Clarissa Bye: Radical gender ideology leaves kids’ heads a mess

Once, ABC Kids was a safe babysitter. Now, it is no longer full of innocent shows but woke training — a Pied Piper of gender ideology, leading our children off a cliff, writes Clarissa Bye.

I used to have a friend who’d leave her son in front of Thomas the Tank Engine for hours. The little boy was obsessed with it.

I’d take my son to visit and her boy would sit up close to the TV, his eyes glazed, practically in a trance. He didn’t want to go play.

She’d joke about how these train characters got inside of his head, how he’d have dreams about them. She did manage to get a lot of housework done.

These days kids often watch ABC Kids via the iView app, on iPads and devices, and the ABC is regarded as a safe babysitter, unlike YouTube or other websites.

You can trust Aunty. It’s government funded, it’s official and you assume the shows are made locally or carefully selected.

Peta the non-binary party planner from the ABC Kids show Mikki Versus The World.

So when an ABC Kids show starts telling primary schoolers and pre-teens they can be “non-binary” and uses words like penis, testicle, vagina and “masc, fem”, while a lipsticked bearded man sings “there are no rules or regulations on the gender spectrum baby” it’s a betrayal of trust parents have in our cultural institution.

This new ABC is not fit to be a babysitter.

It’s no longer innocent shows about trains but woke training.

And I’m not talking about Play School featuring drag queens, which Liberal Senator Alex Antic rightly grilled the ABC boss David Anderson on in parliament last week.

No, this is an ABC series called Mikki Versus The World, rated PG, aimed at upper primary and high school students and the producers say it’s “all about pre-teen mental health”.

An actress pretends to be a psychologist and helps children solve problems.

In the episode “We’re All A Vivid Rainbow: Gender Diversity,” a student decides they are non-binary and frets about announcing it at school.

It’s basically a training video about finding your “authentic self” as non-binary and enforcing the rule that other people have to obey the made-up “they” pronoun.

Schoolchildren are asked “what was it like when you first affirmed your gender?” and the audience is told it’s “100 per cent worth it to be your authentic self”.

The psychologist has a white male side-kick, a naive simpleton so the producers can hammer home some very heavy-handed gender pronoun lessons.

He gets ticked off for using the word “dude” as that is “gendered language”. It’s painful to watch.

A woman in a computer — the “expert” — tells the dopey white male that “being non-binary isn’t a new thing”, which many parents would disagree with.

The show cuts to a scene of Vikings, who were supposedly non-binary. A man with a beard announces he’s “non-binary” and he was “born with a penis but doesn’t identify as a man”.

We’re then subjected to a discussion about whether people with a penis, testicles, vagina or ovaries are male or female.

Researcher Kit Kowalski, who has uncovered the links between peak AIDS charity ACON and its behind-the-scenes promotion of LGBTQI+ in governments and companies — including the ABC — says she can’t recall a single time when a children’s show has brought up penises and vaginas.

“This is lacking any support from an adult supervisor and isn’t in the context of a discussion about reproduction,” she says.

Episode 5 is called We're All a Vivid Rainbow.

Later in the show, a “non-binary party planner” called Peta turns up and the dopey male is now confused by Peta’s appearance, saying “you look like a lady”.

No he doesn’t. Peta looks like a man with a dark moustache and beard wearing lipstick, earrings and a dress.

Peta’s song and dance about how there’s no rules or regulations “on the gender spectrum baby” is the key to this insidious ideology.

Gender is fluid. There are no rules. There’s not two sexes.

A man with a beard is described as a lady. What a child might think is normal isn’t so. Everything is confusing, ambiguous and the “normative world”, as they call it in academia, is disrupted.

Children can’t rely on their own judgment, they have to defer to these expert instructors on the correct way to understand things.

It’s also making impressionable children comfortable with talking about sexuality with people who are not their parents.

It’s “queering their childhood” in the academic parlance.

Other people might describe it as grooming. And it comes from Queer Theory, which some theorists now argue is really Queer Marxism.

Cultural critic James Lindsay makes the case that Wokism is actually a form of Cultural Communism, just like how Mao in China in 1966 reinvented Communism with his Cultural Revolution and Little Red Book.

“It is a theory that … wages war on the normal … and centres that war through identity politics,” Lindsay says. “It challenges anything normal, it does its activism by complicating everything.”

The ABC is the Pied Piper of gender ideology, leading our children off a cliff.

We ain’t in Kansas anymore, as Dorothy said.

We’ve arrived in a surreal upside down Wizard Of Oz world, where the more outlandish, the more it’s passed off as reality.

We’ve slipped off that rainbow and landed somewhere else entirely.

Radical gender ideology is also a sleeper virus that’s almost impossible to eradicate.

Lindsay says the gender ideologists themselves know this.

A recent academic article about how drag queens should be allowed in schools — published in the prestigious Curriculum Inquiry journal — included this actual quote: “We’re leaving a trail of glitter that won’t ever come out of the carpet.”

Not just a mess on the floor but a mess inside our kids’ heads.

Actually, I think Aunty has morphed into a heavy-handed Aunty Jack, the pantomime moustached truckie, wearing a dress and workboots, belligerently enforcing his way in the world.

We need to put our foot down, or tap our red slippers together, and remind ourselves there’s no place like home. And get the hell out of here.