From Claire Lehman, Founding Editor of Quillette.
I have a special place in my heart for high achievers who do not have any college degree. They include some of the smartest people I know. I've met more of them than I can count.
Here are documents that pertain to yet another ill-behaved Woke school (this one located in Las Vegas), along with an attorney's well-drafted threat letter. Read them and weep for our children's future . . .
If you'd like to read the full thread, start with Colin Wright's Tweet:
I applaud this recent decision by the British High Court, reported by The Guardian:
Children under the age of 16 considering gender reassignment are unlikely to be mature enough to give informed consent to be prescribed puberty-blocking drugs, the high court has ruled.
Even in cases involving teenagers under 18 doctors may need to consult the courts for authorisation for medical intervention, three senior judges have ruled in an action brought against the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust, which runs the UK’s main gender identity development service for children.
An NHS spokesperson welcomed the “clarity” the decision had brought, adding: “The Tavistock have immediately suspended new referrals for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for the under 16s, which in future will only be permitted where a court specifically authorises it. Dr Hilary Cass is conducting a wider review on the future of gender identity services.”
Now it's time to stop this mass child abuse on this side of the pond too, given that most girls move from "puberty blockers" to taking 10 to 40 times the natural female amount of testosterone, usually leading to infertility. How did it get to the point where the once-vocal anti-clitoridectomy crowd got so quiet when something comparable comes to our own communities? 12, 13, 14 and 15 year old girls have been allowed to make permanent "decisions" of this sort, without the need for any official medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
Instead of getting real diagnoses, they are cheer-led into drugs, hormones and surgery through social media, peer pressure and even Planned Parenthood (which supplies testosterone to many of these girls. All of this under the guise of "civil rights." The "decisions" of these girls to use "puberty blockers" are being made without the benefit of long-term studies as to dangers, physical and psychological. It's about time we got real adults into this conversation. There is a LOT of buyer's remorse out there, but it's being suppressed by left-leaning news media (you can find hundreds of cases on Reddit/detransition), It makes me wonder when the lawsuits will start flying over here. [More . . . ]
In "Race and Social Panic at Haverford: A Case Study in Educational Dysfunction," Quillette's Jonathan Kay gives a detailed account of how Woke-permeated campus-wide insanity can be triggered by nothing in particular. Kay makes a strong case that Haverford College, a private and expensive far-left-leaning liberal arts institution, self-spiraled into moral panic in a way that brings to mind the meltdown of Evergreen State, a story told and experienced by evolutionary psychology professors Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying. See also, Weinstein's discussion of Evergreen with his brother, Podcaster Eric Weinstein ("The Portal").
The self-annointed thought police are still working overtime at Haverford, where free-speech is merely a phrase and where tribal truths are the reality. I could not imagine sending any student to Haverford if they wanted to learn how to think self-critically and be prepared to hold a job in the outside world.
Jonathan Kay's long article leaves a pit in my stomach and casts a pall over my evening as I write this comment. He needed to fill his article with an extraordinary amount of details in order to substantiate his extraordinary conclusions, including the following: A) Nothing insensitive or racist occurred at Haverford College leading up to the current shrill unrest. B) Nothing that happened at Haverford justified the long ridiculous list of student demands (to which the administration mostly acceded). C) Most chillingly, the administrators of Haverford (and many other colleges) lack the the necessary resources to have meaningful conversations with students or to take respectable negotiating positions during these Woke-fueled paroxysms.
A few excerpts from Jonathan Kay's excellent article:
[T]he mania that swept Haverford College in late October and early November 2020 lays bare, with unusual clarity, the fervid atmosphere of grievance and self-entitlement that has made the administration of elite colleges and universities so difficult.
Of all the Haverford community members I spoke with, the only one who asked to be quoted by name was recently graduated philosophy major Alex Gutierrez, who once summarized the mindset of campus activists in an essay about Jacques Lacan. “Modern activists have psyches that are built for the joy of transgression,” he observed. “They engage in activism so they can repeatedly experience that joy, a joy that is denied them in everyday life because everyday life is dominated by the ethics of pleasure… And so they need to invent fictional dominant orders so that they can defy them. This is why protesters would actually be extremely unhappy if oppression went away. They want white patriarchy to be as powerful as possible, so they can defy it.”
Gutierrez wrote these words before his alma mater fell into upheaval in late October. But his analysis seems apt. When students complained that Raymond had caused them “harm” with her October 28th email, they weren’t really speaking up as activists denouncing racism on campus (since there doesn’t seem to be much of it), but as consumers whose parents paid good money for them to experience the sensation of transgressive social-justice heroism. “Normally, the administrators are the perfect target for student transgression,” Gutierrez told me. “They take the abuse and they’re not supposed to push back. That’s part of their role. That’s what students expect.”
Andrew Sullivan identifies one of the main problems with Wokeness in his article, "The Minorities Within Minorities: And how they can help us revive liberal democracy." This excerpt is from Sullivan's excellent independent Substack column, The Weekly Dish:
I see much of the woke left as deeply threatening to some of my core identities: their hostility to religious freedom, their redefinition of my sexual orientation into a gender preference, their instant judgment of a person by the color of their skin or their maleness. . . . Once you see everything through the prism of crude identity, and reduce everyone to socially constructed molecules in racial hierarchies of various kinds, this is the kind of analysis you get. But what these left and right-tribalists obscure or cannot see is we’re talking about a spectrum of countless, unique human beings here, with individual identities and views formed by a cascade of different life experiences and backgrounds. Things are far, far more complicated and interesting than these crude ideologies can explain.
After publishing the above I spotted Andrew Sullivan's tweet summarizing his article:
Minorities add complexity to America but America adds complexity to them in return. That's why many Americans of countless complicated identities voted this year as individuals and as unhyphenated citizens.