A few days ago, I wrote a review of the NBC TV show Quantum Leap‘s twelfth episode Let Them Play.

For those of you not familiar with this extension of the 1990s TV series, the premise is that a time traveler, in this case Ben Song (Raymond Lee) “leaps” into the lives and physical bodies of different people across time, presumably to put right what once went wrong. Once one mission is accomplished, Ben leaps into a different year and body and does the same thing all over again.

However, the latest incarnation of the show, being created in the 2020s, is also dedicated to “representation” of “marginalized groups.” One of the actors, Mason Alexander Park is gender fluid and trans and one of the primary writers and directors Shakina is a trans women. In my investigation of the show’s conception, it seems that before the first episode even aired, the intent was to make it a showcase of representation in general and trans representation in specific.

On this platform’s “sister blog” Powered by Robots, where I review various science fiction works as well as highlight my own fiction publications, I did my level best to review the episode in terms of any television show, while not (too much anyway) injecting very many of my personal attitudes and nothing relative to faith and God.

However, it’s been eating at me, especially since I’ve been reading so much lately about the other side of the coin, the darker corridors wherein trans people are not treated fairly and doctors, schools, and the government are overselling trans philosophy at the expense of human lives.

Interestingly enough, even though “Let Them Play” was set against the background of a girl’s high school basketball team and a trans girl team member, none of the hot button issues was directly addressed and resolved. The trans girl was eventually accepted by the rest of the team as “just another girl” and undressed in the girls locker room (the scene cut away without facing what would happen when “Gia” exposed her penis to her teammates while disrobing). It barely touched on the issue of trans girls/women taking away exclusively girls/woman sports and spaces because trans priorities are seemingly higher than those of born girls/women (even from a feminist perspective). It ignored the idea that a person who was born and is developmentally male would almost always outperform girl teammates and the girls on the opposing team.

It focused on exclusively positive images of trans kids, the risk of trans people committing suicide, presumably because the rest of the world will not accept their perceived identity, and how absolutely, a trans girl is a girl in every sense of the word.

Except that isn’t true.

Yes, I followed the science (as anti-Christian bigots always miss, science and faith are not mutually exclusive). In short, people diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a recognized mental disorder, suffer from a sort of miscoding of their brain chemistry/structure so that, for instance, a person born male, will have a mental and psychological pattern consistent with a female.

This presupposes that males and females have uniquely different cognitive patterns, which modern feminism tends to deny, however current medicine and science acknowledges this, at least those that deal in “gender affirming treatment.”

See articles from Cleveland Clinic, Science Daily and USC.edu for more information.

This isn’t universally accepted as we see in an article from Transgendered.com and in fact, an unnamed molecular geneticist from UC Berkeley (hardly a hot bed of repressive, right-wing thought…oh, the original article was removed…imagine that…but I found an archived version…I’m sure she’s unnamed to protect her) argues that trans women inmates should never be placed in a women’s prison.

“Adjusting” a trans person’s physical appearance tends to be the treatment of choice and can include puberty blockers, other hormone treatment, and “gender affirming” surgery, such as removing the breasts of young teen girls.

What isn’t recognized or even really recorded, is the “regret rate” after transitioning, that the expectation everything would be better afterward never comes to pass. Supposedly it’s 2 to 3 percent, but that’s pretty informal and probably wrong.

For information on that regret and those people involved in “detransitioning” (there must be more than a few percent), see:

this news article on opposing perspectives.

this article on how a school in Virginia contributed to a trans child being human trafficked, and which includes stories of two kids who were forced down the transition trail when they weren’t really trans.

I have two articles on a whistleblower who saw how the medical industry was fast-tracking children into transitioning with little or no vetting: The Daily Signal and The Free Press.

Also, this New York Post story about a detransitioning activist (more on her later) is illuminating.

The Federalist story highlights how medical professionals will actually abandon patients if they say they want to stop the transition or to detransition, which I’m pretty sure is a gross violation of medical ethics (sue them).

