by Cincy Kem with Robin Singer
Source: Screen shot from I Am Skylar, a National Film Board of Canada production
I Am Skylar, produced and distributed by Canada's National Film Board, is an award-winning documentary about the family and community support and attention provided to a precocious pubescent boy from Cape Breton who desires to be seen as the opposite sex.
Premiering in 2019 as part of the Re-imagining Nova Scotia film series, this 15-minute exposé of what’s going down with kids today -- not only in the big city but also in small-town and rural Canada -- was praised as a celebration of diversity. Promoted as a movie that inspires everyone to live their authentic lives, this film aims to model how a loving family and a progressive community should unquestioningly accept and validate a kid’s assertion when they say they were “born in the wrong body.”
To a discerning viewer, however, the lies and deception laid on children and their families by social activists and the medical gender lobby in defence of gender identity and expression are glaring. One wonders, as the troubles with trans kids make headlines around the world, if our federal film agency will remove this picture from its distribution catalogue. Or, at the very least, perhaps the NFB should slap on some meaningful content advisories of the very real potential for very negative outcomes when one decides to purposely mess with a kid’s natural physical and psychological development.
The plot has thickened in the two years since this government-backed advocacy project -- some would say propaganda -- hit the big screen. As culturally and socially attentive Canadians now know so painfully well, to question the claim by a flamboyant boy child that he is actually a girl child is transphobic. To suggest such a child may in fact be gay is shameful. To be suspicious of the intent of the gender industry in rolling out their experimental products and procedures on children is hateful.
Instead, the film instructs the viewer that a child who jumps on the gender unicorn must be 100-percent-supported in obtaining the medical interventions deemed necessary for that child to become their “authentic self.” Yet there is zero discussion in the film about the validity of the gender concept as a whole. The idea that trans-beings are a normal and natural subset of the population is presented at face value. There is no reference to the lack of scientific certainty about this novel category of human. No questioning at all of this new belief system that has sexed gender spirits hijacking the bodies of unsuspecting fetuses in utero.
Nor are any concerns raised in the film about the negative health impacts associated with the powerful drugs used to thwart a child’s puberty or to nullify and modify their secondary sex characteristics (unwanted facial hair and broadening shoulders are the ones they focus on for Skylar). The fact that a child placed on cross-sex hormones will likely be rendered infertile by the transition process is glossed over. Apparently the 14-year-old boy who has had no adult experience of any kind fully understands what he is “giving up.”
Parents today, like the kind, upstanding citizens in this film, have been blindsided by the pervasive insistence of the gender movement. They are told that not helping their gender-questioning child to transition, if this is what the child says he wants, may result in accusations of neglect or abuse and removal of the child from the home. But kids are indoctrinated in the gender scheme in their classroom as early as kindergarten, often without their parents knowing or understanding what is being taught to them. When one asks how one’s “authentic self” can possibly be one that is medically inspired and surgically modified, the response is: because it’s 2021, you’re a transphobe and you need to get hip to the times. Or worse -- that if you don’t agree to trans your kid they’ll probably kill themselves -- even though this commonly repeated “fact” has been disproven in several reports and revealed to be a manipulative falsehood of wealthy gender industrialists and trans rights activists who are keen on growing their ranks.
And now, two years following this film’s release, Canada’s new conversion therapy law has just received royal assent. Bill C-4 was the first bill to be passed in the new Liberal minority government Parliamentary session using a fast-tracked process that skipped usual legislative steps including hearing of stakeholder testimonies. The new law, which sped through the House of Commons and the Senate in a mere nine days, makes it illegal for parents to do anything but instantly “affirm” their “gender-creative” child -- that is, to seek medical treatment that forces a child's outward physical appearance to become better aligned with their inner sense of who or what they are. It is our government’s position that a child’s self-declared transgender status is the natural state out of which they would presumably be converted via ruthless practices, rather than defining child conversion therapy as the process of taking a healthy-bodied kid and chemically and surgically processing them (i.e. converting them) to be an approximate visual rendering of the opposite sex.
Source: IWK Foundation website
Under the new law, there will be no more “watchful waiting” to see if said child recovers from their dysphoria as they mature (as an overwhelming percentage of them reportedly do). There will be no counseling or mental-health therapy permitted to help them become more comfortable in their skin (because that would be cruel and coercive). Investigation as to what traumas or experience may be triggering their dysphoria will be outlawed (because it’s just crazy to suggest that there may be underlying psychological, emotional, or cognitive issues causing a child to want a way out of living as their natural sex). No time for dilly-dallying, just straight to the name change and drug injections. Before it’s “too late.” Because this is the “kind” thing to do for such children in our pharmacologically-dependent first-world order.
Since the release of I Am Skylar, the claim often made by gender specialists -- that the effects of off-label use of puberty-blocking drugs on kids are “reversible” -- has been debunked. Viewers of the similarly-titled, long-running US reality show, I am Jazz, are uncomfortably familiar with the problems with Jazz’s “micropenis” -- the result of being placed on the blockers at 11-years-old. Recently, Jazz’s famous trans-identified surgeon has gone public with his concerns about the pediatric use of these drugs.
Plenty of respected experts and academics have repeatedly raised the alarm about the experimental nature of “gender-affirming” care and the obvious error of permanently messing with kids’ minds and bodies. The ability for children to make properly informed (i.e. mature-brain) decisions about their future sexual health and function is undergoing legal challenge (Keira Bell’s case is expected to move on to the UK Supreme Court). Testimonies abound on social media by de-transitioned young adults who now realize that past traumas or the physical/emotional discomforts they experienced as tweens and teens were not resolved by changing their names and clothes; growing or cutting their hair; adopting new mannerisms; assaulting their endocrine system; arresting their puberty; or removing their breasts and mutilating their genitals. The rapid rate and wide-range roll-out of big-pharma’s and big-tech’s pills, needles and surgical sex-reassignment procedures on gullible youth and their families has been tracked and exposed.
And yet, this little Canadian film, in which a gentle gender doctor in one of Canada’s foremost children’s hospitals encourages a physically robust teenaged boy to start injecting those medications that will stunt his natural growth and sexual development, remains available on numerous free platforms and is promoted to citizens via our national broadcaster. Only congratulatory reviews may be found online, suggesting that all parents of gender-crazed kids should be so amazing as to allow for psychological and medical experimentation on their child and to let die the memory of, and hopes for, the boy or girl they birthed and raised.
In funding and distributing this documentary, the NFB advances the federal government's diversity and inclusion mandate and claims to contribute “to our country’s social cohesion.” One would anticipate then, that in contributing to such cohesion, the experimental nature of, and difficult truths about, gender transitioning practices on children would be highlighted in order to protect them and their families from the serious harms of an ideology that many experts submit is being used to “trans the gay away.” Instead, we are presented with the standard unicorns and rainbows narrative about teenaged gender transition that apparently all Canadians should believe in and support or be run out of town or even jailed.
The message of the movie is loud and clear: to question the logic, the ethics, or the safety of transitioning kids is to be condemned as transphobic, ignorant and hateful. So just don’t go there. Best to just wave the flag and march in step with the parade -- the future health and function of our youngest generation be damned. The gaslighting of our kids and their families, as demonstrated by the popularity and availability of this down-home documentary, has thus far been a psychosocial success.
Source: Screen Shot from I Am Skylar, a National Film Board of Canada production
In Part Two: We’ll take a close-up of some of the scenes from the movie, and from interviews with Skylar and the director, that illustrate the manipulation and misinformation used by lobbyists and professionals to encourage children and their families to join and support the gender generation.