Radical LGBT own goals

In 2012, the Indian government told the Hon’ble Supreme Court that there were about 25 lakh gay men who constituted about 0.002% of then total Indian population in India1⁠. The landmark Section 377 judgement of 2018 affected an estimated 10.4 crore (0.08%) Indians2⁠. Conservative Western counts hover around 2%3⁠. If we take this percentage and extrapolate it in Indian context considering that LGBT is universal, the figure of total gay people in India should be 2.7 crores or 2% of 135 crore.

There is no credible total LGBT figures in India which is not odd, just under-reported. When we talk of India, we talk of ideas as colonial as the British. We talk of ideas ranging from the peaceful Buddha to the raging Guru Gobind. There are about 5 lakh Ahmadis and zero Sufis. Sufis are Sunnis (like Wahhabis) who form the dominant 85% of Indian Muslims, who are opposed to all minorities, as evident from Kashmir Valley's opposition to Srinagar Pride Parade 2020.

Some recent twitter trends ran by LGBT leaders were #NoPinkWashing, #NoHomoNationalism, and #NotinOurName. These trends lack depth. LGBT appropriated the colour pink, nobody can make them anymore pinker. What does HomoNationalism even mean? Why is this absurdity cool? #NotInOurName ? Five hundred Twitter LGBT activists do not decide the fate of any community whose numbers run in crores. The ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité which came out of the French Revolution of 1789 led to the ascent of Napoleon, via the Jacobins. This blog is an attempt by a heterosexual conservative Indian LGBT ally to show truth to power and it prays not to be catalogued as fascist.

HISTORY
The idea of India is wide enough to accommodate polar opposites like British colonialism and Buddha’s peace. The dominant way of life is Sanatan. Majority follows Hinduism who are divided in innumerable brackets. Buddhists form 0.7%, they are divided into Traditional Buddhists (13%) and the newly converted Ambedkarites (87%). Sikhs, the follower of Guru Gobind, form 60% of Punjab, 1.7% of India but 20% of the Indian army. This should not be odd because war is the conserver of the Khalsa and peace a dissolvent. There are about 5 lakh Ahmadis and zero Sufis. Sufis are Sunnis (like Wahhabis) who form 85% of Indian Muslims. Muslims are interspersed throughout India forming 20% in 86 districts and majority in 19 or 2.81% districts. LGBTs belong to all castes and communities. LGBTs in India are as varied as the colours and faiths of India. They have been here even since before the idea of the law came into the human mind. They were here before humans thoughts of faith, laws, castes and class. Though, their challenge to oppression by victimhood, not merit and skills is new.

Some cultures used to burn LGBT communities at stakes, some used to put their necks on altars, some put their necks to swords, some threw them in gas-chambers, some in gulags but a few were wiser. They were simply trying earnestly to accept and accommodate LGBT. Most cultures chose to persecute LGBT while some rewarded them for merit, or at least tried to tolerate. LGBT-tolerant societies are remarkedly more compassionate than the societies who don’t. LGBT community is visible because they simply chose to. Gaga did for her generation what Bowie did 20 years earlier. She re-queered a mundane mainstream. After all, the LGBT mannerisms caricatured by people are mere exaggerations of reel life behaviour, which are in turn decided by genes which account for upto 25% of non-heterosexual behaviour. Some blend in, some blend out while some simply fake it. The ones with merit become Oscar Wilde, Alan Turing, Prince, David Bowie, Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Dutee Chand, Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King. Like all communities, LGBT-related controversies and crimes keep happening now and then. A 2012 Cambridge study shows that LGBTs tend to be more intelligent than non-LGBT individuals4⁠. This explains their heightened anxiety and empathy because higher the intelligence, higher the empathy5⁠.

Currently, India is witnessing a spike in LGBT rights activism. The problem with the Indian version of LGBT activism is that it is an urbane elitist movement that apes the West blindly without caring for the rural members who face increasing antagonization. LGBT movements rose in the 1960s. It got a massive global push in the last decade helped by the dawn of internet3⁠. The chants of this decade-old emancipatory pride parade were so high, they reached as far as Delhi, a historically war-torn and conservative city. So, how conservative is Indian society really? In 2011, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Lelyveld released a book titled ‘Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India’ which suggested that Gandhi had a homosexual relationship with his ‘soulmate’, the Lithuanian architect Dr. Hermann Kallenbach6⁠. Gujarat was quick to ban the book after which the Indian government dished out $1.28 million to purchase an archive more than 1,000 letters and documents exchanged between the two men, thus removing it from a potential public auction in London7⁠.

