Capitalizing on Stolen Childhood
Castration and the Pied Piper’s new colonialism
Donovan Cleckley, “Capitalizing on Stolen Childhood,” The 11th Hour Blog, June 5, 2022, https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/capitalizing-on-stolen-childhood.
You have seized, in the name of God, the
Child’s crust from famine’s dole;
You have taken the price of its body
And sung a mass for its soul!
- Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Gods and the People,” 18971
Children figure most curiously into politics and religion, filling the role of canvases for others’ desires rather than anything truly of their self-determination. A child learns that she or he cannot exist without existing for somebody else, finding herself or himself denied being in a fundamental way. In her 2012 book Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl observes that adults subject children to fantasy and fiction. “In narcissistic childism,” she writes, “children are blank pieces of paper on which an adult’s story is written.”2 They become more doll than human, more artificial than authentic in the search of “the true self” by way of aesthetics. The child becomes one who desperately seeks the validation of identity from those around her or him, lacking a sense of self. The body and mind become used to “being” in nonbeing—and the child feels lost, with childhood stolen.
The concept of “transcendence” by social and medical transition certainly seems well-marketed to an extreme degree—and increasingly seductive to children. Jennifer Bilek observes that the commercialization around the practice of transitioning amounts to “the glamorization of body dissociation.”3 The rise in young people effectively disabling themselves and removing healthy body parts coincides with the industry and its technology. But the melody has been one played long before. We may think of Robert Browning’s 1842 poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin, a Child’s Story,” in which he dramatizes the folktale involving the Pied Piper. In short, the children of Hamelin become the payment to the piper, entranced and following his song “with shouting and laughter.”4
In her recent investigative work for Reduxx, Genevieve Gluck has written about how the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) has included the category of “eunuch” among potential “gender identities.”5 She has explored the historical background involving the castration of children for adults—mostly a cultural practice serving male sexuality. For historical evidence, Gluck references Laura Engelstein’s 1999 book Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom in which Engelstein writes of the Skoptsy.6 Having emerged in the 1760s from the flagellants, the Skoptsy drew their inspiration from the Bible, particularly Matthew 19:12, which reads:
For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.
Led by men regarded as “sacred” and served by its most devout women, this religious cult subjected human beings to “fiery baptisms,” which involved mutilating genitalia and, for women, removing breasts. The drive to be dismembered originated in a fundamental hatred of the body’s sex and sexuality, made subordinate to religious identity. It became illustrative of the triumph over the flesh, thereby allowing “transcendence” from nature, or imperfection, toward “holiness”—perfection. Previously, Bilek had drawn startling parallels between Kondratiy Ivanovich Selivanov, a founder of the Skoptsy sect, and Martine Rothblatt, an instrumental figure in the legal institutionalization of “gender identity.”7
A moment from Engelstein’s 1997 essay “From Heresy to Harm: Self-Castrators in the Civic Discourse of Late Tsarist Russia” seems especially applicable to the dynamic of the Pied Piper. On the children involved with the Skoptsy, Engelstein writes:
There are also many examples of children being put to the knife, sometimes by relatives who adopted the faith. Children also came into contact with the Skoptsy after being hired from their parents to work as apprentices and servants. Once among the sectarians, the children were raised in the spirit of the creed and allegedly kept from contact with their families. When questioned in court, almost all said they had sought castration of their own free will, as the road to salvation.8
The separation of children from their families had been to effectively control them. It remains so today. A difference between then and now, however, is the industrialization, which has given a greater power to what originally had been an isolated cult practice. Social media has been another critical development in the mainstreaming of today’s more technological ideology of castration. With both profit and propaganda, the old dynamic has been radically magnified in new ways. Techno-idolatry, which I have previously discussed, has replaced, in a secular form, the original religious justification.9
When Stella Perrett sent me the illustration to accompany this essay, she brilliantly noted that, in the traditional folktale, the children do not meet a cruel fate. They are neither maimed nor murdered. Rather, as Perrett wrote, they “ended up re-emerging in a neighboring country and starting a new village, but with no memories of where they came from.” However, she added, “in our dystopia,” as we may well see it, the same good fortune will not be ours. “Very few,” Perrett wrote, “will re-emerge, and none without damage.”10
Far more than childhood will have been cruelly stolen, for the harm done to the body will remain long after the song of transcendence has grown hollow and, then, ended in silence. Victims will soon become survivors, advocating for better care, demanding more ethical treatment, not only for themselves but also for others. But, for so many, it will be much too late—that I know. Let us recall a line from Blake’s 1794 poem “A Little Boy Lost”: “The weeping parents wept in vain.”
“In war, children are stolen,” Hawthorne writes in her 2020 book Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy. “Colonisation results in the theft of children and their acculturation to the colonising culture.” This ideology, she argues, appears present in the kind of deified technology seizing children under transgenderism. Hawthorne writes:
Children caught in this neoliberal cultural revolution underpinned by queer theory, lose not only their past (interrupted by massive numbers of medical and psychological appointments which makes them medically dependent for life) but also their future.11
And, no, the new theft of children is not even remotely like teenagers aging into young adulthood and coming out as lesbian and gay, usually after years of feeling different from peers. First and foremost, homosexuality does not involve becoming a lifelong medical patient. The analogy between being homosexual and being medicalized for so-called “gender dysphoria” always has been false. How the clear and present difference has not been obvious has illustrated the power of forced teaming.12
In fact, the early gay liberation movement opposed precisely this kind of pseudo-religious and pseudo-scientific regime that, in the guise of psychiatry, largely targeted homosexual nonconformity to sex-role stereotyping.13 However, medical violence has become increasingly mainstreamed, for great profit, now sold to the masses as “mental health care” and “suicide prevention.” But we must object buying into the straight lie that makes our bodies into commodities. The industry merely wants to make capital from our very flesh and discard us when there remains nothing left to be harvested.
