Nothing Is Normal Anymore

Those of you who read this blog regularly will recognize a few running themes that crop up consistently, and one of them is that parents need to exercise extreme caution with what sort of entertainment they allow their children to consume.

These days, our culture’s storytellers have a distinct agenda, and that agenda often permeates the stories that they tell. The same parents who send their children to a Christian school to avoid state “indoctrination” are frequently happy to park their kids in front of screens where content produced by people who “hate” Christianity is streamed.

Yet another example is 17-year-old YouTube megastar Jojo Siwa, who, the Christian outlet Disrn noted, is “known for her bubbly, uplifting, and clean songs and dances” has just “announced that she now identifies as LGBT.”

YouTube megastar Jojo Siwa.

Although most adults have never heard of Siwa, she has a massive following among adolescents and children. She has 12.1 million YouTube subscribers and 10.4 million Instagram followers. Her fashion accessory company is aimed at 6 to 12 year-old girls, and children are obsessed with her products due to clever marketing and her “peppy online personality.”

Interestingly, Siwa doesn’t actually identify as gay. She has no idea what she is, she’s just certain she’s not straight. “I just always believed that my person was going to be my person,” Siwa informed her tween fans.

“And if that person happened to be a boy, great, and if that happened to be a girl, great! Of course people are going to say it’s not normal, but nothing is normal. Literally not one thing about anybody is normal and it’s OK not to be normal, it’s OK to be a little different, it’s OK to be a little weird, strange, different. That’s something we should never, ever be afraid of. That’s something we should be proud of. In short: No matter who you love … it’s OK.”

YouTube personalities like Siwa are called “influencers” for a reason. It’s because they have influence in spades, and their audiences listen to them. Siwa, obviously, didn’t start this parade — she’s just getting on the bandwagon.

In fact, she’s part of a trend where teen girls actually worry that they’re “dumb and boring” if they’re straight, especially now that there’s so many other options to choose from and the culture encourages rather than discourages experimentation in gender identity.

As a friend observed, “LGBT is now a joke with no meaning other than ‘clout.’ When people are joining a community because of the perks, it’s not persecuted anymore.”

YouTuber Zachary Antolak “Lauren” McNamara.

 Consider this story from earlier this month, in which trans activist and YouTuber Zachary “Lauren” McNamara, popularly known by the pseudonym “Zinnia Jones” (and boasting over 44,000 subscribers), responding to the recent U.K. court ruling stating that minors could not consent to puberty blockers, stated on social media that all children should be put on puberty blockers until they could choose their gender.

His argument, to use the term loosely, is that children are already fundamentally making a choice by naturally going through puberty.

“If children can’t consent to puberty blockers which pause any permanent changes even with the professional evaluation, how can they consent to the permanent and irreversible changes that come with their own puberty with no professional evaluation whatsoever?” he tweeted. “This is literally a position that permanent changes are fine as long as you’re not trans. An inability to offer informed consent or understand the long-term consequences is actually an argument for putting every single cis and trans person on puberty blockers until they acquire that ability.”

If you’re wondering whether you’re reading that correctly, that is, in fact, a trans activist arguing that because natural puberty brings irreversible changes, we should consider blocking puberty for all children because they cannot consent to nature. Which, in McNamara’s opinion, should now be optional, since we live in a society in which we can all live as gods.

“For the record, I understand that y’all just aren’t capable of wrapping your heads around something like this, because if you could, then you wouldn’t be the way you are. It’s probably best to step away and have a juice box, this is beyond your level,” he tweeted in response to the disbelief that greeted his suggestion.

“Natal puberty became optional the moment technology became available to enable deliberate choice between natal puberty and puberty induced by cross-sex hormones. It became a choice when it ‘became a choice’ and I am really profoundly sorry if you cannot understand that.”

McNamara appeared to miss the fact that many people understand precisely what he is saying and that this is the source of their “shock and horror” and not their inability to grasp his suggestion.

McNamara himself is an atheist male-to-female transgender person who says he was “assigned male at birth” with the name Zachary Antolak and came out as transgender after first identifying as gay. McNamara has been on hormone replacement therapy for eight years. As is so often the case with activists of this sort, he badly wants others to travel the same path he took.

So how did the LGBT movement respond? Was McNamara widely denounced as a fringe crazy for advocating the universal medicalization of childhood? Was he repudiated for suggesting that healthy children be poisoned until they could be forced to choose whether they would accept nature? Of course not.

Not so long ago, activists of this sort would have been immediately quarantined by the broader movement, with more palatable representatives assuring the public that he didn’t represent the real LGBT cause.

Not anymore. The trans “blitzkrieg” conquered with such speed that those driving the train no longer feel the need to lie about the destination, or apologize for those accurately telling us where we’re headed.