Gaslighting Children

Sexual Liberation & Psychological Warfare

Children's rights activist Katy Faust has made the claim that adults are gaslighting kids by refusing to acknowledge the negative impacts of divorce, donor conception, and the myriad other ways parents intentionally distance themselves from being mother or father to their biological children. Faust describes what we are doing to kids as "switching the parent-child relationship," meaning parents now expect kids to validate their feelings, instead of the other way round. If dad isn't happy in his marriage because he feels more like a woman than a man, the kids are expected to sympathize with his decision to relinquish his role as their father. Faust is pointing her finger at the naked emperor, and in this case the clothes the progressive king is pretending to wear are concern and care for children's wellbeing.

The term "gaslighting" comes from the 1938 play (and later movie) Gaslight, in which a husband slowly manipulates his wife into thinking she is going insane, and it refers to the phenomenon of undermining another person's thinking to the point where he questions and even abandons his own sanity. Faust's work focuses on the way parent loss is normalized rather than grieved, but there's another way kids are being gaslighted by progressive sexual ideas, too.

American teenagers in many states are able to take cross-sex hormones without parental permission or informed consent, and many are encouraged to do so despite the associated risks. Worse, the push to "transition"—which includes manipulating the public with lies about the correlation between transitioning and suicidality—prevents kids from being treated for their gender dysphoria and underlying issues. Erin Brewer, an adult woman who experienced gender dysphoria as a child, argues that if she were a child today, she would be pushed towards taking hormonal treatment instead of receiving counseling for her dysphoria as well as for the sexual abuse which she believes contributed in large part to that dysphoria. Not only can hormonal interventions be physically harmful and cause negative and irreversible effects, but also, says Brewer, those so-called treatments rob kids of getting the help they really need.

How We Got Here

How did it come to this point? Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, founder of the Ruth Institute, suggests that the way children are harmed in the sexual revolution is not an accident on the part of progressive proponents. Moreover, what is called liberation here is really a misnomer; it is, in this case, "liberation" from parental oversight.

In 1948, the zoologist Alfred Kinsey turned his attention toward the human species and published his first of several works on human sexuality. In Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey proposed an idea that we can retroactively stamp as an attempt to relegate human modes of being into mere "social constructs." Morse has claimed that the work of Kinsey, who became known as the "father of the sexual revolution," actually "redefine[d] childhood." Kinsey took the lack of a universally accepted age of sexual consent, combined with the fact that children are physically able to participate in sexual acts, to posit that children are sexual beings who should not only be allowed but actually encouraged to actuate their sexuality at any age.

Kinsey went so far as to suggest that apart from social conditioning (read: parental guidance), there was no explicable reason why a child would "be disturbed at having its genitalia touched, or disturbed at seeing the genitalia of other persons, or disturbed at even more specific sexual contacts." It's the sexual revolution's adaptation of the old if-a-tree-falls-in-the-forest question—do children really suffer if no one tells them they're suffering? It's a sly perversion of reality, but Kinsey's idea reveals a deep truth, which is that, for better or worse, children do believe what their parents say about the world. That is why, in order to further sexual liberation policies, children had to be distanced from their parents' supervision.

In 1973, the legalization of abortion chipped more ground away from the connection between parent and child. In 2022, kids can walk into a gender clinic and receive cross-sex hormones that cause detrimental and irreversible effects without their parents' permission. In the first instance, parents have complete control over their child's body, but in the second, the children have complete control over their own bodies. It seems like a strange paradox at first, but both policies rely on separating parents from their children in order to kowtow before the sacred cow of the sexual revolution: consent.

Consent: The New Standard of Good

Legal scholar Robin West argues that consent has become the standard of legality in American law, and that, furthermore, "lawful consent is also becoming the line, culturally, between that which is good or perceived as good, and that which is not." It's an idea Katherine Kersten explicates in an article on modern feminism, that the legal standard of consent has become the cultural standard of good. The message is that the individual should choose what happens to his or her own body, and that the good or ill that results is less important than the ability to choose.

The ability to sexually experiment is, as Kinsey proposed, now celebrated as a societal good, which we see played out in the way celebrities are fêted for their sexually deviant behavior, and in the way LGBT identities are celebrated through institutions such as Pride Month, corporate inclusions seminars, and so on. But West proposes that we expect too much from consent, assuming its benefits without considering the cost. To paraphrase Faust, when society elevates the adult's ability to consent, children are sacrificed on the altar of adult desire. Yet when society elevates the child's ability to consent, the child still gets hurt.

Case in point: Kinsey considered pedophilia normal sexual behavior, a door that obviously opens if the notion of an appropriate age of consent is negated. He made claims from his experiments suggesting that children as young as two months old can and do reach orgasm. It would be generous to say that Kinsey's experiments assumed the consent of the babies and toddlers involved, but if we learned anything from the #metoo movement, it is that assumed consent is not consent.

Historically, parents would not only guide their children's decisions, but would attempt to protect them from the manipulativeness of assumed consent. When children are given the adult ability to consent, they lose that protection, because taking parents out of the equation does not turn kids into adults. Rather, it opens kids up to other influences: cue the naked emperor. Institutions like SIECUS and promoters of comprehensive sex education (CSE) are chomping at the bit to indoctrinate American children. Planned Parenthood has an open-door policy for children with gender dysphoria that's about as pleasant as the witch offering candy to Hansel and Gretel. Then there are the innumerable trolls on social media, like the glitter moms who prey on children confused about their sexuality and gender.

Childhood Negated

Giving kids the ability to make adult decisions may sound equitable and woke, but it's also the way that abuse of children is permitted. In Brewer's words, it's a form of abuse to tell children "that they're inherently flawed, and the only way to cure that is to damage their healthy bodies." But just because a child does not identify the abuse on his own does not mean it didn't happen. In true Orwellian form, the meaning of abuse becomes less concrete and more fluid. Similarly, the meaning of childhood changes, and this is the worst form of gaslighting of all: telling children that they are not children after all, but adults who must accept other adults' decisions (however abusive) and consent to whatever sexual proclivities they fancy (because that's what adults do).

In the old story, the emperor had not yet convinced the town's children that they needed to identify as adults in order to be fully realized humans; otherwise, there might not have been even one kid brave enough to point his finger at the naked ruler.

A Psychology Today article calls gaslighting "a tactic in which a person or entity, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality." That middle phrase is the telling one. The argument that kids have a right to autonomy or sexual independence, however well-meaning it may sound, does not acknowledge the extremely vulnerable position in which this leaves a child. As adults assume the benefits of unhindered sexual and relational choice for themselves, the only way to justify the negative impact of those choices on children is to negate the category of "child" altogether, giving children the same ability to consent as adults. Sadly, it is the very innocence of children, their inherent need and unconscious desire to depend on their parents' judgment rather than their own, that allows this deception to continue. Consent is a poor parent, but it is what many children are left with in the wake of the sexual revolution.