Toddler logic is poisoning politics Welcome to the puerility spiral

As arguments rage about the precise variety of Tyler Robinson’s psychopathic politics, one thing is clear: the killer of Charlie Kirk is intensely puerile. I’m not sure what else you could call the act of engraving a bullet with “If you read this, you are GAY Lmao”, all the while planning to murder someone with it. His fine motor skills may be unusually advanced, but in other areas of development, the 22 year old is — in a perfectly literal sense — retarded for his age.

“Retarded” has in fact become the word of the decade for a reason. Puerility is now a defining characteristic of the political internet, unifying much of the online Right and Left, and explaining why newcomers wandering in from the real world have difficulty telling the difference between groypers and leftoids. There used to be a good excuse for it: a suffocatingly pious climate, rife with fake expressions of emotion and verbal taboos, where infantile transgression was necessary for psychic survival. When solemn-faced progressive censors went bloviatingly high, people of humour and intelligence arguably had nowhere else to go but low. But that justification doesn’t really wash anymore: the wind has gone from progressive sails, and the need for protective dissociation from the culture of sanctimony is waning. And yet many are still in the habit of sociopathic sniggering, and can’t seem to shake it.

I first heard about Kirk’s awful murder in Berlin, where I was at the SEGM conference on clinical approaches to gender distress in young people. A local transactivist group, bent on disruption, had put up an Instagram account to help “know your enemy”, and my face was the first one posted. As I am aware from long experience, there’s a particularly queasy aesthetic to transactivist protest, and it, too, is astonishingly juvenile: malice, grandiosity, and self-pity rendered in babyish pastel colours. People dress up as clowns and skip about, ponderously performing “trans joy”; they drown out opposing voices with screaming or loud music, as if their very existence is threatened by dissent; they lie down dramatically on the road and pretend to die. In between, there are board-game nights, soft toys, and onesies.

Inside the conference, we heard about the ways in which adolescent development can get stuck in perpetuity — descriptions which, let’s be honest, now apply to much of society at large. There’s black-and-white thinking, and a lack of tolerance for ambiguity. There’s a splitting of the world into good or bad objects, along with an inability to think through the consequences of present actions or to care about the future. There’s a fear of sexual development and reproduction; and a failure to distinguish fervent wants from real needs.

Bizarrely, instead of trying to remedy these deficits, many mainstream clinical institutions have regressed too. Even now, post-Cass Review, some therapists are still endorsing nonsensical fairytale spells, and doctors prescribing magic potions to keep adolescent brains suspended. Stuck in their own black-and-white thought patterns, in some countries surgeons are still treating young flesh like Play-Doh. Reasonable objections are met with emotionally dysregulated wailing, and that’s just from the clinicians.

None of these people attended the Berlin conference, thankfully: as usual, they mainly complained about us online. My own talk was about a new model being pushed by some practitioners of medical transition, now that the absence of good evidence for what they do is becoming undeniable. It has a misleadingly adult-sounding name — the “informed-consent model” — designed to lull hearers into thinking that a patient’s agreement is simply being framed as a necessary pre-requisite for medical transition. But a more accurate name would be the “if you want it, you’ve got it” model.

In other words: as long as a patient is informed of the known benefits and risks of a particular “treatment”, then, assuming they desire it, they should be given it by doctors — including where there is no established benefit at all, or even some indicated harms. As one 2024 article puts it — co-authored by Dr Annelou de Vries, the psychiatrist who came up with the influential Dutch protocol for child transition — the process should not be dependent on “the logic of improvement”. Instead, as a matter of good ethics, healthcare should be “provided and justified on the basis of personal desire and autonomy”. And if you think this could only ever be a fringe view, consider that one of the godfathers of evidence-based medicine, Gordon Guyatt of McMaster University, has recently come out in favour of something quite like it, when faced with his own uncomfortable research findings about the poor evidence base for medical transition of minors.

On one level, this weird idea is particular to the already very weird circumstances, and therefore straightforward to explain: for Guyatt, fear of activists, and for de Vries, an application of the sunk-costs fallacy. But, equally, the idea that suitably “informed” patients have a right to whatever treatment they want, as long as they are prepared to personally bear any risks — thereby minimising the role of medical expertise in decision-making — seems to be growing in popularity even outside the gender field. It is rife in pro-assisted dying discourse, for instance. Abstracted from these emotive contexts, though, it looks a lot like toddler logic: I should get what I desperately want, and never mind whether it might be actually best for me, or what will happen afterwards. And if some so-called “expert” authority figure stops me getting what I want, then they are just nasty and cruel.

Giving people what they desire but don’t ultimately need is not, of course, confined to gender medicine. It’s there in the all-must-have-prizes approach to education, and in the immediate gratification afforded by the internet, where many now live full-time. It’s built into the logic of late capitalism itself. Learning to tolerate challenge and disappointment used to be a given in ordinary young life, something no parent had to artificially engineer for their offspring. These days, you have to pray they’ll do a Duke of Edinburgh Award.

Gloating responses to Kirk’s shooting partly came from basic frustration that, during his life, he wouldn’t say what they wanted; he had always refused to toe their preferred ideological line. They probably also hated him for the complicated feelings of ambivalence his arguments gave them. But there were juvenile fantasies of power as well: life as a video game with you as the hero, and conservatives imagined as your evil antagonists. Oxford Union president-elect George Abaraonye certainly sounded like he thought he was in a game of Fortnite when he haplessly texted things like “Charlie got shot let’s fucking go” and “scoreboard fn we are so up rn” on hearing the news.

But it’s tempting to think that it was not just the conservatism that these young people hated about Kirk: it was also that he acted ostentatiously like an adult. He was not frightened of sexual maturity and responsibility; he embraced these things. He actively told people not to give into every passing desire, but to be continent and restrained. He was also able to tolerate opposing viewpoints to his own, without feeling the threat of personal disintegration, or the need to get lost in defensive persecution complexes. Whatever else you think about the content of his particular belief system, these seem like decent qualities to aspire to; and presumably they made resentful, fearful, emotionally delayed adolescents of all ages stamp their feet and hate him all the more.

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