The Disturbing Poeticization of Childhood Transition

A nefarious misuse of a beautiful text

The Hand of God, Kahlil Gibran

I have read The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran several times in my life, more than a few of those times to help pull myself out of a depression. Needless to say, it means a lot to me.

So, you’ll understand my surprise and horror when I noticed that people who support the transitioning of children were using the chapter “On Children” to justify their views.

Here is the chapter in question:

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.

And he said:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts.

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,

and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;

For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Yes, these beautiful words, which highlight the importance of allowing your children to be their own individuals, have been twisted over the last few years into a message of approval for transitioning and sterilizing children. Here are a few examples from X:

A recent article from YYC Business titled “Public schools have a duty to protect queer kids” also had the gall to invoke Gibran’s poem to argue that schools should be allowed to indoctrinate children:

Schools need to be a place for children to build themselves what Gibran called the “house of tomorrow.”

As far back as 2015, the poem was also included in a guide to “welcoming transgender children and their families” by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry.

The fact that this poem could be used to support the idea of “transgender children” speaks to the vapid and shallow view of kindness and care held by those in the gender cult. To be a good person is to be complacent, permissive, and certainly to never say “no,” not even to a young child who might want to change sex one day and pretend to be a dolphin the next. This is not kindness, it is complacency and conformity.

Furthermore, there is a massive gulf between recognizing that your children are their own people with their own path in life and allowing or encouraging them to fall for the lies and delusions of this destructive cult.

Parents are meant to guide. To use these words as an excuse to abdicate that responsibility is to abdicate being a parent.

Any confusion about the proper use of Gibran’s words in this regard can be easily cleared up with the final two lines:

Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;

For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

The archer (God), loves not only the arrow (the child) but specifically also a stable bow (the parent).

A stable parent is not a parent who stands by as their child is confused about the very nature of reality—about something so fundamental as their own physical sex. Much less so a parent who takes an active role in this process. A stable parent does not let their child get indoctrinated into Queer Theory and slapped with the label “queer kid.”

As I wrote previously, a queer kid is a child whose childhood has been stolen from them. Gibran’s poem does not encourage doing this to children.

There is a difference between controlling your kids and protecting your kids. Queer activists have conflated the two in order to destroy the latter because they are the ones who want to do the controlling.

To this end, they’ll even twist a poem about the beauty of parenting into a call for the sterilization of children, purposely extinguishing Life's longing for itself in the process.

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