Woke culture's war on childhood innocence

By JL

“Men who dress up as women and adopt stereotyped feminine behaviours are comical because of their stereotyped behaviour. The inference the audience is encouraged to draw is not that stereotypes are comical, but that women are.” Is Drag Sexist, Kelly Kleinman, 2011

A friend kindly drew our attention to one of the NHS Wales Virtual Pride events.

An online ‘Drag Story Hour’ is being held on 25th August between 2pm-6pm. It is open to all NHS Wales staff and their children and is being advertised on the staff intranet. The event is free which means that the NHS is footing the bill.

Interestingly, since Twitter users objected to the event on social media, the Eventbrite page has been changed from the original (shown above), which was publicly available to view, to something more understated and private.

The event will feature drag character, Aida H Dee (pictured below), who is played by performer, Sab Samuel. “Aida” has already been at the centre of a controversy after his scheduled Drag Story Hour in Leeds was cancelled following complaints.

Aida’s NHS Wales event will feature the children’s book, “Charlotte the Scientist Finds a Cure”.

So a man who parodies womanhood for a living will read from a book intended to empower young girls.

Drag can be a somewhat contentious matter in feminist and gay circles. Many feminists feel that it is a demeaning parody of womanhood whereas its defenders see it as an important part of gay culture. Both sides can agree, however, that it is not a suitable form of entertainment for children.

If the intention is to provide kids with positive homosexual role models, wouldn’t hearing from a gay architect or a lesbian engineer be better than a man pretending to be a woman with bouffant hair, clownish makeup, false breasts and a plunging neckline? How is that a positive homosexual role model?

But it’s not only the NHS marketing drag to kids. Shockingly, the NSPCC are at it too.

A charity established to protect children from abuse and grooming is exposing them to adult entertainment that involves grown men performing in frocks, heels & fake breasts. Aside from drag being inappropriate for kids, is the NSPCC unaware of the safeguarding issues? Or do they just not care?

Is it really possible they don’t know that a drag queen exposed himself to a group of toddlers at a library in Minnesota? Or that a drag queen story event in Portland involved small children laying on top of an adult male stranger? Or that not one but two separate drag queen storytime events in Houston have been hosted by convicted child sex offenders?

Here’s author James Lindsay on why organisations have been successfully groomed into believing it vital that children are exposed to drag.

The most obvious way Wokeness goes after the innocence of children is in the Queer variant of trans activism, especially by having trans strippers perform for children in schools, for example. Why would they do this?

The belief is that the innocence we encourage in children is part of the systems of power (specifically generated through performativity) that enforce heteronormativity and cisnormativity and thus lead to dysphoria or oppression of gay and potentially trans kids.

The logic isn't terribly complicated: there might be gay or trans kids in the class, say, who would be more comfortable in their sexual identity (if that makes sense for a kid -- it doesn't) and gender identity if they saw disruptions to the usual "binaries" being celebrated.

The disruption is simple: exhibition of sexuality, especially Queer sexualities and trans people demonstrating sexuality. The (cultural) prohibition on this behaviour is usually put as "childhood innocence," which is viewed as a dominant discourse that enforces normativities.

Another ‘normativity’ the NSPCC was eager to disrupt was the convention of not masturbating at work. You may remember their former employee, James Makings, a rubber fetishist who uploaded a video of himself indulging in that very activity. Yes, at work. At the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Rather than take immediate action to reassure those who might need its services, the NSPCC defended him vehemently on social media and decried as ‘bullies’ those who raised concerns.

The NSPCC sacked Makings surreptitiously a few months later but they have never apologised to the people they insulted at the time and, unfortunately, it seems the same workplace culture is at play here.

Lindsay again: Sexualizing children's spaces is therefore a "logical" consequence of queering both spaces and childhood in order to "liberate the potentialities" of children's identities, and it requires the disruption of childhood innocence.

…in sum, you're not wrong to perceive that there's a Woke war on the innocence of childhood, which is seen as an enculturating tool of oppression by dominant and hegemonic discourses and structures. These must be disrupted. Children can't be innocent; they must be activists.