An ‘international’ Delhi school takes schoolchildren to LGBT pride parades annually since 20168⁠. Activists are pleading other schools to take up such initiatives but they have not found success yet because schools realise they operate in India and that acquirement of knowledge is an age-restricted process. A teenager kid is not expected to possess the wisdom of her sixty-year-old grandmother. The process of acquiring knowledge is accretionary. It proceeds step-by-step and missing any step confuses both the process and the learner.

Building block games like Legos and model construction games like Mechanix come pre-rated for eight-year-olds, eighteen-year-olds and even twenty-eight year-olds. Human life progresses in stages. Schools cede higher learning to colleges and universities. The modern trend of LGBT activism ignores (and defies) this simple wisdom. It rises in defiance and claims a good share of the media narrative. This worries conservative and traditional societies. The noble intentions of internationalist schools and individualist activists are brave but these intentions risk being deemed bravado if they do not factor in the handicaps that plague Indian schools and societies. Like all emancipatory movements that are driven by ideas, passion, purpose, empathy and alienation, the LGBT movement in India wants too much too quick while risking all that it has gained so far.

TOO FAST, TOO FURIOUS

In a rush to look ‘cool’, many LGBT activists don ‘anti-establishment’ garbs. They frequently forget that where there is no law, there is no freedom. They forget that individuals do not come into the world as fully formed adults. They forget that forcing gender issues on people is as wrong as people forcing gender issues on LGBT. They forget that kids gain wisdom through trial & error. Radical LGBT activists probably paint children as mini-adults. A common thread running through the ‘anti-establishment’ fan club in all communities is their ignorance and contempt of the simple truth that the maximum amount of freedom permissible for individuals must be consistent with maintenance of social order.


Section 377 was decriminalised, re-criminalised and again decriminalised within the span of a decade after standing strong in oft-misuse for 157 long years until it was fell by a modern and forward-looking honourable Supreme Court. The draconian victorian law vaguely says that ‘Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine’. The quick pace of upheaval is proving too much for a slow-moving Indian society to tolerate. LGBT community’s insistence on speed of changes, rather than quality of change creates chasms between Indians who support LGBT, Indians who tolerate LGBT, Indians who oppose LGBT and Indians who are LGBTs.

Thankfully for India, it is not a theocracy or a monarchy. Even the most radical of elements would agree that India is a nation of nations, an ocean of oceans, that India is an idea bound by the Indian ocean in the South and the Himalayas in the North. Thankfully current crop of Indian politicians are too prude to even mention LGBTs in a political rally. How long before a younger and more ‘cool’ set of leaders start utilising the sexual and gender fissures to seek votes? Faiths can afford politics, movements can not. Indian LGBT community’s steps risk being cut short by rising alienation within a democracy that debates and discusses facts before legislating.

LGBT pride parades are about gender and sexual rights. Their roots lie in the Pre-Lenten carnivals9⁠ and festivals which evolved after emancipation from French planters. The planters were shocked that the freed slaves were not vengeful but instead taking to the streets, beating drums, dancing and chanting songs merrily. Modern carnivals retain this tradition of handing the streets over to the people who become living art. São Paulo in Brazil has the most traditional LGBT groups of street Carnival in the world10⁠. Pre-Carnival pride parades are led by ‘Minhoqueens’, a street Carnival group celebrating drag queens with a lot of gay divas and pop music.

For many this is a time to party, while some make serious artistic, intellectual statements and political commentary. The intellect and politics influence impressionable minds. The pride parades in the West are child-friendly events that people have grown accustomed to over a long period of time, while India has just come out of the closet, energising many who stayed silent. Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher spoke of carnivals as events where all rules, inhibitions, restrictions and regulations which determined the course of everyday life were suspended along with all forms of hierarchies in societies, where everything banned was suddenly allowed, where eccentricity was permitted and where profanity defeated piety. Indian LGBT activists risk riling a pious conservative society if they turn the volume of profanities up because law is not free to treat school-going juveniles as adults and it is more often than not sympathetic to college-going truants.

