Blessed Boy
A warning from our not-too-distant utopian future
The year is 2030.
Steven and Melissa are a young Global Citizen couple who have just received wonderful news – they’ve been granted a Parenting License.
It wasn’t easy.
The cost was an impediment because even though Steven and Melissa both earn six-figure salaries, the carbon credits required to qualify them for a Parenting License came at a cost of $2.5 million. Steven and Melissa did the math and worked out they could afford to mortgage this across thirty-five years at 6.75%. They reckon they got a pretty good deal – a starter home would have cost them closer to $4 million and even on a shoestring budget, there was no way they could make the numbers work.
So, rather happily as it turned out, a child instead of a house it was to be.
Most of Steven and Melissa’s friends don’t have children and are not planning to – some because of the cost, but most because it is unfashionable, and during the course of their long journey, first toward mortgage approval, and then the Parenting License itself, several of their friends drifted away because in 2030 having children has become a little odd, like being a Christian or voting for conservative political candidates.
But Steven and Melissa have always wanted children and the loss of a few friends and the humiliation of dealing with the Central Bank’s mortgage bots, and then finally a real human who was even colder and ruder than the bots, was a further price they were willing to pay to one day hold their own infant child in their arms.
There were other sacrifices they had to make. A Parenting License could only be issued after a twelve-month strike-free period on each of their SmartPasses. Under the normal run of things, a Global Citizen can expect to receive anywhere from one to five strikes annually. Strikes are most often issued for going Carbon Amber, which occurs when one’s personal CarbonMeter moves from green to orange. This usually happens when one exceeds their travel quota or buys more than the allotted 200 grams of meat per week, but there are currently 4,269 carbon-related products, services and activities that can affect this. Most citizens hover between low green and high amber most of the time. Those who go into the red zone are taken away to Education and Training Centers and then most often relocated – this is something people are encouraged not to talk about or dwell on, and those who spread misinformation about the Centers receive hard strikes (these remain in place for two to five years and cannot be offset by sustainable living the way carbon strikes can).
Anyway, to maintain a perfect SmartPass score for twelve months is nothing short of remarkable and involves going 100% vegan and remaining in one’s 10 km Zone, using only foot or bicycle transportation. Because of the farming impact of much vegan food, it is also critical that certain products are avoided lest they nudge the CarbonMeter needle in the wrong direction, and so Steven and Melissa have been eating mostly bug protein for the last year. Melissa even posted a TikTok clip doing a cute little dance routine and singing about how she loves Billy’s Bug Burgers, and this earned her an extra ten SmartPass credits, but Steven has been conspicuously silent on the matter and this has been worrying Melissa, as a lack of enthusiasm for particular things can also have a detrimental effect on one’s score.
There is also a standard series of online learning modules that need to be completed around sustainability, diversity, inclusion, and equity, and for Straight White People such as Steven and Melissa, an auxiliary examination to determine the magnitude of their implicit racial and gender bias and thus, their suitability as parents of a Young Global Citizen.
Most importantly, one must be hyper vigilant what links they click, for even with the help of the trillion-dollar online fact checking industry, misinformation still abounds in 2030 and visiting an objectionable or misleading site will earn one an immediate hard strike and automatically disqualify them from obtaining a Parenting License for five years.
But these sacrifices also, Steven and Melissa were willing to make for the sake of their future child (they had wanted to have at least two children, but the cost of the carbon credits for this was well beyond their means).
And finally, the day arrived, and Steven and Melissa opened their SmartPasses to find a new item in their Certificates Wallet – their long-awaited Parenting License. They were preapproved for their mortgage and had almost saved enough for the deposit – payable at the time of drawdown, if and when the child was born. It was time to celebrate and they opened the bottle of champagne they’d been saving. There is no impact to one’s SmartPass score from buying alcohol, but Steven and Melissa have been saving 100% of their disposable income each week for their mortgage deposit and even with the price controls on booze, the bubbly was a luxury they could barely afford.
Melissa was now permitted to come off Mandatory Birth Control so she and Steven could start trying. She did get pregnant after a few months but in her second trimester she miscarried several hours after receiving her fifth EKAF-30 mRNA vaccine. Melissa and Steven were devastated but kept trying. Again, Melissa became pregnant but again she miscarried, this time the day after her BOJNOC-31 booster.
