“Hi, son, how was your time at Scout camp?”

“It was great. But it was sort of  different, too. We had a boy in our tent who was born as a girl. He even still had a girl’s body parts — but it didn’t matter! He was still one of us.”

“Wasn’t that kind of weird for you?”

“Well, no. You’re not supposed to think that way, you know. He was a boy, that’s all. I love how our leaders taught us not to treat him any different than any other boy.”

“Really?!”

“Yeah, it was great. You should have seen what happened when one of the kids called him ‘her.’ Extra KP duty, real quick! I almost made the same mistake myself just now — but hey, I’m learning. Really, by the end of the week I got used to thinking it wasn’t so weird after all. Why shouldn’t he be able to decide he’s a he?”

Small Gods and Great Harm

The Boy Scouts of America announced on Monday their decision to allow “transgender boys” into Scouting, caving in to progressives’ program of sexual self-creation. Is there any problem with that, really?

Yes, there is. It makes children into small gods with the power to revise reality for everyone. And it does them great harm besides.

Child “Transgenderism” Is Not Adult Destiny

It’s harmful to the “transgendered” child, first of all. There is good reason to use quotes around “transgender” when speaking of children, because for most of them who consider themselves transgender, over time it turns out not to be real.

Every child entering Cub Scouts or Brownies has to decide, which shall I be: boy or girl? Every child has that responsibility, that authority, that god-like power.

Sexual confusion and questioning is fairly uncommon among children, but even less common when they grow up. The great majority children’s sex-and-gender issues resolve naturally: they grow up to a sense of internal and external sexual congruency. Which is a very good thing: Self-identified transgendered adults experience exceedingly high levels of emotional and psychological distress. They attempt suicide — and succeed — at unusually high rates. So no one should predestine any child to enter into life that way. Let them grow out of it instead!

But now the Boy Scouts have acceded to contemporary sexual fluidity. Membership is no longer dependent on the child’s sex on his birth certificate, but on their self-reported “gender.” The Girl Scouts made a similar decision long ago.

Small Gods and Über-Gods: “A Scout is Reverent”

This isn’t just about membership in one scouting organization or another. This is about one person re-creating all others’ reality. Who determines whether Jenny is a boy or a girl? Jenny does. Or rather James, if Jenny decides she/he is a James instead.

In this view James is no longer Jenny, subject to the biology he was born with. Nature has no such authority over him. He is his own small god — but not just his own, for he has the power to create a whole new reality for himself, for you, for me, and for his fellow Scouts. He is a boy. That is now real. So he has spoken, and so it shall be.

The Boy Scout law reads, “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.” Indeed we must all must be reverent, for there are many über-gods and lesser gods in the world-creating pantheon of which James is a member, and they have great power in our world. They will unite swiftly to punish any rebel who resists the new reality.

And you, now — do you doubt James’s new reality? Did the pronoun “he” bother you in those last two paragraphs? Then you are an unbeliever; an infidel, clinging to the old ways; you have not bowed to the new religion of the small gods.

Your punishment will proceed forthwith.

Every Child a Ruler Over Your Reality

The Boy Scouts crumbled under their judgment. For you, it is perhaps just a matter of time. The gods have made themselves rulers over all reality — including yours.

Not only that, but they have spawned themselves into every child. Every child entering Cub Scouts or Brownies has to decide, which shall I be: boy or girl? Every child has that responsibility, that authority, that god-like power. (Do parents have any say in this? Time will tell, but the trend is to hand the power increasingly to the child.)

Thus have the über-gods decreed that every child shall become his or her own gender-god. Day by day we are falling under the tyranny of every small god.

Refusing to Bend the Knee

But I for one refuse to bend the knee. Jenny might have the legal right (with her parents involved, at least for now) to change her name to James; she does not have the natural right to force me to accept and obey her re-created version of physical reality. The girl who slept in the Boy Scout tent is still a girl, no matter what she or the other gods tell us we must call her.

For she is no god. There is only One who is. Soon enough, the small gods will run hard into His reality. I choose to align myself now with His reality; for any other choice is both harmful and foolish — and a damningly irreverent denial of the same Scout law that I repeated every week as a Boy Scout.