This post consists of a section I omitted from yesterday’s essay because I did not want to bury the good under a pile of evil. If you, dear reader, are not fully convinced of the evil of the LGBTQ movement, or if someone you care about is not fully convinced, then this post is for you (assuming you have already read yesterday’s essay). Otherwise, there is no reason for you to read further about this sordid subject.
Today’s post makes three points:
1. “Drag Pedagogy: the Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood,” the peer-reviewed article by Harper Keenan and Lil Miss Hot Mess, self-described as “a genderqueer drag performer/scholar and a trans scholar” (p. 443), closely exemplifies the LGBTQ ideology I explained in the first third of yesterday’s essay.
2. The article by Keenan and “Mess” is not an outlier; it is part of a massive ideological movement.
3. The same ideological roots, though less overt, have underlay the LGB—Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual—part of the movement since its inception more than a half century ago. Moreover, these roots dominate not only academia, but also the psychological professions, leading to the coercive demand for unquestioning “affirmation” of homosexuality.
On the first point: Keenan and “Mess” write (pp. 444–445),
Although queerness refuses crystallized meaning [because no postmodernist would ever want to be crystal-clear], our use of the term in this article generally refers to our desire to practice an embodied political resistance to confining constructs of gender and sexuality as they are produced by the institutions and social relations that govern our lives. As an analytic frame, however, “queer” is not limited to the individual person. Queer theory can be used to examine how often-impossible standards of normalcy are formed, not only through institutional categorizations of gender and sexuality, but also through social expectations produced through the racialized structures of capitalism that are inextricably intertwined with that hierarchy (Cohen, 1997; Ferguson, 2004, 2018; Munoz, 2009; Robinson, 1983; Snorton, 2017; Spade, 2011).
Building in part from queer theory and trans studies, queer and trans pedagogies seek to actively destabilize the normative function of schooling through transformative education (Adair, 2015; Britzman, 1995; Bryson & de Castell, 1993; Galarte, 2015; Keenan, 2017b; Kumashiro, 2002; Malatino, 2015; Munoz & Garrison, 2008; Pinar, 1998; Platero & Drager, 2015; Shlasko, 2005). This is a fundamentally different orientation than movements towards the inclusion or assimilation of LGBT people into the existing structures of school and society. As a practical example in the early childhood classroom, consider the common practice of sorting children into groups of boys and girls. An inclusion stance might allow children to decide for themselves whether they would like to be in a boy’s or a girl’s group, whereas a transformative approach might work with children to inquire as to how “boy-ness” and “girl-ness” are given meaning, the limits of these two categories, and how people might organize themselves differently.
The authors are self-proclaimed political activists who want to eradicate “boy-ness” and “girl-ness,”—and capitalism, the “racialized” system that produced these “often-impossible [and therefore oppressive] standards of normalcy.”
The article’s conclusion states (p. 455),
It may be that DQSH [Drag Queen Story Hour] is “family friendly,” in the sense that it is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship. Here, DQSH is “family friendly” in the sense of “family” as an old-school queer code to identify and connect with other queers on the street.
The phrase “preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship” means sexual and anti-capitalist grooming. The authors want to eradicate the traditional family by grooming children to join the “family” of “queers.” A “queer” is an activist dedicated to overthrowing capitalism, the system alleged to enforce oppressive sexual norms such as masculinity, femininity, heterosexuality, and the family.
Now to my second point. Further grinding their ideological axe (p. 446), the authors write,
The harmful impacts of institutionalized gender normativity reverberate across the living world. Generations of feminist, queer, and trans scholarship within and across the fields of Black and Indigenous studies, queer/trans of colour critique, and disability studies illustrate how gender normativity works to maintain the larger structures that facilitate its production – coloniality and racial capitalism central among them (Arvin et al., 2013; Clare, 2017; Combahee River Collective, 1977/2017; Crenshaw, 1991; Davis, 1983; Ferguson, 2004; Gill-Peterson, 2015, 2018; McRuer, 2006; Munoz, 2009; Snorton, 2017).
