© Kohl's website/screenshotThe Kohl's website displays various clothing items for newborns and infants.
Retail giant Kohl's is facing significant
backlash after conservatives highlighted the company's Pride gear intended for children. The collection includes a onesie decorated with cartoon figures carrying a rainbow-colored flag and is aimed at celebrating Pride Month.
Their stock crashed roughly five percent on Tuesday following the controversy.
The backlash primarily originated from many of those who took issue with the marketing of such products to babies and children. This resulted in a rising number of #BoycottKohls hashtags online and severe criticism aimed at Kohl's, with some customers calling for a boycott of the retailer.
Some critics have compared this situation to recent controversies involving
Bud Light and
Target, which faced similar backlashes for their affiliations with LGBTQ+ causes.
Here's a look at how their stocks are doing:
REACTIONS:
Comment: In answer to the last question, an open article in PubMed (of all places!) has something
to say about it:
Mothers of boys with gender identity disorder: a comparison of matched controls
Abstract
This pilot study compared mothers of boys with gender identity disorder (GID) with mothers of normal boys to determine whether differences in psychopathology and child-rearing attitudes and practices could be identified. Results of the Diagnostic Interview for Borderlines and the Beck Depression Inventory revealed that mothers of boys with GID had more symptoms of depression and more often met the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder than the controls. Fifty-three percent of the mothers of boys with GID compared with only 6% of controls met the diagnosis for Borderline Personality Disorder on the Diagnostic Interview for Borderlines or had symptoms of depression on the Beck Depression Inventory. Results of the Summers and Walsh Symbiosis Scale suggested that mothers of probands had child-rearing attitudes and practices that encouraged symbiosis and discouraged the development of autonomy.
And from a 2020 article in
American Thinker:
A 1991 study may have found the root cause of transgenderism
By Andrea Widburg
If you're on the left, you believe that the traditional idea that humans come in two sexes (male and female) is not only outdated, but evil. Instead, leftism insists that human sex identification is an infinitely malleable matter of personal choice, untethered to genetics. Conservatives respond that it's not a matter of choice. Instead, people who claim to be transgendered almost invariably have complex mental issues, often stemming from their upbringing. A recently recovered 1991 study supports conservatives.
During his pre-election town hall, Joe Biden happily accepted that little boys and girls know exactly what sex they really are (separate from their biological sex) and promised that he will ensure that the law lets them make those choices. By saying this, Biden implied he would encourage allowing children to opt into dangerous hormone treatments and mutilating surgery. That's not just demented; that's evil.
Just a couple of weeks ago, HBO premiered a documentary about allegedly transgender kids. Footage made the rounds of a scene in which a woman tries to force her manifestly six-year-old son, Phoenix, to stand in front of an LGBTQ church and proudly identify himself as a girl. You can see the clip at the beginning of this Matt Walsh video:
Walsh goes on to point out some important insights about the HBO show:
1. The mothers are crazy. (When Phoenix's parents get divorced and Phoenix finally insists he really is a boy, his mother feels better because she had worked through her issues. Another boy, whose mother insists he is a girl and lives through his fame, hates his female persona.)
2. The fathers are nonentities or invisible men who go along with overwhelming mothers. They are eunuchs and seem fine with having their sons take that lack of masculinity one step farther.
3. Many of the children come from broken or breaking homes.
4. Even parents who aren't on board with their children's transgenderism go along meekly with the social pressure.
I agree with everything Walsh says. I have said for years that transgenderism is a leftist attack on masculinity and a creepy, pedophile-like way to take control of children's sexuality.
What I said doesn't preclude people having body dysmorphia, a term that means they have a wildly incorrect view of their bodies. Before transgenderism became a "thing," the most commonly known version of this disorder was anorexia nervosa, which saw perfectly healthy young women starve themselves to death because they saw themselves as fat.
Thankfully, we recognized that anorexia was a mental illness and tried to re-orient these women's minds. If we had treated anorexia the same way we treat the disorder of "transgenderism," we would have offered these women dieting tips and stomach-stapling.
Walt Heyer, who was one of the first Americans to take hormones and have surgery to "change" from a man to a woman, realized that (a) the medical community unconscionably pushed him into these drastic changes and (b) the problem was with his upbringing, not his misgendering. In his case, he blamed his grandmother, who gave him big ego strokes for wearing girls' clothes and being feminine.
Based on my own experiences living in the San Francisco Bay Area in the company of a lot of people living on the LGBTQ spectrum, I think Heyer's right. Probably 70% of the people I know on that spectrum had suffered childhood traumas, whether it was absent fathers, overbearing mothers, or abuse at a parents' hands.
It may be that those overbearing mothers, the same ones Matt Walsh focused on, are the biggest factor in transgenderism. Someone trolling through the literature discovered a 1991 study in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry that compared mothers of boys with gender identity issues to mothers of "normal boys." (Yes, just 29 years ago, it was still "normal" to call a boy a boy.) What the study revealed is that, for the boys who identified as girls, 53% of their mothers had Borderline Personality Disorders. For boys who knew that they were boys, only 6% of the mothers had Borderline Personality Disorders.
Seemingly, when boys are transgender, it's not because, baby, they were born that way. More often than not, it's because they had the spectacular bad luck to be born to a mother with a serious mental disorder.
I've long said that when people claim to be members of the opposite sex, rather than destroying their bodies with hormones and surgery to create a Frankenstein-like simulacrum of that opposite sex, we should first give them a trial treatment of hormones aligned with, not the opposite of, their biological sex. It seems they also need time with a good psychiatrist who understands the emotional trauma of a disordered mother.
Comment: In answer to the last question, an open article in PubMed (of all places!) has something to say about it: And from a 2020 article in American Thinker: