This is quite the response when you consider that all Sandy is saying is to leave children alone.
John, aka âBrianna,â and men like him, are frantic to push the notion that children can be born in the wrong body because it provides a thin veneer of respectability to their own pretense at womanhood. If children feel this way, the line goes, then obviously it canât be a fetish.
The problem with that is that, as experts know, fetishes can and do begin in childhood â even in prepubescence. Spend any amount of time in fetish communities online, and you will find plenty of deviants whose fetishistic impulses began as children. Jerome Brudos, the shoe fetish slayer, began his obsession with womenâs shoes at the age of four.
On a more personal note, I had a suspect who began his obsession with rope at age 6, after watching a western in which a woman was tied to the railroad tracks. It gave him a âfunny feeling,â and from then on, he engaged his sisters and female cousins in games that required him to tie them up. As he got older, he began to molest these girls, and he eventually went on to commit several rapes and one homicide as an adult, all of which included elements of bondage.
Do some children experience dysphoria? Of course â but what men like John are desperately trying to hide is the fact that the majority of children - 84% - will get over it on their own if you just leave them alone to grow out of it, and that almost all of the others can resolve their discomfort with talk therapy.
John, however, wants to medicalize these children at the first sign of distress because he knows that once a child is medicalized, the rest is all but inevitable. He is willing to throw these children into the fire in order to warm his hands: to sacrifice their lives and bodies and their own future children so as to gain more participants for the game of âletâs pretend,â he clings to so tightly.
And why is he so desperate? Why do these men demand the sacrifice of innocent children? Because deep down, they know itâs all a lie. A truth can exist in a personâs heart without needing to be told, but a lie must be shared and believed.
John canât be a woman independently of other people because he knows heâs a man, but if he can force everyone to treat him like a woman, then itâs easier to convince himself of the lie â and itâs easier to force people to do this if they think his impulses stem from some deep-seated childhood trauma than it is when they know itâs actually a sex thing. By pushing the concept of the dysphoric child, these men are trying to disguise the true origins of their behavior.