Bring Back The Schoolroom Miss

The Costa Coffee surgical mutilation scandal broke before I finished reading Helen Joyce's Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, to cite its original title. I have put it down for the time being, feeling overwhelmed by the horrors of what girls and boys have done to themselves and why their parents permit it. It seems that reaching puberty has become even worse than it was in the 1980s, when bullies mocked us for our humiliating new secrets.  

Apparently one online transgender activist is exulting in, rather denying, the concept of "social contagion," stating that this is "how transgender people reproduce." In short, they're coming for your children, to quote the recent Pride Day chant, and it absolutely blows my mind that children whose parents forbid them to travel through seedy districts are allowed to absorb the philosophies and ideologies of simply anybody online. I have always admired friends who forbid their children the internet--and all but the most innocuous televised/filmed entertainment--but now I wonder why more of them don't do the same. 

I do not wonder at thousands of 11-year-olds dreading puberty or shying away from its first claims upon their bodies. It is awful to go from the lightness of childhood through the heaviness of adolescence towards adulthood and death--our parents' deaths, if not our own. To unformed intelligences encouraged in make-believe, it not obvious that the alternatives are worse. 

Children enjoy having their height measured against the doorframe, but puberty means growing out, not up, and it's embarrassing. I was never overweight as a child or a teenager, but by 16 I longed to escape my annoying, achy, leaking, earthbound body. My unruly hated hair I had already vanquished by having three sides of it cut, at intervals, close to my head. 

I was deep into my twenties before I understood that we are our bodies--ensouled bodies--and that the way forward is acceptance, kindness, rational fasting, good nutrition, and intense physical exercise. My poor parents had paid for any number of physical activities--gymnastics, swimming, skating, ice hockey, ballet, Girl Guide hikes--but most of these just hadn't filled me with the joy of life. (Mad props to skating and hikes.) It may have been different if my parents themselves had been sporty; my Polish goddaughter told me that she wants to learn golf so she can golf with her [golf-mad] grandmother. 

Yesterday I confessed on Facebook to having disliked being a girl from the ages of 11 until about 14, and I got all kinds of sympathetic emoticons and praise and whatnot, which was not my goal. My aim was to remind my intended audience that female puberty is often unpleasant but we get through it and enjoy being women. My intended audience was friends with daughters. However, it was the mother of a son (and a teacher of teens) who responded by  saying that girls that age have an awful time and need role models. 

I am not sure who these role models are. (Occasionally I look at "great women role models" books for my niece, but they invariably include Margaret Sanger and are actually thinly disguised left-wing propaganda.) My own belief is that girls aged 11 to 18 need to be removed from our terribly debased pornografied culture until they have come to terms with their changing bodies and developed their characters along rational and virtuous lines. In the past, the most privileged women in society found this protected place in "the schoolroom," that is, the place put aside in their father's (or brother's) house for their education, and then (possibly) in a select seminary for young ladies or (if Catholic) in a convent school. 

But now I must put aside these thoughts to take my husband's computer to the repair shop and shop for a dress to wear to the wedding of a young convent school graduate. 

Update: My concept of "The Schoolroom Miss" is quite different from that of the Regency romance novel. More on this anon.