are and hence must be treated as equals.
Article written by Kalavai Venkat
Featured Image source: Disney Executives Admit: Of Course We’re Grooming Your Children (thefederalist.com)
OTT: Over The Top media service available over the internet instead of the traditional distribution networks such as cable and DTH.
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