Childhood on a Sliding Scale

get arrested during an elective mastectomy, and watch the gears grind

Shamelessness confers infinite flexibility.

San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston is out on the leftward edge of a left-run city, warning recently that the city’s so-called moderate Democrats are actually working directly with the fascist movement to advance the MAGA agenda in the Bay Area. He’s that guy.

On his list of favorite issues, Preston is all-in on trans youth, and strongly opposed to violations of their right to sexual self-determination. Youth can cut things off their bodies. Just as a twenty year-old can express youthful exuberance, a thirteen year-old youth can chemically castrate…herself. To keep her penis from developing.

Childhood isn’t implicated in a thirteen-year-old’s elective mastectomy; it’s a choice made by a youth.

Now, in San Francisco this weekend, a large group of people assembled for an annual skateboarding event — an informal event, on the streets — and started shooting off fireworks in a neighborhood. Neighbors were disturbed, and called the police. The police asked the crowd to stop, and to leave. Then this happened:

Then a whole lot of arrests started. Or, as Dean Preston puts it, and pay close attention to his word choice:

Trans youth; arrested children.

It’s unconscionable for police to handcuff the people who spit on them and threw bottles at them, because those are children, and arresting them is an assault on the inherent innocence of childhood; also, thirteen year-olds have the capacity to medically transition autonomously, because they’re mature youth whose judgment is essentially beyond question.

Childhood switches on for things you wish to prevent, and switches off for things you wish to promote. Those are youth; those are children.

Ten years ago, the UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff wrote a series of short books arguing that progressives should use language with a sharp awareness of the “neural gateways” their word choices were allegedly activating, avoiding right-oriented framing to make a left-oriented point. As I wrote back then, Lakoff warned leftists against accidentally right-winging themselves by, for example, telling a friend who had a miscarriage that you’re sorry she lost her baby. Rather, avoiding the trap of right-assumption that subconsciously triggers conservative instincts, a progressive tells a post-miscarriage friend that you note her fetus has ended its development. He also suggested that uterus-havers going down to Planned Parenthood to end the development of their fetuses tell friends and family that they had opted for a “family freedom” procedure. George Lakoff, I have argued for a long time, is just so dumb it hurts to know he exists.

But leftists have taken the insane point, and were changing the names of things long before Lakoff thought to suggest it. Orwell published 1984 in 1949, and here we still are blazing trail in Newspeak.

The police are cruelly arresting those children.

The youth are bravely having their genitals surgically altered, as is their right.

It seems to me that the heart of all politics to the right of Dean Preston starts with the simple instinct to try to call things what they are, at least attempting to use language as description. Yes, politicians on the right play word games and hide failure in euphemism. But the instant, easy upshifting and downshifting into different framing on the basis of an intended perception — that’s the essence of leftist politics, the expression of the desire to upend as opposed to the desire to conserve.

It works less and less as people notice it more and more, but they wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work, or if it hadn’t worked at some point. This is what they’re doing with “child labor.” It’s an endless game of emotional manipulation, insane and sometimes dangerously effective.

Also, please note that the term “cluster munitions” is now obsolete:

All cadre will update their dictionaries accordingly.