Note all the citations—including one of Angela Davis, protégé of Marcuse and a Communist Party USA candidate for vice president, along with many others of the same ilk. Note the phrase, “Generations of feminist, queer, and trans scholarship.” In all, the paper cites 102 other works, most of which wear their far-Left politics and/or subjectivism on their title. But that’s just one bush from an overgrown forest.
Four of the citations are from Transgender Studies Quarterly, published by Duke University Press. Take a look at the initial double issue of that journal from 2014. The Introduction writes of “the nearly ninety authors who have supplied keywords and key concepts for this inaugural issue of TSQ.”
One of the keywords is “Capital.” (After all, what would an LGBTQ journal be without a condemnation of capitalism?) Here is a representative passage:
Capital continuously maneuvers to normalize exploitative relationships, to naturalize private property relations (e.g., whiteness as property), and to steadily erode common, collective, and cooperative spaces. Despite the fact that only a few actually own private property (the “1 percent”), whiteness as property refers to the expectations of power and control held by whites in US society (Harris 1993). Like racialized others, the majority of whites are forced to sell their labor to those with capital; however, their elevated sociocultural and political status shapes their unreflective claims to privilege (“We deserve to live in a safe neighborhood,” for example).
The LGBTQ movement is led by an army of anti-capitalist, anti-West, anti-reason ideologues.
On my third point: My analysis here is not about the psychology of homosexuals. My analysis is of the philosophy of psychological professionals who are part of the LGBTQ movement.
Psychological professionals, generally more covert than academics, often do not state their radical ideas directly but instead cite others who state them. Consider, for example, psychology professor Gregory M. Herek, who authored the entry entitled “Homosexuality” in the Encyclopedia of Psychology published jointly by the American Psychological Association and Oxford University Press in 2000. Herek has been involved professionally in numerous U.S. and state Supreme Court cases regarding sexual orientation, arguing in favor of same-sex marriage. In another anthology, Herek writes (p. 323),
Through intense political struggle, lesbians and gay men have made considerable progress in shifting the realm of discourse on sexual orientation from medicine to civil liberties (e.g. see Altman 1982; D’Emilio 1983).
But Altman 1982 states (p. 184),
Once sex is desacrilized and separated from its procreative function, it becomes evident that there is no reason to regard it as a form of behavior set apart from others. If it is regarded as legitimate to have a meaningful discussion with someone one meets on a voyage and will never see again, why cannot it be equally meaningful to have a f- – – with someone in similar circumstances? [Literal obscenity removed.]
Altman 1982 also states (pp. 200–201),
One might also argue that since no one advocates preventing all interaction between children and adults, it is making too much of sex to argue that this relationship alone should be prohibited. …
If sexuality were free from the sorts of pressures that exist in our society—it would be utopian to argue for no social pressures that exist in our society—I suspect child/adult sex would be fairly common, though not perhaps as common as sex among children themselves.
John D’Emilio, also cited by Herek, is a historian who specializes in the history of homosexuality. In his 1983 article (not the work that Herek cites above) “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” D’Emilio writes (p. 54),
capitalism … needs to push men and women into families, at least long enough to reproduce the next generation of workers. The elevation of the family to ideological preeminence guarantees that a capitalist society will produce not just children, but heterosexism and homophobia. In the most profound sense, capitalism is the problem.
Herek also writes (p. 320),
The social constructionist position [which Herek advocates] holds that what most people call reality is a consensus worldview that develops through social interaction (see Berger and Luckmann 1966; Foucault 1978; Gergen 1985, Plummer 1981).
Foucault needs no introduction. Berger and Luckmann 1966 is a well-known book entitled The Social Construction of Reality, which states (p. 13),
The basic contentions of the argument of this book are implicit in its title and sub-title, namely, that reality is socially constructed and that the sociology of knowledge must analyse the process in which this occurs.
and this (p. 15):
It is from Marx that the sociology of knowledge derived its root proposition—that man’s consciousness is determined by his social being.
And so on. For much more about this subject, see my book Masculine Power, Feminine Beauty: The Volitional, Objective Basis for Heterosexuality in Romantic Love and Marriage, Chapters 3–5. But see this book mainly for its positive theory of heterosexual romantic love.