As The Daily Wire reported, Mario Lopez is in the Left’s crosshairs for making the extraordinarily correct and obvious claim that three-year-olds are psychologically incapable of choosing their own gender. Appearing on “The Candace Owens Show” a few weeks ago, Lopez explained the problem with letting toddlers make life-altering decisions for themselves:
Look, I’m never one to tell anyone how to parent their kids obviously and I think if you come from a place of love, you really can’t go wrong, but at the same time, my God, if you’re three years old and you’re saying you’re feeling a certain way or you think you’re a boy or a girl or whatever the case may be, I just think it’s dangerous as a parent to make this determination then, well, OK, then you’re going to be a boy or a girl, whatever the case may be … It’s sort of alarming and my gosh, I just think about the repercussions later on.
Sadly yet predictably, Lopez has since issued a groveling apology for saying something that any sane person ought to recognize as true. Under pressure from radical left-wing smear machines like the Human Rights Campaign and in the face of disingenuous media attacks, Lopez folded like a cheap lawn chair and disavowed his unassailable comments, calling them “ignorant” and “hurtful.”
The truth may indeed be hurtful to people who are grasping desperately to a delusion, but there is nothing remotely ignorant about observing that three-year-old children are immature and neurologically underdeveloped. What you will notice about Lopez’s critics is that none of them can explain, or will even attempt to explain, why his comments were wrong. Even Lopez himself, in his mea culpa, didn’t go into specifics about what part of his statement was incorrect. Does he now think that three-year-olds actually can decide their own gender? What new information prompted that reversal?
There is no information, of course. The Left has no coherent reasons or rational defenses when it comes to this issue (and so many other issues). They have only ideology and emotion, signifying nothing.
Here is the reality: A three-year-old child can’t reliably make any choice, in any context. Take a three-year-old to Baskin Robbins and ask him which flavor he prefers, and he will give you 14 different answers before collapsing into tears. Let a three-year-old decide what outfit he’s going to wear, and he’ll emerge from his room wearing one shoe, no pants, and a diaper on his head. Allow a three-year-old to choose his dinner and he’ll be eating a bowl of ketchup with a side of gummy bears and whipped cream. A child at that age has not developed the cognitive ability to assess a variety of options and decide which course is correct, safe, and healthy. He will not have that ability for several more years. If he grows up to be a leftist, he will never have that ability.
Of course, nobody can choose his or her own gender. That matter is irrevocably settled by our chromosomes and reproductive organs. But the leftist position here is so preposterous that even if one grants the premise that gender can theoretically be chosen, the Left would still be wrong in thinking that three-year-olds can choose it. There is a reason why toddlers are not entrusted with any legal powers or responsibilities. They cannot vote, drive, take out a mortgage, buy a gun, buy a ticket for an R-rated movie, buy alcohol, buy cigarettes, or buy anything at all because they are simply too young to do so.
Young children cannot grasp the distinction between fantasy and reality. If you tell a toddler that Batman isn’t real, he will stare at you blankly. “Isn’t real” is an empty phrase in the mind of a child. My oldest son, about four years old at the time, once tried to leap over the banister on the second floor of our house. I stopped him just in time and warned him very sternly that he must never do that again. He said he can, he’ll be fine, because Spider-Man jumps off stuff all the time. I explained that Spider-Man isn’t real. “No, you’re wrong,” he said. “I’ve seen him on TV.”
Are we supposed to believe that people this ignorant and immature — so innocently detached from reality — can make meaningful declarations about their own gender? A boy who says he is a girl doesn’t even know what a girl is. Adult leftists don’t know what a girl is, either, but at least the child has an excuse. The next time you hear a young boy make this kind of claim about himself (which many young boys do, at some point or another, because it’s a normal phase of childhood), you should respond with a simple follow up question: “What is a girl?” If you listen to his answer, you’ll quickly discover that “I’m a girl” really means something like “my sister’s dollhouse looks cool and I’d like to play with it.” His declaration of “being” a girl is really a declaration that he is interested in some of the things that his little toddler brain associates with girls.
As adults, it is our job to help children sort through this confusion. We are supposed to be the ones grounded in reality — the ones who understand the distinction between fantasy and reality. That’s the point Lopez was trying to make. And it is terrifying that so many adults in this country disagree with it.