Memory is hazy, and I missed early punk by about a half-generation, and I couldn’t quickly find the clip, but I remember seeing a punk rocker being interviewed on a mainstream television show, looking very much the emaciated junky and saying, essentially, we have control over your children.  Even not being a parent at the time, something was chilling about the assertion.

Part of what made the punk movement different was that it discarded the aspirational part of revolution.  They weren’t trying to push people past standards and norms to free them for a higher existence.  To some extent, the very notion of a higher existence was just another version of oppression.  The corruption and destruction was the point.

I thought of that image upon reading Charlie Jacobs’s account of “rescuing [her] daughter from her transgender fantasy”:

During that same time period, my daughter went through Teen Talk—a Manitoba, Canada-based program that says it provides “youth with accurate, [nonjudgmental] information” on “sexuality, reproductive health, body image, substance use awareness, mental health, issues of diversity, and anti-violence issues”—at her public school.

She came home with a whole new language. She and all her girlfriends discussed their labels—polyamorous, lesbian, pansexual. None of the five girls chose “basic,” their term for a straight girl.

Now, I was worried.

She distanced herself from her old friends and spent more time online. I checked her phone, but I was not astute enough to know that she had set up “appropriate” fake social media accounts for my viewing.

An older girl showed romantic interest in her. I barred that girl from our home. I learned later that she had molested my daughter.

Programs like Teen Talk have infected our schools and other institutions.  Many of the practitioners, no doubt, think they’re freeing children for a higher existence, but I wonder whether the corrosive punk attitude hasn’t simply been so thoroughly absorbed by mainstream culture taht it doesn’t recognize its own ends.

People there are who would read Jacobs’s account and reinterpret her deep concern for her daughter and wishes for her wonderful future as, instead, some sort of pathological need to control.  Perhaps they have so little sense of even the possibility of controlling their own lives that they project this pathology onto others.

Featured image by Michael & Diane Weidner on Unsplash.