There will be those of us who perpetrated, collaborated, witnessed, and, most vitally, protested this medical violence. Unlike in the folktale, where every child forgot, remembrance will be a haunting thing for society’s new child—and for us all.
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Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Gods and the People,” 1897, in The Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre: Poems, Essays, Sketches, and Stories, 1885-1911, ed. Alexander Berkman, 1914 (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 52.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 247.
Jennifer Bilek, “The Allure of Body Dissociation,” The 11th Hour Blog, January 18, 2021, https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/the-allure-of-body-dissociation.
On the use of “Pied Piper,” there was a notorious case in the UK press of a man named Warwick Spinks, described as “the Pied Piper of paedophiles,” even the UK’s “most wanted child abuser,” who, after fleeing, blended in with the gay community in Prague.
See James Kirchick, “The Monster at the Bar,” The Spectator, May 25, 2013, 26-27. Online: “When the Bloke in the Bar Turns Out to Be a Paedophile,” https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/when-the-bloke-in-the-bar-turns-out-to-be-a-paedophile:
Though Willem’s victims are surely fewer than those of the late Jimmy Savile, his alleged crimes are still more ghastly. In 1995, Lewes Crown Court sentenced him to seven years in jail for charges including sexual assault at knifepoint, taking indecent images of children, and drugging a 14-year-old homeless boy and selling him into sexual slavery in the Netherlands. A harrowing 1997 report by the Guardian had him boasting to an undercover policeman of how he rounded up ‘chickens’ (paedophile slang for underage boys) across Europe to work as prostitutes. A 17-year-old told of a conversation in which Willem pointed to a group of young boys on the street in Amsterdam and said that he would pay £200 or £300 for each. A Birmingham man recalled Willem showing up outside a club holding an eight-year-old boy’s hand, explaining that he had to ‘make a delivery’.
But none of these revelations could top the most horrifying allegation, lent some credence by his conversations with undercover officers, that Willem was involved in the sale (and possible production) of ‘snuff films,’ in which young boys were sexually abused, tortured and murdered on camera.
In 1996, a year after his trial, Willem’s sentence was reduced on appeal from seven to five years. The following year, he was awarded parole after having served 30 months. Part of the agreement was that he must remain in the UK for the duration of his probationary period. He promptly fled to the Continent.
After having been involved in selling boys into sexual slavery to other men, disseminating if not creating films involving boys sexually abused, tortured, and then murdered, in 2001, Spink wrote a letter to the Prague Post complaining about police raids getting in the way of “underage gay prostitution”—that is, gay men like himself sex trafficking boys. Efforts to stop men from buying and selling boys, Spink argued, constitute “the way the Czech Republic violates basic human rights.” Kirchick attributes Spink’s prolonged evasion of justice to “the residue of communism” rather than considering why Spink became “a mainstay of Prague’s expatriate gay community” after being sentenced for various crimes against children.
Genevieve Gluck, “Top Trans Medical Association Collaborated with Castration, Child Abuse Fetishists,” Reduxx, May 17, 2022, https://reduxx.info/top-trans-medical-association-collaborated-with-castration-child-abuse-fetishists. See also Genevieve Gluck, “Castrating Children in the Service of Male Sexuality,” Women’s Voices, December 3, 2021, https://genevievegluck.substack.com/castrating-children-in-the-service.
See Laura Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
Jennifer Bilek, “Martine Rothblatt—A Modern Day Kondratiy Ivanovich Selivanov?,” The 11th Hour Blog, October 20, 2021, https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/martine-rothblatt-a-modern-day-ivanovich-selivanov.
Laura Engelstein, “From Heresy to Harm: Self-Castrators in the Civil Discourse of Late Tsarist Russia,” in Empire and Society: New Approaches to Russian History, eds. Teruyuki Hara and Kimitaka Matsuzato (Sapporo: Hokkaido University Slavic Research Center, 1997), 6-7.
See Donovan Cleckley, “Techno-Idolatry in Transhumanism,” The 11th Hour Blog, May 1, 2022, https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/techno-idolatry-in-transhumanism.
Conversation with Stella Perrett, May 17, 2022.
Susan Hawthorne, Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy (Mission Beach, Australia: Spinifex Press, 2020), 201-202.
See Dr. Em, “Forced Teaming, Feminism, LGB and ‘Trans Rights,’” Uncommon Ground Media, May 25, 2020, https://uncommongroundmedia.com/forced-teaming-feminism-lgb-and-trans-rights.
See Abram J. Lewis, “‘We Are Certain of Our Own Insanity’: Antipsychiatry and the Gay Liberation Movement, 1968-1980,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 25, no. 1 (2016): 83-113. https://doi.org/10.7560/JHS25104.