As far as girls, women, and sports, there’s plenty of material to illustrate that trans girls/women actually disrupt girls/women sports and that, in an absolute manner, trans women are trans women but not women in the sense of being born and developing that way.

Consider this Washington Examiner story.

Also how two biological males/trans females came to hold 15 women’s state championship titles in Connecticut.

Also, from the NY Post, a trans girl won a girl’s state wrestling championship for the second time

I’m sure you’re seeing the pattern.

Of course, the Biden administration is heavily contributing to this travesty.

Also see articles from Chron and Campus Reform on this topic.

Back to the “Quantum Leap” show and how absolutely none of the above was addressed. Bleeding Cool and J.B Spins both wrote glowing reviews on the episode, praising support for the trans community and completely ignoring any of the relevant issues, as I previously mentioned. In fact, the episode engaged in a significant amount of wish fulfillment, especially in the area of the girls locker room.

Other episodes of this series have passed over obvious points of conflict for the sake of representation, but this was the most glaring example. In reading the reviews of not only this episode, but a number of others, that “glossing over” historical realities is occasionally mentioned, but far more often, outstanding praise for representation, even when historically inaccurate in the extreme, is at the forefront.

The show is a re-creation of the world according to the 2020s priorities list. This puts it at odds not only with the original show, which depicted these issues in a more realistic and gritty fashion, but also an endless number of other series going back decades that also addressed social and political matters of their day. There wasn’t always a neat and tidy happy ending, just like real life.

Another thing that has generally passed over is the proximity in the airing date to the most recent Grammy awards. They too showcased trans and non-conforming entertainers, but in this case, there was significant pushback, particularly to Sam Smith and Kim Petras.

You can read about it at Variety and People, and particularly about the pushback at The New York Post.

You may say the “satanic” aspects are overblown and that it was nothing more than performance art, but right here in my own little corner of Idaho, actual Satanists held a gender affirming ritual at the state capitol. This pretty much says the quiet part out loud.

Now I can say that an adult can do anything they want to with their life, because after all, it’s their life, but children can’t consent. While the Quantum Leap episode dealt with teenagers, the character Gia was said to have “come out” when she was in fifth grade. That would have made her about ten, well before the age of being able to legally consent.

Also, I found a story from August of last year about the world’s youngest transgender model.

Noella McMaher is ten years old and supposedly has identified as trans since age 2 1/2 years. I’m calling BS on that one. I have a 2 1/2 year old granddaughter and I see her almost every day. I promise you she has no idea about all of this stuff. She knows she’s a girl but tends to identify herself primarily by her first name. I’m not even sure she understands what the differences are between boys and girls and why should she right now?

As far as McMaher goes, according to the above-referenced article:

Noella – who fashion insiders say could make her first million in the next year – first identified as transgender at ‘two-and-a-half nearing three’, according to her biological mother Dee, 35, who now identifies as a ‘trans masculine male’ and cites Noella as an inspiration.

In an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dee said: ‘My spouse and I are both non-binary.

That’s interesting. Two trans/non-binary parental figures in Noella’s life and at age 2 1/2, she, as a young toddler, manages to self-identify as trans. And that doesn’t send up a lot of red flags for anyone, especially mental health and medical professionals?

I have to wonder if Noella had parents who were cis-hetero if she would have “come out” at age 2 1/2 or at all?

I suppose you could say the same about cis-hetero kids of cis-hetero parents, but then those parents also experience kids coming out as gay or trans. I’d love to see an actual, objective study of the frequency of coming out as trans, non-conforming, and gender fluid among from cis-hetero families vs. non-conforming families. I bet the results would be interesting.

It might also go a long way in explaining the steady increase in the trans population. Yes, I know the argument is that there have always been a stable population of trans people across time and it’s only now that the environment is supportive so they’re coming out more. The other explanation is that there are external influences that are affecting the outcomes, particularly among vulnerable children and teens, whereby they are convinced to believe they are trans.

