The Cub Scouts are now under increasing pressure for refusing to allow an 8-year-old girl, who identifies as a boy, to join their ranks. As reported on a New Jersey website (the child is from Secaucus, NJ), “From the moment he joined, 8-year-old Joe Maldonado eagerly looked forward to camping trips and science projects as a member of the Cub Scouts. But his expectations were dashed after his mother said she received a phone call from a Scouting official who told her that Joe would no longer be allowed to participate because he was born a girl” (my emphasis).
To be more accurate, Jodi (the child’s original name) is no longer allowed to participate because she was not just born a girl. She is a girl, and Cub Scouts are for boys. That’s why CBS News reported that, “Joe’s family says parents of other children had complained.”
Surprise, surprise. They had ample reason to complain, since Cub Scouts are for boys – little boys – and Jodi is a girl – a little girl.
But for Jodi’s mom, this came as a total shock, since, she says, the Cub Scouts were aware of Jodi’s biology and had no problem with initially accepting him. Plus, her mom reports, Jodi was now accepted at school as a boy.
CBS News reporter Errol Barnett asked Jodi’s mother, “As a parent, how do you know that you don’t just have a girl who is a tomboy, and that it’s a transgender issue?”
She replied, “I took a couple years; I didn’t realize it.”
With all respect to Jodi’s mom, there are experts who say that the worst thing a parent can do is accommodate a younger child’s gender confusion, while others would remind us that most kids experiencing gender confusion no longer do so after puberty.
But no, Jodi is Joe, and she/he is sure of it, even at 8. Not only so, but the rest of the world must accept it.
When Barnett asked Jodi, “Why did you want to join the Boy Scouts?”, she replied, “Because all of my favorite friends were there.”
And that’s why the Cub Scouts should change their policy and allow girls to join their groups: because a little girl has more boy-friends than girl-friends and because she identifies as a boy.
According to CBS News, “The [Boy Scouts of America] told CBS News it offered the family alternative, co-ed programs for Joe, but Maldonado told us she’s not interested and instead wants an apology for her son.”
No surprise here either. It’s not a matter of working out a practical solution. It’s about the rest of the world changing its policies to accommodate a confused little child.
Of course, the Boy Scouts of America have only themselves to blame, since their accommodation to gay activism has made them as an easy target for trans activism, making their official statement sound quite lame and short-sighted: “No youth may be removed from any of our programs on the basis of his or her sexual orientation. Gender identity isn’t related to sexual orientation.”
Do the Boy Scouts of America really think that they will be able to say yes to gay activism but no to trans activism, that they will be able to dodge the accusation of being homophobes without being nailed with the accusation of being transphobes? Have they not noticed that the acronym LGBT – notice that T at the end! – has been around since the early 1990s? If you say yes to the LG part, the B part is automatically included and the T part is right behind.
Let’s see how long the Boy Scouts hold out on this one. After all, if the Obama administration was pushing for this kind of acceptance in the schools – with penalties for non-compliance – and if Bruce Jenner being named woman of the year is old hat, why should the Scouts resist? Plus, the already-more-liberal Girl Scouts of America announced a few years back that a boy who identifies as a girl would be welcome in their midst. Social madness indeed.
But the worst thing about this whole story with 8-year-old Jodi is that the media is talking to her as if she was an expert, asking her how she felt about why she was excluded, to which this precious little child can only say, “I don’t know,” sounding sadly baffled. (To watch the actual video clip, along with my commentary, go here.)
To quote little Jodi, “It made me mad. I had a sad face, but I wasn’t crying. I’m way more angry than sad. My identity is a boy. If I was them, I would let every person in the world go in. It’s right to do.”
It’s a great sentiment, but it’s also the lens of an impressionable, still-developing, 8-year-old. When else do we go to little kids for life counsel and direction? And don’t the parents have a responsibility to shield their kids from this kind of attention? Don’t they actually set their children up for further pain and rejection by presenting them to the world as the opposite of who their biology and chromosomes say they are?
Interestingly, when National Geographic recently featured a 9-year-old boy who identifies as a girl on the cover of its “Gender Revolution” issue, I wrote that the magazine was complicit in a form of child abuse. Unknown to me, the American Family Network was sending out the message that, “National Geographic exploits children to further an agenda.”
Also unknown to me, in 2015, Camille Paglia, the controversial academic and social critic, and herself a lesbian, told a Brazilian TV station that, “Nothing... better defines the decadence of the West to the jihadists than our toleration of open homosexuality and this transgender mania now.”
She also said this, “Parents are now encouraged to subject the child to procedures that I think are a form of child abuse. The hormones to slow puberty, actual surgical manipulations, etcetera. I think that this is wrong, that people should wait until they are of an informed age of consent.
She added, “Parents should not be doing this to their children and I think that even in the teenage years is too soon to be making this leap. People change, people grow, and people adapt.”
Further confirmation for this position comes from Dr. Michelle Cretella, president of the American College of Pediatricians, who also feels that medical facilities that support a child’s transgenderism are engaging in child abuse.
She said that National Geographic is “promoting a political agenda over science and the wellbeing of innocent children” by displaying the young child as the face for their first ever transgender cover.
“Affirming so called transgender children means sterilizing them as young as 11-years-old,” Dr Cretella told Lifesite News. “Puberty blockers plus cross-sex hormones causes permanent sterility. And biological girls who ‘transition’ to male by taking testosterone may have a double mastectomy at age 16. The life time use of cross-sex hormones also puts these children at risk for stroke, heart disease, diabetes, cancers and more.”
Is this what lies ahead for little Jodi?
I seriously doubt that the Boy Scouts of America will be able to hold their ground against trans activism, but I have no doubt about this: They will one day regret the decisions they made, first caving in to gay activism and then to trans activism.
As for Jodi’s parents, I imagine that they deeply love their child and would do anything to make her happy. Sometimes, though, it’s the job of the parents to do things that make a child unhappy for the moment, knowing that, in the end, it will be for that child’s lifelong happiness.
I look forward to the day when the very real confusion of a little child, which I do not minimize, is not the measure of reality or the arbiter of societal norms. In fact, that day cannot come too soon.