Ideologie in de zorg
Rainbow Week at the Care Home: The Ideology Stops Nowhere
Residential care centre De Veldekens in Berchem is organising a Rainbow Week featuring drag queens, discussions about inclusion and participation in Pride. The management and occupational therapist present this as care. It is something else.
De Veldekens care home in Berchem is organising a Rainbow Week. Drag queens will perform, there will be a group discussion about inclusion, and around a dozen residents will take part in the Antwerp Pride parade. The management and occupational therapist say: "We must not sweep LGBTQ issues under the rug." Older people must not be left out of the story. They need to be prepared for grandchildren who come out.
It sounds friendly. It isn't.
Once again, everything is being lumped together. Homosexuality, being lesbian, and the entire gender identity agenda are all being fused into "LGBTQIA+". As if objecting to drag shows for residents, or to the medical transition of young people, were the same as hostility towards older gay men or lesbian women who simply want to live their lives.
No one in their right mind objects to residents with a homosexual orientation feeling safe. That goes without saying. What is happening here is something else: an ideological activity introducing drag, "inclusion" rhetoric and participation in Pride into a setting where people are in the final stage of their lives. The assumption is that older people need to be "brought up to speed", because LGBTQ issues are supposedly "something that concerns every year, every age and every era".
That is the classic confusion. Homosexuality is a sexual orientation. Gender identity and the associated medical practices – puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries – are not. By permanently tying the two together, any resistance to the ideology or to medical experimentation is recast as "older people wanting to sweep LGBTQ issues under the rug".
In a care home, the focus should be on dignified care, peace and respect for the residents' life stories. Not on organising drag performances and "opening the door" to an agenda that systematically sidelines biological reality and medical caution. The claim that no one is being forced sounds hollow when the entire week is devoted to one particular message and the media present it as positive news.
This is not inclusion. This is the further rollout of an ideology that stops nowhere – not at schools, not in sport, not with the police, and now not even with the oldest among us.