Once that occurs, they are in the hands of schools, mental health, and medical professionals, and the ever present pro trans activists, all pushing them in a particular direction and telling these kids “this is who you really are.” Adult and peer pressure are powerful influences and as I mentioned above, I’m betting the “regret rate” is far higher than about two or three percent. That pressure could also convince kids and adults to keep mum about any regret. After all, we’ve already seen how these people are abandoned by their doctors. What if all the “support” they receive were to suddenly go away, too? What if they were actively attacked in social and news media as well as in their day-to-day lives?

An article from the Independent Women’s Forum states that Trans Activist Wants You To Believe Detransitioners Aren’t Real. The fix is in.

If you want to get a little closer to one detransitioner, follow Chloe Cole on twitter. I can only imagine what sort of harassment and abuse this young person takes on a daily basis through social media and other venues. She’s a person of amazing courage. It will take courage to fly in the face of this “movement” and to tell people that just because you’re confused, just because the “experts” say you are this thing, doesn’t make it so.

If the “experts” did their jobs, instead of being agents of promoting a social movement for the sake of justifying the identities of adults, they’d more thoroughly vet potential trans kids and investigate if indeed only intrusive “gender affirming” medical methods are appropriate and therapeutic.

That’s really it. Adults manipulating children in order to justify their own perceived identities. Actually, I’m sure some of those adults are authentic and sincere, but they are also being manipulated.

Are there actual trans individuals who can only be helped by “gender affirming” treatments? Probably. I mean I don’t know for sure or how often they actually occur in the human population. My guess is not nearly as often as we’ve been led to believe.

So what’s the real percentage? Numbers are so easily gamed, it’s almost impossible to know. According to The UCLA Williams Institute the overall U.S. population identifying as trans is 0.3%. However, Pew Research states that approximately 5% of young adults “say their gender is different from their sex assigned at birth.”

As believers, we know the world is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. These are like the days of Noah, and I suppose we’re fortunate that the Almighty made a covenant with humanity that He wouldn’t destroy the world by water again.

I don’t know if we’re so fortunate to live through these days, and especially to raise children and grandchildren in this world. We older folks possess more of a grounding, having never experienced such extremes as we were growing up. I’ve got a nearly 14-year-old grandson, and although he’s pretty solid, the world is incredibly convincing. My two younger granddaughters are even more vulnerable.

Keep your children close. Read a lot. Be aware of what’s happening in the world so you can counter it when these events begin to impact, or try to impact the most vulnerable members of our world, our kids.

If there are indeed people who are trans, gender-non conforming, gender fluid, and I’m not sure how all of that is strictly biological, then so be it…if they’re adults. If adults, on the other hand, are deliberately immersing children in that world, especially to gratify their own adult needs, then that is wrong and that is evil.

I know a lot of people will read this and say I’m “trans-phobic” or a “bigot” or a bunch of other bad names. However, I’m not writing this out of some social or emotional imperative. I’ve done the reading, I’ve “followed the science,” and I’m convinced that the medical, psychological, educational, and governmental systems have gone off the rails. Entertainment, I can understand. Most of what we see produced has been out of touch with real people for decades. Entertainment also seems to be the marketing arm for those other entities I mentioned above.

As parents and grandparents, we are the last line of defense. We can no longer depend on schools to be safe for children. Heck, we certainly can’t depend on places like Disney theme parks to be safe let alone what they used to be…the happiest place on Earth.

There are plenty of secular people who claim that the Church is the most dangerous place for kids and where they are most likely to be sexually abused. Church isn’t immune because predators hide in the places where their prey are accessible. But given what I’ve written, I’d rather take my grandchildren to Church than expose them to the rest of the world as described above.

Addendum – March 2, 2023: I came across a tweet by detransition activist Chloe Cole announcing a “Detransition Awareness Day” on March 10th in Sacramento. Frankly, this is going to attract a huge number of protestors and no doubt things will get very ugly. That said, Ms. Cole has a right to express her opinion at a peaceful gathering, no matter how upsetting that opinion is to others. She’s also got the experiences to back it up.