crotch goblins and genocide
hating one enables the other
hey y’all,
today i’m sipping on an “almond brothers” smoothie from happy + hale on 9th street. there are few simple pleasures i enjoy more than a well balanced, perfectly textured, and filling smoothie that i didn’t have to make for myself. it has chocolate almond milk, banana, almond butter, and ground coffee. big fan of drinking my food; much like a baby.
i want to kiki with my fellow childless-by-choice millenials. i absolutely love my low-responsibilty, high-indulgence lifestyle. i love having a relatively uninhibited schedule and expendable income. i love getting to decide who to put first and when in my day-to-day. i love being able to make last minute plans with people i haven’t seen in awhile. i also have a festering, bordering on septic, mother wound that will take my entire life to heal (if i ever do). last, and most importantly, i have no desire to be a parent. i have a relatively nascent and petulant resistance to obligation these days. i believe deep in my bones that if you don’t want to be a parent, then you shouldn’t be. if you are a parent, you are opting into a relationship where you owe that person everything and they owe you absolutely nothing. there is no greater responsibility.
what is often shocking to people when i talk about my life choices is that i love children. this is an anxiety-inducing statement to make as a gay trans man. my proximity to children endangers me; under the current regime and all the ones that came before it. i’m unnaturally reserved with other people’s children to save myself from being a conservative headline, but i crave intergenerational relationships with children who are not related to me. i resonate deeply with james baldwin’s assertion that all the children are ours. i want to do a little jig with a toddler at the farmer’s market. i want to snuggle my best friend’s kids on the couch while they incorrectly explain the plot of spiderman to me. i want to make a baby giggle in line at the grocery store. i want to blow bubbles on the beach for the littles down by the water to chase.
it brings me great joy to share the world with young people. i also feel strongly that it is our collective obligation to ensure that this world allows children to live safely and freely. i believe this is true whether or not you personally like them. my childhood was not always safe or free. few people looked out for me, and that is not right. instead of internalizing those wounds and making it everyone else’s problem, i try my very best to leave this plane better than i found it for those who come next. i think the world should be designed around the needs of those most vulnerable, which does actually include children.
so, it is borderline psychopathic to me that so many non-parents loudly and proudly express their disdain for children. in my experience, it is primarily well-educated, career-driven, neoliberal 30-40 somethings who openly hate children. i have compiled an abridged tableau for you to peruse. these are the examples i felt would get the point across, but aren’t horrific. i found hundreds of comments on child youtube accounts threatening rape and sex trafficking (all from straight men, by the way) that i made the decision not to include. you get the picture.
i think there must be something deeply wrong with you to have this much hate in your heart for a person who 1. did not choose to be here, 2. has absolutely no power in our society, 3. is reliant on responsible adults for their needs being met, and 4. you also used to be. there is also a bizarre overlap between animal rights activists and child haters. how can you love dogs and hate babies? and listen, i don’t like dogs. i would prefer not to be around them, but i realize that the world is designed around my individual preferences. i don’t hate dogs and i certainly don’t think they shouldn’t be allowed in public.
i am not the first person to write about this, but i had a lightbulb moment over the weekend. these are the same people with “if kamala was president we’d all be at brunch” signs at the no kings protest. these are the pussy hat girls. these are the fags don’t think palestine has anything to do with drag. if you do not have love and empathy in your heart for the single most vulnerable people in our society, i can’t imagine you having love and empathy for them in other societies.
since october 2023, more than 50,000 children have been reportedly killed or injured in the gaza strip, according to UNICEF regional director for the middle east and north africa, edouard beigbeder. fifty thousand children have been murdered by israel and bankrolled by me. that is keeping me up at night. we have failed as a species if we can go to brunch while our peers kill children. there is no difference between me and a palestinian child.
in social justice spaces, we’ve taken great care to create systems of learning that emphasize difference. this is necessary in demonstrating how the tools of white supremacy are leveraged with differing severity across identity. we cannot ignore this, which is why it is so unbelievably cringe when someone says “we’re all one race, the human race.” nevertheless, this is actually true. that is the root of all of it - no one’s life is more valuable than any other. not one of us has to earn our worthiness. everyone deserves a life of safety, dignity, and freedom.
self-obsessed child-free blue MAGA and pro-life protesters outside of planned parenthood agree on one thing: children are hypothetical. they only exist to further a narrative and create comfort for themselves by any means necessary. the objective reality is that children exist and we share the world with them. if we cannot mildly be inconvenienced by sugar-high toddler’s squealing at the ice cream shop in our comfortable neighborhoods in the west, how can we protect and defend the voiceless abroad who die by our hand?
i am not asking anyone to single-handedly end the genocide in palestine. i’m not even asking anyone to dedicate their lives to children’s rights in the united states. i’m asking all of us to take one step forward in cultivating empathy with intention. to step outside of ourselves and balance our needs with the needs of those who share our world. and then i’m asking you to do that every day at least once. can you challenge someone the next time they say they hate kids? and if not, can you ask them in earnest to explain why? can you get them to identify their own callousness and offer an alternative? can you a smile at a crying baby in line for the ATM?
xoxo,
kuya von
i showed you my gooey center, please respond 👉👈
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