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Where are the limits to self-definition?

Seven years ago, a short video went viral that has stood the test of time like few others. It featured Joseph Backholm of the Family Policy Institute of Washington interviewing students at the University of Washington about gender bathroom access.

Seven years ago may as well have been 70 years ago. It was a debate almost no one was having at the time. For Backholm to even bother making a video on the topic was akin to holding a neon sign atop his head flashing the words ‘reactionary’ or ‘conspiracy theorist’.

But Backholm’s interview montage was prophetic.

He began by asking students their opinion on transgender people using any bathroom of their choosing on campus. All who made the cut said they would support such a move.

Backholm then asked, “If I told you that I was a woman, what would your response be?”

Most of the students answered with words of affirmation, though a few visibly recoiled.

The interviews got really juicy when Backholm asked, “If I told you that I was Chinese, what would your response be?”

The students’ woke worldview — if it was even called ‘woke’ back then — began to show cracks as their words of glowing praise faded to puzzlement.

But Backholm wasn’t done. “If I told you that I was seven years old, what would your response be?”

At this point, you’ll simply have to watch the video:

(Spoiler: yes, there were UW students all the way back in in 2016 who fully affirmed Backholm in his newfound identity as a six-foot, five-inch Chinese woman who was seven years old and eager to enrol in a first grade class).

2016 also happened to be the year that MercatorNet published a story about middle-aged mechanic Paul Wolscht who ‘transitioned’ to Stefonknee Wolscht — “a six-year-old girl in frilly dresses” who “likes colouring in and playing with dolls with other children”.

It turns out that Stefonknee Wolscht has stuck at his schtick and is no longer such a misfit in a world that has since gone mad. Seven years later, he is still six years old and boasts his own YouTube channel and Instagram account.

As recently as February of this year, British tabloid the Daily Star provided an updated summary of his life story:

After 23 years of marriage, Stefonknee Wolscht’s wife Maria gave an ultimatum: “Stop being transgender or leave.”

Unwilling to suppress her true self, she left Maria and their seven children to lead a new life.

But in yet another unexpected twist, she then began to identify as a six-year-old girl, dressing in children’s clothes, wearing her hair in pigtails, playing with dolls and sometimes using a pacifier…

She had hormone replacement therapy, started to live as a six-year-old girl and met a polygamous couple, Adrian and Serena, who became “mommy and daddy’”.

Stefonknee explained: “He (Adrian) found me on a fetish website. We went out for lunch and hit it off really well.”

In 2016, MercatorNet editor Michael Cook wisely wrote that if Paul can become Stefonknee, there are no limits to defining an identity — and that what he needs is therapy, not sympathy.

If only those words were heeded by our culture. Wolscht was part of a trickling stream that has now become a rushing torrent.

Witness the staggering scale of corporate sponsorship behind a figure like Dylan Mulvaney, a 26-year-old man who turned a fledgling acting career into a multi-million-dollar income stream by identifying — not as a woman but, per his own description— as a girl.

The torrent is not stopping. There is a waterfall up ahead. If our culture can accept transgenderism, transracialism and transageism, all is in place for a wholesale embrace of paedophilia.

If grown men like Paul Wolscht or Dylan Mulvaney can self-identify as little girls, what stands in the way of the next self-identifying “little girl” says that he likes little boys?

After all, age, like gender, is just a social construct, is it not?

Point out my flashing neon sign all you like. But then let’s check back in seven years.

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Originally published at MercatorNet. Photo: Screenshot via YouTube.