The growth of LGBT activism in the West was not smooth. In Nazi Germany Jews wore yellow stars, gay men wore large pink triangles, Romanis wore brown triangles, political prisoners wore red, criminals wore green, immigrants wore blue, Jehovah's Witnesses wore purple, asocial people like prostitutes and lesbians wore Black11⁠. After World War II, the growth in LGBT movement happened in spurts and it ignored societal thresholds of tolerance, which in turned helped the religious opposition to consolidate thus making the path to civic liberty bumpy. It exploded after the Stonewall Riots of 1969 which kicked off the global movement12⁠. The resentment had been brewing for long which resulted in ensuing violence.

Before activists jump on the sexual revolution boat they must understand that Indian democracy, unlike the West, did not get the luxury of time. LGBT activists seek rapid change in a stagnant, traditional, and delicately balanced Indian society which puts them on a collision course that might undo all their gains. The society is too big and too complex. They can not revolutionise it. They can only influence a wee bit. Involving schoolkids in sexual revolutions will vex parents, increase parental fears which LGBT dislike and ridicule. They choose to ignore the fact that the parental guard against LGBT is as genetic as the LGBT genes because gay sons and lesbian daughters can not reproduce naturally. Parent-hating radicalised class like the Antifa rioters in the USA are zipping around burning shops and cars, playing their versions of Grand Theft Auto.

BULLIES

The LGB part of LGBT is sexual. Lesbian is a self-label for a woman whose sexual and emotional attractions are for other women. Gay is a self-label for a person whose sexual and emotional attractions are for the same sex, typically in reference to men. Bisexual is a term used to refer to a person whose sexual orientation, behaviour and interest include both the same and other sex. The T in LGBT stands for Transgender - an umbrella term for people whose gender expression is non-conforming and/or whose gender identity is different from their birth sex. Then there are gender-nonconforming people may or may not identify as LGBT. Compared to peers who reported low levels of school victimization, LGBT young adults reported high levels of school victimization during adolescence. They are 2.6x more likely to report clinical levels of depression, 5.6x more likely to report having attempted suicide, 5.6x more likely to report a suicide attempt that required medical care and 2x more likely to have been diagnosed with virus-like HIV13⁠.

India is fond of aping Western trends. A poll of more than 1,000 teachers working in UK primary or secondary schools revealed that 13% of children are bullied because of their sexuality. This is compared to 11% because of their race, 7% because of their gender and 2% because of their religion. The bullying is not one-sided. LGBT are severely bullied within LGBT circles too, often living lives of a hostage to self-created portraits, much like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Militant activism does not help when Indian governments and schools can barely provide safety to kids. Activists, governments and schools have no right to preach sexual morality or sexual violence because of misplaced revolutionary zeal. The mean age of self-identification as lesbian or gay is around 16 for all genders. The age group between 14-18 can be safely said to be most vulnerable to peer pressure, pop-culture and forced homogenization of ideas.

For each year children delay labeling themselves as LGBT, the suicide risk is reduced by 20%. A lot of children are just confused, perhaps, terribly confused because of lack of media literacy. 94% of school-age kids who identify as transgenders grow out of their desire to change genders as adults if parents and schools stop encouraging them to internalize and publicize their LGBT identities14⁠. How high is the bullying pressure exactly? Dr. Robert Spitzer, a leading figure in the study of homosexuality whose work was embraced and celebrated by LGBT rights activists until he authored a study in 2003. The abstract of this study finished with the line: “Thus, there is evidence that change in sexual orientation following some form of reparative therapy does occur in some gay men and lesbians.” He was suggesting that ‘highly motivated’ individuals can reorient sexual behaviour. The LGBT juggernaut and Transgender rights activists brought immense pressure on him, eventually extracting an apology in 2012 from the eighty-year-old veteran. This despite Dr Robert Spritzer being the one to have earlier led the movement which resulted in 1973 declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness in the US15⁠.