Melissa and Steven almost gave up, but they had six months left on their license (the Parenting License expires if the woman cannot go full term within a three-year period), so they kept trying. Eventually, and not without complications, Melissa did give birth to a beautiful baby boy. She and Steven were overjoyed, and they named him Benedict which is Latin for ‘a blessed boy’. They called him Benny for short.
Benny grew into a fine young Global Citizen, taking to his education with an aptitude not often seen. He was a Global Carbon Hero at seven and Global Pride Hero at eight and by nine he had all his sustainability, diversity, inclusion, and equity badges.
At the age of ten, Benny decided he was Trans.
The TikTok algorithm picked this up immediately and Benny was in touch with a nurse from the Trans Children’s Health Advocacy Authority (TCHAA) within an hour. Benny completed an initial consultation via Zoom and was then visited the next day at school by a psychologist and a doctor from TCHAA. After a week’s in-class and online observation Benny was conditionally approved for gender reassignment and TCHAA took the next step of notifying his parents.
Steven and Melissa were shocked that Benny had decided he was a girl rather than a boy – he’d never behaved or spoken in a manner that would have led them to believe this was a likely outcome for their son, despite the gender-fluid environment that schools went to great lengths to ensure, and the daily LGBTQIA++ Affirmation classes that all children attended. And although Trans Kids are common in 2042, with one in five opting for reassignment before adulthood, it simply wasn’t something Steven and Melissa had ever seriously contemplated. When they’d seen the children of acquaintances undergo the transformation, they’d whispered to one another things like, “Benny would never want that.”
Steven and Melissa attempted to oppose the next steps, which involved puberty blockers and twice weekly therapy sessions with psychologists from TCHAA, but this earned them each a hard strike on their SmartPass and a warning from TCHAA that further obstruction of their daughter’s wishes could result in legal consequences.
Steven and Melissa tried to talk with Benny who now went by the name Rainbow, but they had to be careful when and how they did this because while they were able to turn their devices off for certain periods, Benny’s was always listening, and it would be noted if they attempted to interfere with it in any way, because children undergoing transition are required to have at least one connected device on their person at all times, in case in need of urgent mental health assistance from TCHAA.
Benny remained adamant however that he was really a girl trapped in a boy’s body and after six months on the puberty blockers he was scheduled for gender reassignment surgery.
Distraught and desperate, Steven convinced Melissa that their only recourse was to try and slip through the net. They gathered what belongings they had and loaded up their small EV. They told Benny they were going on a holiday and departed.
They drove through the night, stopping only once to recharge the car. By dawn they had cleared the state line and by the time Benny woke up and asked again where they were going, the mountains were in view and Steven and Melissa’s spirits were beginning to rise with the sun.
Steven had no real answer for his son so he just said “We’re going on holiday Benny, just you me and Mum, and we might be gone a long time – it’ll be an adventure. It might be difficult, but what matters is that we’re together.”
“Dad, my name’s Rainbow,” Benny said, but he didn’t seem to mind the sudden, unexpected trip and he relaxed and played on TikTok and they drove on into the bright morning.
Before heading into the mountains Steven stopped again to recharge the car, but when he plugged it in, an error message flashed up on his iPhone. An identical alert popped up on the car’s main consol. Steven’s bank account had been disabled. He jumped back in the car and tried to get it moving but the EV also had been shut down remotely. Melissa began to cry.
There was nowhere to go. Both of their digital wallets had been deactivated and heading in any direction on foot was impossible – but they tried it anyway. After three hours Benny was crying and refusing to go any further and even Melissa was almost relieved when the police chopper finally showed up.
Steven was charged with kidnapping and sent to a Training and Education Center. Melissa and Benny never saw him again.
Through pleading and fabrication, and Benny’s numb complicity in the lie, shocked at having seen his father tased and hauled off by cops in riot gear, Melissa was able to retain custody of Benny and return to her old life, though she was subject to constant close monitoring via her smartphone and weekly visits from TCHAA.
Benny’s surgery went ahead, and he became Rainbow in body as well as identity.
Melissa found that a cocktail of prescription anti-depressants and alcohol allowed her to blunt the worst of her pain at what she felt was the barbaric mutilation of her perfect baby boy – her blessed boy, Benedict.
Rainbow grew to the age of eighteen as a girl and, with the aid of estrogen supplements and her artificial vagina, even dated and had a sex life, such as it was. But she had grown severely depressed – this began not long after the surgery and was treated over the years with a steadily escalating concoction of drugs, not dissimilar to her mother’s repertoire. In one of her rare lucid moments, Melissa reflected bitterly that the manufacturer of her daughter’s anti-depression medication was the same company that had first supplied her puberty blockers all those years ago.
