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Stolen Youth’s chapter on “the transgender crusade” leans heavily on the work of the controversial author Abigail Shrier, a non-doctor who wrote a book about something called ROGD (rapid-onset gender dysmorphia), a condition that no medical organization recognizes and is not backed by any scientific evidence. It repeatedly refers to the widely and repeatedly debunked notion that children and preteens are having their genitals cut off in the pursuit of gender-affirming care. If that were happening in large numbers, it might be a cause for public health concern. Stolen Youth does not provide evidence that it is.
Sometimes the authors distort the meaning of things they’d written themselves, mere paragraphs or pages prior.
Toward the end of the “woke Disney” chapter, Mandel writes: “For those of you keeping score at home: Peter Pan, Dumbo, and Lady and the Tramp are out. Gender bending Muppets are in.”
In the previous paragraph, the writer admits those animated films are not actually “out” or even that difficult to access, they can still be streamed through the Disney Plus app after watching a disclaimer that’s displayed on screen for a few seconds.
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty/Reuters
As for the “gender-bending Muppets”? She’s referring to Gonzo from Muppet Babies wearing a dress in one scene—one Muppet, in one scene. Through much of Gonzo’s 50-year existence as a member of the Muppet gang, the through-joke has been that he is trying to fuck his pet chicken, Camilla. But the dress and they/them pronouns! That’s a bridge too far.
Mandel claims that children are being sterilized and mutilated by gender-affirming care. To support this, she refers to the Planned Parenthood Mar Monte website, which advertises gender-affirming care to patients in California and Nevada. “Not content with their core mission of providing sexual health counseling, family planning, and abortion, Planned Parenthood is expanding its mission, offering highly potent hormones with little to no barriers to anyone who walks in claiming to suffer from dysphoria.”
Actually, the website the endnotes refer to specifies that people 16 and under are not eligible for gender-affirming hormone treatment through Planned Parenthood.
In another chapter, the authors cite an article by conservative thinktanker Christopher Rufo (the culture warrior who made Critical Race Theory the original “woke” boogeyman) that claimed a group called Sexy Sex Ed had “organized a series of ‘sexy summer camp events’” for children “as young as 13” in Kentucky that covered such racy topics as sex work, self-managed abortions, and BDSM.
Very little of that story is true. According to the organization itself, Sexy Sex Ed “has never held an in-person summer camp in Kentucky or anywhere else. The 2021 Sexy Sex Ed Summer Camp was a one-time virtual workshop series held on Zoom and the participants were ages 16 and up.” Oh, well. Nevertheless.
Markowicz writes that in 2022, a Denver elementary school announced plans for a “Black Lives Matter School Week of Action.” Markowicz claims that kindergarteners and first graders were taught BLM principles such as “disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics.” Except this, too, omits key facts.
First of all, the complete language that BLM had used on its website is, “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.” Secondly, that language was removed from BLM literature back in 2020, two years before Markowicz claims it was being taught to kindergarteners.
Mandel recounts a near-miss with a comic book her daughter checked out from the library that turned out to be a graphic novel that featured what Mandel describes as “a sexual encounter between two young girls at a sleepover.” The book, The Breakaways, does contain a romantic scene involving two girls—a kiss between two fully clothed girls who are sharing a bed. Just a kiss. It’s less passionate and sexy than the kiss between Ariel and Eric at the end of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. “Was this a mistake?” Mandel writes. “Or is it part of something more widespread and sinister?”
No, Bethany. You’re just homophobic. (Mandel, by the way, has written a children’s book series aimed at “conservative” families, including one that calls Rush Limbaugh an American hero. Limbaugh’s radio show used to boast a feature he called “AIDS Update” where he played music and mocked gay men who had died of AIDS. I haven’t read Mandel’s children’s book series but I’m assuming she left that part out.)
Mandel seems especially offended that mass-marketed media for children now reflects lived experiences she doesn’t personally want for her own family, complaining that Disney has pledged to have half of the characters be LGBTQ or “racial minorities” by 2024. This move would put its cast of cartoons in line with the population of children in the U.S., where nearly half of babies born between 2018-2020 were nonwhite and some of those babies, presumably, will eventually grow up to be gay.
Mandel lamented that Disney “spends the majority of its time not on content, but on [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion].” Does she honestly believe that a multi-billion dollar company is spending “the majority of its time” on something that doesn’t directly make it money?
If this all reads as obsessively nitpicky, it is. But to read Stolen Youth is to experience death by 1,000 spatters of bullshit, every anecdote recounted with key facts removed, most conclusions an exercise in missing the point, much of the supporting documentation unreliable or hacky. It is a greatest hits of Fox News lower-third chyrons but lacking the punch, offering no particularly original insight. Instead, we get sloppy half-truths, reckless hyperbole, and an open contempt for educators, child-care providers, librarians, pediatricians, and, at the end of the book, the ability of their own children to think for themselves upon encountering complicated moral ideas.
For the intended audience of Stolen Youth, “woke” is the perfect uber-villain for a confederacy of aggrieved would-be bullies. It is the Babadook beneath the stairs. It is the murderer who writes, “Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the lights?” in blood on the wall of a pitch black dorm room. It is a campfire story for puritanical adult dweebs who are scared of everything and are willing to blame everything but themselves on their own growing irrelevance.
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