With Assembly Bill 1266, California became the first American state to require public schools to allow transgender students to use restrooms and participate on sports teams matching the gender with which they identify, rather than their biological sex. Indian kids die in schools with disturbing frequency, sometimes simply by having mid day meal or visiting washrooms. Students who were questioning their sexual orientation reported the most bullying, the most homophobic victimization, the most drug use, the most feelings of depression and suicidality, and more truancy than either heterosexual or LGB students. A positive school climate and a lack of homophobic victimization moderated the differences among sexual orientation status and outcomes16⁠.

Transgender activists pressure both doctors and parents to consent to “gender-affirming medical treatment” for children who otherwise likely would grow to accept their bodies. Such treatment typically starts with puberty blockers at age 8, cross-sex hormones at 14, and genital surgery for boys as young as 17. Western schools are hiring drag-queens as part of LGBT awareness. This is too much activism not just for comfort, but also for common sense. A young American transgender writer, Andrea Long Chu whose book ‘On Liking Women’ is credited with launching ‘the second wave’ of trans studies described Gender Dysphoria in an opinion piece - “Dysphoria feels like being unable to get warm, no matter how many layers you put on. It feels like hunger without appetite. It feels like getting on an airplane to fly home, only to realize mid-flight that this is it: You’re going to spend the rest of your life on an airplane. It feels like grieving. It feels like having nothing to grieve¹⁷⁠.” This account is disturbing but it is what it is. Gender is more about mind than the body.

Even a cool President like Obama admitted that even the best studies do not report improvement after reassignment surgery. Chu acknowledged in her opinion piece “I was not suicidal before hormones. Now I often am.” Leon Kass, a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago says, “Today a doctor is often seen as nothing more than a highly competent hired syringe¹⁸⁠.” Dr. Ryan T. Anderson of The Heritage Foundation notes - “If a patient wants to fix her nose or change his gender, determine the sex of unborn children, or take euphoriant drugs just for kicks, the physician can and will go to work, provided that the price is right and that the contract is explicit about what happens if the customer isn’t satisfied¹⁹⁠.” Chu claimed in her opinion that she was “engaged in ‘compassion-mongering’, peddling bigotry in the guise of sympathetic concern”. Transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men.

Dr. Paul McHugh, professor and former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Medical School wrote in an opinion piece that all, including Bruce Jenner, become feminized men or masculinized women, counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with which they ‘identify’. Over the last ten or fifteen years, this phenomenon has increased exponentially. Although transgender who choose for gender re-assignment may be encouraged by public reception, they must know that young children and adults generally come to their ideas about their sex not through erotic interests but through a variety of youthful psychosocial conflicts and concerns²⁰⁠.” Gender dysphoria has become cool like Emo culture which normalised self-harm and GTA like video games that have normalised school shootings and suicides. Whether people may like it or not, gender dysphoria is a disorder anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder. McHugh writes in his piece, “Its treatment should not be directed at the body as with surgery and hormones any more than one treats obesity-fearing anorexic patients with liposuction. The treatment should strive to correct the false, problematic nature of the assumption and to resolve the psychosocial conflicts provoking it²¹⁠.”

Dr Paul McHugh

Instagram savvy young girls believe that a sexy appearance brings them power because it gets them attention from potential ‘friends’, groomers and online predators. The belief that girls are sexual objects starts from boys’ tendency to sexually harass girls in school and it affects young girls adversely. Sexual harassment by boys and men is a regular part of school and work-life. Internet is merely furthering the numbness. In US schools Peers perpetrate 79% of the sexual harassment in schools and much of this harassment is in the form of sexual jokes, leering, touching or grabbing areas like the breasts or buttocks, and comments on physical appearance22⁠. The consequences of sexual harassment are far-reaching, can be long-lasting and personality altering at great costs to schools and consequences to society in general.

