An Observation of Hyper-Novelty

a short riff on one aspect of the "trans kid" phenomenon

The following video is going around Twitter. The tweet is here. It quite clearly shows a mother attempting to steer her son into a trans identity. She is absolutely committed to communicating to this boy that being trans will make him special and more deserving of her attention.

Young children can rarely if ever truly differentiate attention and love, so this is, in my view, quite literally an attempt to tell her son that he will be more lovable to his mother if he decides he’s a girl.

Nora @NoraUtd

389k likes on TikTok. This poor child. The parent couldn’t be any more leading if she tried…

I will spare you the ranting that this topic deserves, the wholly justifiable outraged moral condemnation. I’ve done that in other posts, including this one that goes in depth about how the “trans kid” phenomenon is moving us towards pedophilia normalization.

This post is just to comment on one aspect of the phenomenon: hyper-novelty.

Nature vs Nurture

In their book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, my friends Dr. Heather Heying and Dr. Bret Weinstein go into deep and helpful detail about exactly what kind of creatures humans are.

On the never-ending “nature vs nurture” debate, their framing is the most helpful one, accurate and nuanced: humans are not blank slates, but we are the blankest slates in nature.

Evolution is not wasteful. Our childhoods last an astonishing percentage of our lives, compared to the rest of nature, because our childhoods actually matter.

The fashionable blank slatism of (mostly) the left is wrong, but so is the genetic determinism of (mostly) the right. Childhoods matter. Developmental experiences matter. Childhood trauma is powerful and it matters, and this is still true for actual trauma even as our culture tries to dumb the definition of trauma down to “thing that made me mildly uncomfortable for a minute.” What we experience and are exposed to, how we are taught to think and react to the world as children—these become our baseline settings, and they matter.

Their book presents a full evolutionary toolkit for viewing and understanding the world, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

One of the overarching themes is this: the human niche is niche-switching, but the pace of change in our present era is damaging us.

The hyper-novelty is just too novel; it’s all happening too fast and we have to actively work to help ourselves and our loved ones understand and mitigate the damage. We have to work with and not against the facts of the kinds of creatures that humans are.

“Trans Kids” as a Hyper Novel Phenomenon

Once I processed my emotions around the video shown above, something occurred to me.

In the not-so-distant past, and especially in the era when we were letting go of stereotypes as a society and embracing more individual freedom, something was largely true about this type of parent. If you were a parent who objected to the type of kid that you had—by which I mean some immutable aspect of your child, like their sex, or some extremely-difficult-to-change-and-not-wholly-changeable aspect of your child, like their basic temperament—trying to change them was enormously expensive.

Here’s part of what I mean: imagine a man who wants a very masculine son. Maybe he was not a very masculine boy and wants to spare his son what he went through. Maybe he is a very masculine man who has just always been very masculine, and wants his son to be like him.

If that man gets a sensitive, shy son, his attempts to change that are going to cost him something. He will, if he wants a hunting partner, have to drag that boy to the woods to kill deer, and deal with the boy’s emotions, and put in a ton of work and energy and effort to try to change his son into something very different from a child who isn’t interested in going to the woods to kill anything.

Imagine a woman who wants a hyper-feminine daughter. She desperately wants her little girl to be her shopping partner, someone who loves makeup and who prizes feeling and looking pretty, someone who will help her put on beautiful dinner parties and someday have a wedding that costs more than a house.

If that woman gets the kind of daughter we used to call a tomboy, the kind of girl who wants to be an astronaut and climbs trees because they get her closer to the sky, and would far rather be taught to change the oil in the car than bake a pie crust? Well, her attempts to change that are going to be very expensive.

She will have to wrestle that girl into a dress each and every time she wants her in a dress. She will have to police her speech, body language, attitudes, and the like constantly in an attempt to reshape them.

If that father had a daughter, or that mother a son? Generally speaking, they had to get over their bullshit and change their expectations.

The phenomenon of “trans kids” has flipped this paradigm on its head.

Parents who want their kid to fit their gendered expectations no longer have to pay a high cost. They no longer pay a cost at all.

Our society now provides these parents with enormous benefits. Parents of “trans kids” are made into heroes, praised for their courage, and lauded as leaders worth following. They are made into exemplars of moral virtue.

This happened in less than a decade.

Conclusion

I don’t have any suggestions or ideas here. I don’t have any clever closing thoughts. I just noticed this, and I wanted others to notice it, too.

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