Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

by Helen Joyce

In the late 1960s, some European liberals thought that breaking down sexual taboos was a task that had to be started young. In German kindergartens run along radical-left lines, teachers encouraged children to fondle them, view pornography and simulate sexual intercourse. Contemporaneous accounts show that parents often felt qualms, which they suppressed because of what they had been told about how children should naturally behave. What happened was child-abuse, though motivated by political conviction rather than sexual desire. But it did not take long before paedophiles saw their chance. The leaders of the sexual revolution were men whose aims were to legalise homosexuality – and, in some cases, to smash the heterosexual family unit. Few if any wanted to endanger children; they simply did not give children enough thought. Left-wing organisations tolerated groups such as the UK’s Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), which had links with the Labour Party and the civil-rights group now called Liberty. In Germany, a political organisation called the Study and Work Group on Paedophilia made remarkable advances. In 1980, a youth group affiliated with the liberal Free Democratic Party adopted pro-paedophilia positions, as did the Green Party, formed the same year. Paedophiles gained such a hearing on the Left partly by persuading Leftists that their enemies’ enemies were automatically friends. In this case, the enemies were Conservatives, Catholics, evangelicals and fascists,...