One study of the estimated economic cost of sexual harassment in the U.S.Army, for example, found that in one year alone, the cost of sexual harassment was over $250 billion23⁠. The difference between American and Indian approaches towards children can be gathered from the fact that Americans start teaching their kids the importance and usage of 911 from the age of four24⁠ while Indian children are the most malnourished kids on the sad face of Earth. They are weak physically25⁠. Children and teenagers now a days hold their parents hostage. More the privilege, tighter the grip. Schools must look into their wards’ health and safety first, sexual revolution can wait because schools can not handle the bullying and depression that will come dressed as pop-culture. There is absolutely no need to push the revolutionary new pills down the simple, caring and protective Indian parents’ throat. Let them be. They are old. The world is crazy. The economy is down. Everybody is scared. It is a humane thing to do. This is normal and natural, seemingly ‘cool’ cancel culture is not cool in real life. It is alienating.

FORCE

LGBT community is often demonised as encouraging paedophillic behavior. These allegations are results of the community’s militant activism and general homophobia. Members of disliked minority groups are often stereotyped as representing a danger to the majority's most vulnerable members. At any given time a child is more at risk of molestation from heterosexuals than homosexuals. Gregory Herek26⁠ of University of California at Davis writes in his blog "The empirical research does not show that gay or bisexual men are any more likely than heterosexual men to molest children." Herek adds that those who study paedophilia say that one cannot make the association between sexual attraction towards children and sexual orientation, gay or straight. He maintains that child molesters cannot be described as homosexuals, heterosexuals, or bisexuals because they are not incapable of an adult relationship.

Whatever the causal route, sexual orientation may or may not be a choice. Even prepubertal erotic experiences can evolve into irreversible sexual orientations. The popular ‘anti-discriminatory’ and ‘anti-establishment’ motived political correctness does not factor in complex and postnatal developmental factors that bring more harm than good. The technical and accurate term for kids who may be potential gays and lesbians is Prehomosexual. It conveys both disturbing biological determinism and clinical interventionism. The stereotypes range from an unusually effeminate and solitary little boy coupled with interests in dolls, makeup, princesses, dresses and dislike for rough play with other boys to little girls with outwardly boyish personality with an aversion to all the perfumed, delicate, laced trappings of femininity. These behaviours tell parents about their child’s sexuality which leads to fear, loath and onset of adult homosexuality. A cross-cultural data published by Fernando Luiz Cardoso of Santa Catarina State University in 2008 showed that young pre-homosexual males are attracted to solitary sports, such as swimming, cycling, or tennis, over rougher contact sports, such as football or soccer, and also that they are less likely to be childhood bullies. It is fashionable these days to say that one is born gay, but if we think more critically, it’s nonsensical and probably criminal to refer to a newborn infant as being homosexual.

In looking carefully at the childhoods of now-gay adults, researchers find early behavioural indicators that homosexuals seem to have in common. J. Michael Bailey, a psychologist from Northwestern University, and Canadian psychiatrist Kenneth Zucker¹⁴⁠ published the seminal paper on childhood markers of homosexuality with their controversial 1995 review article in Developmental Psychology. Their aim “was to review the evidence concerning the possible association between childhood sex-typed behaviour and adult sexual orientation.” Their work wasn’t about identifying the causes of homosexuality but about indexing the childhood correlation of same-sex attraction. It simply meant to index the non-erotic behavioural clues that best predicted which child will turn gay and which won't. Unsurprisingly, the most salient sex-typed behaviours were observed in the domain of play. Boys engage in what developmental psychologists refer to as 'rough-and-tumble play' whereas girls are calmer. Little boys tend to gravitate towards toy guns and cars while girls like hyperfeminized dolls. Young kids of both sexes are imaginative so they pretend-play, but the roles that the two sexes prefer are gender-segregated by as early as two years of age.

Bailey and Zucker hypothesized that homosexuals show an inverted pattern of sex-typed childhood behaviours measurable over a Kinsey scale over a long time, usually 16 years. As with all approaches, this too is not fail-safe. In 2008, University of Toronto psychologist Kelley Drummond interviewed 25 adult women who, as children between 3-12 years of age, were referred by their parents for assessment at a mental health clinic. As adults, only 12% of these women grew up to be gender dysphoric which is the uncomfortable sense that one’s biological sex does not match one’s gender identity. The researchers found that the odds of these women reporting a bisexual/homosexual orientation was up to 23x higher than would normally occur in a general sample of young women.