Rainbow pursued extreme behaviour in order to fill the aching hole she felt deep inside her. She did drugs; she tried becoming a TikTok personality; she went on Only Fans; she slept with Trans Men, Trans Women, regular men, and regular women; she even starred in some Pornhub movies.
But eventually she decided that it was all too painful, too difficult, too meaningless. She applied for the Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program for which by the age of eighteen she no longer required a special parental dispensation and after a short consultative period, she was approved.
A week before her nineteenth birthday Rainbow was admitted to hospital and given 20 mg of Midazolam to induce sleep, then 40 mg of Lidocaine to reduce possible burning in a peripheral vein from the Propofol which was to follow. 1000 mg of Propofol then induced coma and death and although it was not needed, 200 mg of Rocuronium was finally administered as per the protocol.
Melissa was drunk and out of it on Xanax and Zoloft at the time of her son’s death.
Rainbow’s euthanasia was livestreamed on TikTok to her favorite song, Free To Be Me by Poppy Zigzag.
It went viral and she was praised globally for her strength and courage.
The year is 2051.
Note: This short story, for want of a better description, came about almost by mistake. I’ve been feeling enraged and miserable since viewing the medical kidnapping of baby Will by the New Zealand Police on 8 December 2022, and was resolved to address this crime in my next piece of writing. I was groping around for an angle; a way to come at this issue, to dissect it and expose the evil at its core. But nothing was coming – all I felt was this sad, lethargic kind of rage. The idea of hammering out 1500 words of prosaic pontification sapped my motivation even further – this issue has been academically analysed ad nauseum and still the madness continues.
At the heart of the issue is bodily autonomy and, as a byproduct, parental rights. When I first viewed the baby Will video, without context, I thought it was a clip of a child being removed from his parents to undergo gender transition, which is probably where the seed of this story germinated. I was mortified; I thought I was witnessing the final frontier of progressivism from some far-left jurisdiction that had happily decided to skip forward a few steps and start doing gender reassignment on babies.
I was somewhat relieved when I discovered that baby Will was only being removed from his parents’ custody so that the state could enforce a blood transfusion using blood likely affected by mRNA gene therapy against their wishes, and despite their having found suitable unvaccinated donors.
Consider that: I was relieved that the state was only kidnapping a baby to enforce a blood transfusion, as opposed to gender reassignment. That’s where we are as a society.
I remain shocked and enraged, but that fact that my disgust is tempered by the stayed specter of something far worse, yet entirely plausible, weighs heavily on my soul.
It may sound hyperbolic, and perhaps we will never reach the point where babies are gender-swapped on the whim of the state, or some other nefarious actor, but we are fast approaching such a future. And even if this nightmare never arrives, a future that none of us could have imagined is already here, and children are being taken by the state on all sorts of absurd, so-called medical grounds, including gender reassignment.
Would any of us have believed the abuses of parental rights being committed by the state in 2022, had we been told about them ten years ago? Would we have believed stories such as baby Will’s? Or that of eight-year-old James Younger; or Drew Hudacko; or this story from Australia; or this story from Indiana, USA… or the hundreds of others? Would we have believed these reactions from members of the public, when asked how they felt about a five-year-old transitioning?
Ten years ago, most would have scoffed at these as the hysterical maunderings of a crazy conspiracy theorist. Now, in 2022, as children are propagandized with Trans ideology daily by a trillion-dollar marketing machine, and the state is taking custody of minors to enforce gender transition… we are still called conspiracy theorists.
There comes a point where you realise – they have every intention of going there, and they’re not even trying to hide it. All our worst imaginings and more will come to pass, and when we cry out, they’ll just keep calling us crazy.
The fact is that nearly everything I have described in the above scenario is either already happening or being enthusiastically discussed at the highest levels of government, academia, media, and industry.
We are mere historical moments away from what I have depicted above becoming reality. And I believe we will see such a future unless we execute a radical course correction.
I take no pride in the piece of writing you’ve just read. I did not enjoy creating it and was in fact left feeling physically ill after doing so.
It is a blunt and graceless brain dump; a howl of rage and misery; an imperfect and hotly repellent piece of prose that ought never have needed to be written.
But it is what it is, and it has adequately expressed my outrage at the continual and accelerating encroachment of the state upon our human rights.
These are my fears for the future. I hope I’m wrong, but the preponderance of evidence suggests that I am not.
You have been warned.