Ok, I’m going to be the one who says it.
This is just plain wrong.
Go for it.
Call me intolerant. Call me a bigot. Call me a sexist, homophobic, transphobic, gender-bashing, hate-mongering piece of shit.
I’m not any of those things. But this is going too far.
I can tell you until I’m blue in the face that I’m all for people living their lives the way that they see fit. As long as someone isn’t hurting somebody else, I don’t care. I’ll stand up and defend anyone who is being bullied because of their Race, Religion, Gender, Sexual preferences, how they want to dress or what they want to look like.
That’s every adults choice to make and I’ll defend them from persecution every time.
But this?
A 10 year old boy who likes to dress as a Drag Queen decides to start a club for other like-minded children?
This is a child.
A 10 YEAR OLD CHILD
The “Child” in question (I highlight the word Child as I honestly believe this boy has been forcefully pushed beyond the realms of childhood) is named Desmond Napoles, a 10 year old from New York (who’d have thought eh?) who is known on the internet as “Desmond is amazing”.
This is quoted from Desmond’s website:
“At age six, Desmond expressed boundless joy when he received an Elsa costume from Disney’s movie “Frozen” for Halloween. After that, he often asked for princess costumes or dresses while out shopping. Soon, he often wanted to wear his dresses outside of the home. Initially uncertain if they were making the right decision for allowing him to do so, Desmond’s parents quickly and fortunately realized that the source of their uneasiness came not from Desmond’s personal choices, but from their own misgivings about how the outside world would react. It was as simple as defeating those feelings, accepting Desmond as he is, and respecting Desmond’s own tastes and preferences.”
The part of the quote in red is where I’d like to focus my attention.
When you have children, you have to make decisions for your child; choices that children are unfit to make due to their age, life experience and understanding of complex situations and societal norms. Leave it to a child to make decisions regarding their safety and up-bringing and you’ll generally find that they eat nothing but sweets and soda, test to see if a fire really is hot and cross a busy road without paying heed to the truck barrelling towards them.
The fact that Desmond’s parents had doubts about allowing him to dress up in dresses not just inside the house but outside as well, tells me everything I need to know about the whole situation. As a parent you generally go with your gut instinct on situations you’ve never come across before; your first instinct is almost always the correct one. You can’t gamble with your child’s future, particularly if it means putting said child in the firing line of all sorts of people and scenarios that a 10 year old is not capable of fully understanding or dealing with.
Desmond’s parents have gambled and allowed their child to behave as a fully responsible adult when he clearly is not. If he wants to dress up in women’s clothes when he is old enough to understand the impact of his choices, then fine. All power to him. But he is being allowed and actively encouraged to make decisions about his life that even a teenager or an adult would struggle with, all in the hope that his parents portray to people that they are “doing the right thing” and “promoting a sense of inclusion and progressivism”.
There are easier and less harmful ways of teaching a child about inclusivity and tolerance, without the need to throw them into the pool of life and see if they swim or drown.
Children should be protected, not exploited.
The whole situation reminds me of the young child actors in the ilk of Macauley Culkin and Lindsay Lohan; pushed and encouraged into acting by their parents at incredibly young ages; unaware of the dangers and pitfalls of the life they were being pushed into, all in the name of making their parents rich.
Everybody knows what happened to these two young actors, and the dozens of child stars who were unable to cope with being prematurely promoted to adult status. I hope beyond hope that the same doesn’t happen to Desmond.
Let him be a child.
He’s 10 years old, and at 10 years old he should be worrying about nothing more than what sandwiches he has in his lunchbox, and not having to deal with the amount of ridicule and abuse that he will surely be receiving now, and in his teens from intolerant assholes in the world. It’s bad enough dealing with that as an adult, never mind as a child.
Like I said earlier: live your life the way you see fit. As long as you’re not hurting anyone else with your life choices I don’t care.
Desmond’s parents are hurting their child with their choices.
So I DO care.
RANT OVER