Bailey and Zucker revealed 89% of randomly sampled gay men recalled cross-sex-typed childhood behaviours exceeding the heterosexual median. Critics say participants’ memories may be distorted to fit with societal expectations and stereotypes but in 2008 Northwestern University’s Gerulf Rieger gathered evidence from childhood home videos validating the retrospective method. There is evidence of 'Dosage effect' - the more gender-nonconforming characteristics there are in childhood, the more likely it is that a homosexual/bisexual orientation will be present in adulthood.

Kenneth Zucker

Michael Bailey

Although gender-atypical behaviour in childhood is strongly correlated with adult homosexuality, it is still an imperfect correlation. Not all little boys who like to wear dresses grow up to be gay, nor do all little girls who despise dresses become lesbians. Researchers readily concede that there are multiple and very complicated developmental routes to adult homosexuality. Heritable, biological factors interact with environmental experiences to produce phenotypic outcomes. Those children who show pronounced sex-atypical behaviors may have more genetic load towards homosexuality, whereas gay adults who were sex-typical as children might trace their homosexuality more directly to particular childhood experiences. A 2010 Archives of Sexual Behavior report hint intriguingly that men, but not women, who were sexually abused as children are significantly more likely than non-abused males to have had homosexual relationships as adults.

PRIORITIES

The 2015-16 All-India Survey on Higher Education calculated total enrolment in Indian higher education at 34.5 crores. In line with 19^th century Victorian English attitudes, Indian edcuation system is focused on discipline, not intelligence or innovation that are much needed in the present 21^st century. Indian education has more chinks than armour. All armours have chinks so India had its own before it copied some more chinks from the West, in order to blend in the West. This is because Indian universities were built for clerical training not innovation. Indian universities have failed to create one major political philosophy different from the West. In IT engineer lingo, India is systematically trained for maintenance not development. It would be wise to get a reality check.

As per Census 2011, India has 37.24 crore kids in the age group 0-14 years constituting 30.76% of the total population. This huge population translates to India holding the despicable distinction of having world's largest number of child sexual abuses cases. India stand horrified because it knows in its heart that hiding within statistics are real numbers and real young humans. A child less than 16 years is raped every 155th minute. Every 13th hour, a child under 10 is raped. 1 in 10 children have been sexually abused at any point of time. Every second Indian kid is being exposed to one or the other form of sexual abuse and every fifth child faces critical forms of it27⁠. As is evident, Indian schools have failed in protecting students like Indian universities and governments.

A UNICEF survey on demographic and health in India reported that 10% of Indian girls might have experienced sexual violence when they were 10–14 years of age and 30% during 15–19 years of age. Overall, nearly 42% of Indian girls have seen sexual violence before teenage. In 95% cases, the perpetrator is known to the child as relatives, neighbors, step parents and other highly trusted people while kids belonging to the lower socio-economic status are at higher risk28⁠. The issue of sexual abuse is a taboo in India due to fear of indignity, denial, social stigma, mistrust in government, misdemeanour by govrnement and communication gaps between parents and children. A 2018 UNESCO survey on sexual orientation and gender identity related violence in schools of Tamil Nadu is eye-opening. 60% and 50% of the sexual/gender minority youth kids surveyed said they were victims of physical bullying when they were respectively in middle/high school and higher secondary school, while 43% of respondents said that they were sexually harassed when they were in primary school. Only 18% of participants reported such bullying to school authorities and 53% said that school authorities took some action against bullies. The consequences of bullying were quite harsh: 73% had reduced social interactions with their peers; 70% suffered suffered from anxiety and depression; 70% said they lost concentration in studies; 63% reported lower academic performance; and 53% reported having skipped classes About a third (33.2%) said bullying played a key role in discontinuing schools29⁠.

The New York Times just reported that more than 4.5 crore online photos and videos of children being sexually abused were reported by tech companies, more than double what they found the previous year. India Child Protection Fund (ICPF) in a report titled Child Sexual Abuse Material in India mapped 100 Indian cities and towns to find a steep increase in demand for searches like “child porn”, “sexy child” and “teen sex videos,” along with an increase in traffic by 95% during the Chinese virus lockdown. Wishing an obvious problem to go away magically will not make it go. The American Academy of Pediatrics reports that in the United States, 42% of children between 10 and 17 have viewed pornography online.

