The Assault on Children’s Psyches
California’s ethnic-studies curriculum is fueling a mental-health crisis among teenagers.
Patricia (a pseudonym) is the mother of a teenage girl who in recent years has come to identify as transgender. Her daughter’s trans identity emerged in response to feelings of shame about being white.
Other ROGD parents tell a similar story. Their schools compulsively tell their children how awful it is to be white, how white people enjoy unearned “privilege,” how they benefit from “systems” put in place by and for white people for the sole purpose of oppressing “people of color.” Plagued by guilt, the children rush to the sanctuary of “LGBTQ+” identity.
The students don’t want to be thought of as vicious oppressors. Lacking maturity and self-confidence, they fail to put “anti-racist” indoctrination in its proper context. They do not appreciate its ahistorical, anti-intellectual, and anti-humanist foundations, nor are they aware of the incentives leading teachers and administrators to foist it on them. Being white is not something these teenagers can escape, but they can mitigate its social costs by declaring themselves part of an oppressed group.
The wages of whiteness for teenagers are, however, only half of the story.
A recent study by Eric Kaufmann confirms the new meaning of LGBT among young Americans. “Whereas in 2008 attitudes and behavior were similar,” he writes, “by 2021 LGBT identification was running at twice the rate of LGBT sexual behavior.” The recent explosion in LGBT identification among Generation Z seems to be driven mainly by young, white, very liberal women who self-identify as lesbian or bisexual but who do not necessarily have female partners.
While both homosexuality and transgenderism are said to be organic and unchosen, being “queer” or “non-binary” takes nothing more than an act of will; one need only declare oneself so.
Whereas in 1991, most teenagers would have had at least one sexual encounter by the time they graduated high school, by 2017 most had had none. The vacuum left by the hollowing out of courting and relationships has been filled, so it would seem, by a new, inward form of “sexuality”.