Let’s say a little boy likes to play with dolls.

He also cuts out pieces of paper in the shape of horses and pastes them on pink sheets of cardboard.

He watches old black and white musicals, and tells his parents he wants to take waltz lessons.

Years later, in seventh grade, he takes up chess. He doesn’t try out for sports teams. He doesn’t like sports. He quickly becomes a good chess player and starts a club at school.

One day, Sally, a member of the chess club, approaches him in an empty corridor at school late in the afternoon. Standing in front of him, she says, “Let me ask you a question, Freddie. Do you want to be a girl?”

Shocked, Freddie laughs. He says, “No, but I’d like to ask you out on a date. You’re the first girl I’d like to take out.”

And that’s the end of that myth.

I would date that little fictional capsule 1973. Before there was any talk of transgender.

But if I wrote that vignette with 2024 on it, there would have to be much more. Sincere conversations with teachers and parents about gender identity. Private little meetings at school with a gay math teacher who educates select kids on gender dysphoria and the impossible parents who don’t understand. And the books mentioning gender in the school library. And so on.

And maybe, in that case, Freddie is convinced he does want to be a girl. Because he doesn’t fit in, and fitting in has taken on extreme importance. A kid has to belong somewhere.

So Freddie, who loves his parents, but doesn’t think they’re quite willing to go all the way, finds an adult who can hook him up with a health practitioner who can supply puberty blockers and describe the whole process of the Big Switch.

In 2024.

And Freddie’s life will never be the same.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that blocking the cascade and the Niagara of impulses and desires that puberty brings on…is a medical crime and a catastrophe, and has nothing to do with legitimate treatment for a condition.

The phalanxes of people on social media and the doctors and the clueless parents and the government officials and the media, all of whom are blowing transgender trumpets to the sky, and proclaiming those who make the Switch the New Heroes of our time…are the New Society. The deranged society.

But in 2024, there is a very good chance Freddie wouldn’t know that. In his “groomed confusion,” he makes a radical choice.

He forces himself to think and believe he’s doing the right thing. He keeps repeating “the transgender story” to himself at night. He seeks out other trans kids because only they can understand him. He finds adults who are “caring and sympathetic and wise.”

In 2024.

Where there are new snakes in the grass that never existed before.