Kids need the Klinger mentality

From Section 8 to Sergeant, the beloved character showed the way.

If you grew up as a Boomer or a Gen X’er, surely you remember the television show M*A*S*H. There was a recent uptick in interest in the show because its debut was 50 years ago last month, and some of the cast that is still living shared their thoughts.

It was more popular in my hometown of Toledo than in most places because of one local character: some in his old neighborhood might remember him as Jameel Farah, but more would know him as Jamie Farr. And everyone of a certain age remembers he was Max Klinger, the cross-dressing corporal trying to dodge his way out of the Army with a Section 8 discharge. Of course, in this day and age we don’t encourage cross-dressing in the military - we just pay for the surgery to go all of the way to looking like the opposite gender.

But Klinger’s evolution as a M*A*S*H character is instructive a half-century later because it parallels how a lot of kids eventually handled their ideas of changing genders. Once Klinger had his responsibility increased by being pressed into service as company clerk, he realized he wasn’t going to get his Section 8 because Colonel Potter wasn’t going to play his game and the rest of the 4077th unit was just as crazy as he was in their own way. So he packed away the dresses for regular Army drab and buckled down to do the job of company clerk in his own unique savvy Toledo way. He figured out a different and more productive way to bend the rules, and eventually became Sgt. Klinger.

I always hear of girls who claim they went through a tomboy stage growing up - some longer than others, and some never quite outgrew it. My take on this is that, in their minds, being a tomboy at some point enhanced their femininity rather than giving them a desire to reconstruct their body into something it wasn’t born to be. Meanwhile, some boys, especially younger ones, aren’t necessarily afraid to get their nails painted or even play dress up in Mom’s clothes. It’s a phase they, too, may go through.

While the act of changing gender - such as one can, considering their DNA doesn’t change - seems like a new craze, we first became aware of it in the mid-1970s when the former U.S. Open tennis participant Dr. Dick Raskind had the surgery to become Dr. Renee Richards and won a court case to be allowed to once again participate in the U.S. Open, this time as a female. Richards never became a superstar player on the women’s side, however, in large part because she was two decades older than most of her opponents. It was in that same era when tennis star of a bygone era Bobby Riggs boasted he could beat any woman player, even in his mid-50s - but he lost the “Battle of the Sexes” to Billie Jean King, who was 26 years his junior. Had Renee Richards been born twenty years later and won her court case, taking on women roughly his own age with a man’s body and strength, I believe it would have made the Lia Thomas outrage of late look like a Sunday picnic. (In the first local tournament Richards entered, a number of women withdrew for that reason.) Naturally there were some even back then who figured out this would be an issue someday. And guess what?

But the outrage isn’t about sports so much anymore. I used the analogy of Klinger and the evolution of his M*A*S*H character to reflect what used to happen with tomboys or boys who played with dolls - in nearly all cases, they snapped back to relative gender conformity by the time they reached puberty. There may have been 1 in 100 who proceeded down a path of same-sex attraction or, less often, sought to transform their body into what their gender dysphoria believed it should be.

Now, however, there is a whole grooming industry that seduces young questioning men and women into making life-altering decisions that involve puberty blockers and invasive plastic surgery, taking advantage of the same conformity bias gone wrong that leads to other awful things like a spate of suicides in a school, for example. And like the abuser who demands secrecy from his victim, so too are those involved in the gender reassignment business, like the schools that provide “transition closets” for secretly changing out of the clothes they left home in to dress in a manner befitting the gender they believe they really are, or the whole state of California that will assist a youth in changing his or her gender, no questions asked.

I’m not going to blame Klinger for many millions losing their collective minds, as cross-dressing has long been a part of the Hollywood act. But it is insanity, perpetrated by the sickness of those who believe they are smarter and more righteous than God. This entire flirtation with the practice of grooming kids for a deviant lifestyle needs to stop, for all of our good. But I think it’s going to take parents being parents of their kids and not being their buddies to straighten out their path.