When The Tasmanian Toddlers Get into the Knife Drawer

The Tasmanian Toddlers, also known as the politicians that state’s lower house of parliament, have gotten into the knife drawer.  And it won’t be pretty.

Now there’s something cute about toddlers sitting on the kitchen floor rummaging through the Tupperware cupboard.

Something cute.  Something safe. Something innocent.

Those little bundles of joy are in no danger from Tupperware, unless of course, it’s pilfered Tupperware, sneaked out of a party. If that’s the case then the very handling of it constitutes a crime.

Every parent knows it’s part of their child’s development to play with the Tupperware cupboard.

But the knife drawer?  The utensil tray with the serrated steak knives and roast carving blade that’s sharp enough to cut cigarette paper?  You’d be a culpable parent if you ever allowed the kids to get into the knife drawer.

Yet that’s exactly what has happened in Tasmania.  With their most recent decisions around gender and hate speech the Tasmanian Toddlers have gotten into the knife drawer.   And it’s going to get messy.

Instead of worrying about Tupperware, things like infrastructure, schools, hospitals etc, issues that state politicians have historically been adept (apparently) at dealing with, the Tasmanian Toddlers have gone all naughty, climbed onto the bench, opened the drawer picked up a meat cleaver and gone “Oh what’s this? This looks like fun!”

So a move by the state Liberal Government to introduce a bill that sensibly, and sensitively, removes the need for people to divorce in order to change gender has been completely hijacked by the Tasmanian Toddlers.

The original bill recognised that, for a small percentage of people in the state who have undergone gender transition, having suffered gender dysphoria, the further pain of a compulsory divorce was not necessary.

Sensible and sensitive, as I said.  But of course give ideologues such as the Tasmanian Toddlers an inch and they’ll take a mile.  Every time.  And then they’ll drive back a half mile to reverse over you.

So the Labor Party, and of course the Greens, but most ridiculously, the Liberal Party’s Speaker of the House, have instead used the opportunity to push through a raft of changes that the Tasmanian Attorney General calls “confusing, untested, poorly drafted amendments to the Bill liable to lead to unintended ­consequences.”

Now, instead of a sensible and sensitive bill, here’s what the Tasmanian Toddlers have just legislated (yet to be passed by the Upper House, but don’t hold your breath):

1. Tasmanian birth certificates to be genderless
2. people as young as 16 to change their official gender ­simply by filing a statutory ­declaration.
3. Extension of hate speech to cover “gender expression”, including correct use of transgender ­people’s changed honorifics and names.  

The state government opened the Tupperware Drawer, but the charming little things climbed up onto the bench and opened the knife drawer.

Hate speech laws in Tasmania already caused enough trouble during the same sex marriage debate when activist/Tasmanian Toddler Martine Delaney dragged Hobart’s Catholic Archbishop, Julian Porteous before the Anti-Discrimination Commission for simply stating to Catholic Schools what Catholic doctrine on gender and marriage was.

The Toddlers had a hissy fit and demanded the knife drawer.

Of course, it takes the adults to see the dangers that the Tasmanian Toddlers can’t see.

As The Australian reports today:

A broad range of interests, from radical feminists to conservative Christians, attacked the reforms as effectively abolishing gender and threatening the safety of female-only services, from domestic violence shelters to the Girl Guides.

But of course when you’re a Tasmanian Toddler with access to the knife drawer, all you can see in front of you is that shiny, gleaming pointing thing that you’re not quite sure what it does, but gee it looks like fun!

I just finished reading Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, Submission, and while it’s an occasional graphic read in terms of sex, it’s utterly sobering in terms of what it looks like when Toddlerism abounds.

The premise of Submission is that France, riven by ennui and a hollowed out spiritual centre, in which no one believes anything anymore, is taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood.

But it’s not a violent takeover.  It’s by popular vote.  Faced with wipeout by the far-right nationalist leader Marine Le Pen, the centre-right and centre-left throw their lot in with the charismatic leader of the Brotherhood, whose seems like the only one adulting anymore.

The novel’s protagonist is modern France, indeed much of the West personified: Running around in a haze of self indulgence, self-loathing, and the nagging feeling that there must be something more.

He stumbles from unsatisfying sexual encounter to middling dining encounter, increasingly sure that his privileged position in the literary academy means nothing.

His increasing erectile dysfunction merely confirms his suspicions that everything has had its day.  The once robust Christian framework of the West has either been driven out, or has succumbed bit by bit to modernity’s wiles, enervating any strength it had to resist, not, as it happens, the Muslim Brotherhood, but the sheer infantile fantasies of the modern West.

It’s happened before of course, as Houellebecq’s novel points out, but this time a tipping point has been reached. The toddlers have been playing in the knife drawer for too long, and it took the lean, muscled, confident adult of Islam to wrest them away and put the Toddler back on the floor with the Tupperware where she belongs.