A Bangalore based NGO, Rescue, reported in 2015 that 70% of students who were surveyed had watched porn from the age of 10 years. Besides, 31% of the boys interviewed watched violent porn content and 93% of the boys admitted that porn was as drugs while 86% of the boys admitted that watching porn does lead to sexual activities. Even if these high numbers are considered exaggerations and halved, for example let’s say 86% is halved to 43% to counter exaggerations, does it make the situation better? 53% children in India between the ages of 5 and 12 have been subjected to some form of sexual abuse. Laws like POCSO are stringent but how many kids can reach the court? Majority of cases are not reported and settled within familial and official institutions. The lack of trust in law is natural because justice is simply inaccessible in India. Like all political leaders, university and school leaders prefer vote bank over conscience. LGBT leaders are walking into a trap by making their movement political. Gender must be kept above politics because it is universal just like human rights. Hyper-active LGBT activists risk trapping their colorful community in majoritarian-minoritarian politics.

Social media also has become the prime hunting ground for sex traffickers. In March 2019, Instagram was the leading social media platform for child grooming by sexual predators. A recent poll of 2,000 teens found that nearly 75% had received pornographic direct messages from strangers, even if they had a private account. And 55% of victims of sex trafficking in 2015 met their abuser through a website, app, or text^30,31. The sexualization of children is occurring in brick-and-mortar spaces too. India urgently requires to check media led objectification and sexualization. Kids have a right to grow and learn in safe spaces. Indian schools are simply not safe enough to become a place where children are exposed to sex apart from sex-ed. Schools can start with making media studies as a subject compulsory while making sex-ed universal. The need is growing strong as we learned from the shocking Bois Locker Room scandal.

Vanity, validation and victimhood encouraging social media websites have taken the lead in influencing impressionable minds. Parents have yielded parenting to technology. Students in colleges are taught to be apologetic about history and feel victimised. Universities which are products of thousands of years of human wisdom are reduced to politics in name of activism. An explosion of LGBT activism was bound to awe and antagonise because genes prefer procreation and recreation, not depletion. Current LGBT-related discourse acts dry while swimming in the dour seas of cynicism and victimhood.

CONCLUSION

Well-meaning experts tell parents to cultivate little prehomosexual’s native talents so the ultimate genetic payoff could be larger with one very special gay child than it would if ten mediocre straight offsprings. Parents and schools agree that there is a time and place for kids to have fun and a time and place for adults to do the same. Kids come with responsibilities and some spaces are simply not age-appropriate for them. Indian pride parades can be deemed child-friendly only if they follow no-alcohol, no-drugs, no-nudity rules.

Drug usage has risen amongst the youth, along with internet brought perversity and numbness. Schools and universities can not be allowed to over-rule the parents or nature. If they value democracy and sanity, they must liberate the children so they feel safe and brave enough to live normal painless lives, instead of recruiting them for pride parades. Human welfare and progress does not lie in aping, it is rooted in innovation because had it been otherwise, humans would still have been apes in green jungles. Indian LGBT must stop aping the Left or the West just because ‘anti-establishment’ looks cool because it does not. It looks juvenile and desperate. Life and the internet is more than just memes. We live in a world where teenagers often talk of depression as if it's cool. Merely branding something as cool by social media influencers does not make it cool in the sense the original word means. LGBT-related issues need sensitivity and empathy, not pressure and hate. Just like radicals on all sides harm society in general, radicals in LGBT harm themselves.

1. India has 2.5m gays, government tells supreme court - BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-17363200.

2. Section 377 verdict: Section 377: Here’s everything you need to know | Whats is Section 377? https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/sc-delivers-historic-verdict-heres-everything-you-need-to-know-about-section-377/articleshow/65698429.cms?from=mdr.

3. What Percentage of the Population Is Gay? https://news.gallup.com/poll/6961/what-percentage-population-gay.aspx.

4. Kanazawa, S. Intelligence and homosexuality. J. Biosoc. Sci. 44, 595–623 (2012).

5. INTELLIGENCE AND HOMOSEXUALITY | Journal of Biosocial Science | Cambridge Core. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial-science/article/intelligence-and-homosexuality/E07585DD50D9924C677EFC7B6060AB0A.

6. Gandhi Timeline - Life Chronology of Mahatma Gandhi. https://gandhiashramsabarmati.org/en/the-mahatma/life-chronology.html.

7. Indian Government Spends $1.3 Million To Stop Auction Of Gandhi Letters That May Show He Was Gay | HuffPost India. https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/india-government-buys-gandhi-letters-to-stop-auction_n_1668466?ri18n=true.

8. Tagore International School, Vasant Vihar. http://tagoreint.com/vv/V2.0/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1863.

9. Top 10 Pre-Lenten Celebrations - Travel - National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/top-10/pre-lenten-carnivals/.

10. The LGBT side of Carnival in Brazil. https://www.washingtonblade.com/2018/02/07/lgbt-side-carnival-brazil/.

11. What Is the Meaning of the Pink Triangle? From Nazi Label to Gay Pride Symbol - HISTORY. https://www.history.com/news/pink-triangle-nazi-concentration-camps.

12. What Happened at the Stonewall Riots? A Timeline of the 1969 Uprising - HISTORY. https://www.history.com/news/stonewall-riots-timeline.

13. Childhood/Adolescence - The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People - NCBI Bookshelf. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK64808/.

14. Is your child a ‘prehomosexual’? Forecasting adult sexual orientation - Scientific American Blog Network. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/is-your-child-a-prehomosexual-forecasting-adult-sexual-orientation/.

15. Moran, M. Spitzer Issues Apology for Study Supporting Reparative Therapy. Psychiatr. News 47, 1b – 23 (2012).

16. Psychological Consequences for High School Students of Having Been Sexually Harassed | Request PDF. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226590992_Psychological_Consequences_for_High_School_Students_of_Having_Been_Sexually_Harassed.

17. Opinion | My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy - The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sunday/vaginoplasty-transgender-medicine.html.

18. Sex Change: Physically Impossible, Psychosocially Unhelpful, and Philosophically Misguided - Public Discourse. https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2018/03/21151/.

19. New York Times Reveals Painful Truths About ‘Sex Change’ Surgery | The Heritage Foundation. https://www.heritage.org/gender/commentary/new-york-times-reveals-painful-truths-about-sex-change-surgery.

20. Sex Reassignment Doesn’t Work. Here Is the Evidence. | The Heritage Foundation. https://www.heritage.org/gender/commentary/sex-reassignment-doesnt-work-here-the-evidence.

21. Transgenderism: A Pathogenic Meme - Public Discourse. https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/06/15145/.

22. How School Bullying Impacts Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Young Adults. http://mcclellandinstitute.arizona.edu.

23. Sims, C. S., Drasgow, F. & Fitzgerald, L. F. The effects of sexual harassment on turnover in the military: Time-dependent modeling. Journal of Applied Psychology vol. 90 1141–1152 (2005).

24. When should I teach my child to call 911? | Parents. https://www.parents.com/toddlers-preschoolers/safety/when-should-i-teach-my-child-to-call-911/.

25. Height of Indians growing at one of the slowest rates in the world: Study. https://www.livemint.com/Politics/MykyWXJ0bGCLcvZLSw4KoK/Height-of-Indians-growing-at-one-of-the-slowest-rates-in-the.html.

26. Facts About Homosexuality and Child Molestation. https://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_molestation.html.

27. Over 53% children face sexual abuse: Survey | India News - Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Over-53-children-face-sexual-abuse-Survey/articleshow/1881344.cms.

28. (No Title). https://www.unicef.org/sitan/files/SitAn_India_May_2011.pdf.

29. New study on bullying based on sexual orientation and gender identity in schools in Tamil Nadu, India. https://en.unesco.org/news/new-study-bullying-based-sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity-schools-tamil-nadu-india.

30. Wolak, J., Finkelhor, D., Mitchell, K. J. & Ybarra, M. L. Online ‘Predators’ and Their Victims: Myths, Realities, and Implications for Prevention and Treatment. Am. Psychol. 63, 111–128 (2008).

31. Babchishin, K. M., Hanson, R. K. & Hermann, C. A. The characteristics of online sex offenders: A meta-analysis. Sex. Abus. J. Res. Treat. 23, 92–123 (2011).