Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe is a real deep thinker. At least, the thinks he’s a deep thinker. And because the woman who gave him his only claim to celebrity — J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter novels — has been subject to death threats for making mundane observations about gender, everyone wants to know what this actor, who plays a brainy kid in the movies, has to say about it.
“But there are also people who do have a slightly condescending but well-meaning attitude of like, ‘Well, people are young and like, you know, that is a huge decision.’ I’d love to hear from all of you about, like, why we can trust kids to tell us who they are.”
Spiked columnist Julie Burchill offers to perform the necessary lobotomy that would allow Radcliffe to understand why we don’t “trust” children to agree to permanently lose the ability to have their own children, or part with body parts they may regret losing one day when they’re a little older.
It sounds lovely to say ‘listen to kids’. And no one wants to say that ‘children should be seen and not heard’. (Of course not – it’s gender-critical women, the people who want single-sex spaces and single-sex sports, who should be seen and not heard, silly!) But there’s a reason that children don’t have the same rights as adults – why they can’t get a tattoo, have sex, get married, buy alcohol, fight / die for their country or drive a car. It’s because they don’t know who they are or what they’re doing yet.
Burchill reminds us of the chamber of horrors that was the British gender care facility known as Tavistock, where “half of the 5,000 children referred to the NHS’ Tavistock clinic from 2020 to 2022 were under 15 – and over a dozen were under four years old.”
Tavistock was shuttered in July 2022 after “an independent review condemned the clinic as “not a safe or viable long-term option” because its interventions are based on poor evidence and its model of care leaves young people “at considerable risk” of poor mental health.
In essence, Tavistock was part of the Big Lie being fed to us “cisgender” dinosaurs — a lie that trans activists can’t endure being challenged by the likes of J.K. Rowling or anyone else.
Trans-rights activists hate our side because they’ve failed to force us to lie. The words they expect us to use are designed to spread untruths. ‘Genderfluid’ sounds lovely, for instance. It’s what my teenage idol David Bowie was being when he shagged around like a sailor on shore leave one day, and wore a dress the next. When I used to dance to my favourite song of his – ‘Rebel Rebel’ – I was always full of glee at the line that never got old: ‘Got your mother in a whirl / She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl.’ We old people don’t look down on today’s trans antics because we’re uptight fuddy-duddies – we do so because we’re still reprobates. We find the idea of needing external validation for one’s identity pathetic. We didn’t need it from our parents; we certainly wouldn’t have wanted it from building societies to beer brands, as the softies do today. And as for the poor old whirling mum (trying her best!), today she’d be marched off to the Pronoun Police for not immediately identifying which one of the 72 BBC-approved genders her indecisive offspring was on that particular day. Boy or girl? How dare you limit my potential – today I’m otherkin!
Radcliffe is not brave enough to tell the truth. Somewhere in that minuscule brain, he knows that what he’s saying is utter nonsense. But he’ll never work another day in Hollywood unless he tears down the one person who’s responsible for his success and celebrity and elevates the notion that young children can make decisions they must live with for the next 80 years or more of their lives.
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