How will the parents of these poor children feel when one day their boy/girl says to them: How could you? You were supposed to protect me and you did this to me?
Indeed, how will we as a society feel? How are the children, whose parents are giving them hormones to change their little bodies from male to female, how, just how, are those kids going to feel in decades to come when some of them realise that this had all been a terrible mistake?
I have just finished watching a documentary about the people who were the babies born in the late 1950's and early1960's and suffered the effects of the drug thalidomide that their mothers had taken for morning sickness, depression or anxiety.
As everyone today is now too sadly well aware, thalidomide caused babies to be born without limbs and other health issues that caused enormous challenges as the child grew to adulthood.
More than 10,000 little ones were born throughout the world with missing or poorly formed limbs. The severity was determined, it seems , by how far advanced the pregnancy was at the time the mother took the drug. In the first 3 weeks it would effect the development of the brain; one more day and the eyes would be effected; day 22 the ears and face; day 24 the arms and by day 28 the development of the legs would be effected. By 42 days in to the pregnancy, the baby would develop normally.
Once the babies were born, countries throughout the world started realising what a terrible and tragic situation had occurred - too late, of course, for those children who had been born, and too late for their guilt ridden mothers who would find it difficult to ever forgive themselves for having innocently swallowed a tablet that would have such long and far reaching consequences.
Here we are, about to move into a new year and a new decade. 2020 is almost upon us and we are seeing the impact that thalidomide is having on these 60 year olds. The physical dexterity that they developed in their younger years is being lost and their flexibility has diminished. They are aging quickly and unable to perform many of the day to day tasks that once they could do with relative ease.
As I watched this honest and heartfelt documentary that featured folk who had lived childhoods, married, had children and gotten on with dealing with a situation that had been beyond their control and that of their parents, I could not help but wonder:
How are the children, whose parents are giving them hormones to change their little bodies from male to female, how, just how, are those kids going to feel in decades to come when some of them realise that this had all been a terrible mistake?
It brings tears to my eyes when I think about what is happening in this sick and upside down world. When I think back to the courageous father, who fought so valiantly to protect his son from a mother who insisted that their child would become a girl, I applaud that man and feel heart ache for those children with parents less courageous. I think of those parents who have had their rights stripped from them by Governments and courts who have ruled that parental responsibility is to be surrendered to the state.
Mostly, I think of the children, too young to know what the hell is going on and how, in years to come they will look at their altered selves and wonder how on earth it was allowed to happen.
I could not help but think that this is almost a 21st Century thalidomide, only, instead of a mother feeling guilt for taking a tablet, there will be guilt for having allowed someone to take up a scalpel.
On an emotional and moral level, what is happening with this wave of gender dysphoria is repugnant to me.
On a legal level, it is litigation waiting to happen on a scale we have never seen before. Who will they sue? The parents? The Government? The Doctors?
At the end of the day, will it even matter? It will not give them their lives back just as a financial compensation does not allow thalidomide victims to grow back their missing limbs.
It may give financial assistance to ease the pain of the loss of what might have been… but oh, how the guilt will weigh heavy on those that allowed this to happen.
Where, with thalidomide, it was an innocent expectant mother ( who may not even know she was pregnant) swallowing a tablet to alleviate nausea, this, in my opinion is a far greater potential tragedy.
The woman in the documentary I watched sat with her elderly mother and kept reassuring her that she felt no malice and for her mother to please not feel guilty. It was not her fault.
But how will the parents of these poor children feel when one day their boy/girl says to them
How could you? You were supposed to protect me and you did this to me?
Indeed, how will we as a society feel?
I hope that it will be SHAME.
