Jesse Singal tweets:
In his same Tweet Thread: "Stop fucking reducing people to their skin color. It's gross and immoral behavior, and it's crazy to me that it's not only allowed but incentivized in so many liberal spaces."
This episode serves as a spotlight on the deplorable behavior of Abigail Disney.
This is a passage from Will Storr's new book, The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It (2022):
Tyrannies are virtue-dominance games. Much of their daily play and conversation will focus on matters of obedience, belief and enemies. Is the game you’re playing coercing people, both inside and outside it, into conforming to its rules and symbols? Does it attempt to silence its ideological foes? Does it tell a simplistic story that explains the hierarchy, deifying their group whilst demonising a common enemy? Are those around you obsessed with their sacred beliefs? Do they talk about them continually and with greedy pleasure, drawing significant status from belief and active belief? Does it seek to damage and destroy lives, often with glee? Is this aggression made to feel virtuous? That’s probably a tyranny. This might sound melodramatic, but we all contain the capacity for this dreadful mode of play: those cousins are built into our coding. If we’re serious about ‘never again’ we must accept that tyranny isn’t a ‘left’ thing or a ‘right’ thing, it’s a human thing. It doesn’t arrive goose-stepping down streets in terrifying ranks. It seduces us with stories.
Andrew Sullivan, pulling back the curtain to expose massive educational/governmental/health-care dysfunction that is encouraging exponentially increasing numbers of our children to seek irreversible surgery and a lifetime of powerful cross-sex hormones for their physically healthy bodies:
"What is gender identity? Since this very new term is now cemented in law, corporate practice, and now medicine as well, it’s a good question. Here is an official description from HRC, the biggest “queer” lobby:Sullivan concludes:
"One’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither – how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves."
The key word, it seems to me, is neither. It means that your gender may not have anything to do with being male or female or on any kind of masculine/feminine spectrum. Your gender identity can be a tree, a fish, a Nazi, a puddle, or an earthworm — and these innermost identities must always be affirmed and be protected in law.
Like most decent people, I am more than fine with accepting that some people really do deeply feel that they are one sex and yet biologically are the opposite one. It’s rare, but very real, and I have long supported care and protection for this tiny minority of marginalized people we now call transgender. Mercifully, they are now covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And Americans are on board: in a new poll, support for protecting transgender people from discrimination has 64 percent support and only 10 percent opposition.
But what on earth does it mean to identify as no human gender, neither male nor female nor a mix, but as, say, a tree — and use “tree” as a pronoun? You think I’m kidding, don’t you? Just making shit up to make it sound insane. But wait:
"Students are introduced to gender pronouns through the children’s book, “They, She, He: Easy as ABC.” The somewhat familiar pronoun ze is introduced, as are more bespoke possibilities. On one page, “Diego drums and dances. Tree has all the sounds” (tree is Diego’s preferred pronoun). For a character named Sky, all of the pronouns are right."
This is in a first-grade curriculum in Evanston/Skokie School District 65, a public-school system in the Chicago suburbs, as reported by Conor Friedersdorf. The pronoun “tree” has already been deployed by some as legitimate. I noted recently how, in another HRC-recommended book for kids, a baby “can’t decide what to be. Boy or girl? Bird or fish?” Yes: fish. The idea that children can identify as other species has now been approved in the education world. It’s being taught to your kids as truth. It is the Biden administration’s and “LGBTQ+” lobby’s view of what “gender identity” is.
It is anything you want it to be. And must always be affirmed by others."
[T]he term “gender identity” is so nebulous, so completely subjective, that it can be used to describe literally anything, any perversion, any mental illness, any deranged fantasy — like South Park’s Gerald Broflovski’s compulsion to become a dolphin. And it’s being used as a construct to tell first-graders that they can identify as a tree and a fish now. In public schools. With the full backing of the president and the Democratic Party.[More . . . ]I’m not nut-picking. I’m using the official description of “gender identity” to show that the term itself is nut-enabling. There are no limiting principles in a truly nebulous product of postmodernism now worming its way into our legal system.
Jesse Singal digs into this storiybut, more importantly, into the way the New York Times has once again committed journalistic malpractice. Our media outlets have turned into two competing teams that act like churches. It's as if we are relying on churches to provide us with factual accuracy regarding their respective dogmas:
In light of all this, it’s interesting to read the rest of the Times story and examine which information Patel did and didn’t include. There is no sign he (or the other two staffers who worked on the story) contacted any other member of either team or its coaching staff, or anyone in attendance at the game, or anyone who wasn’t in a leadership, issuing-an-official-statement position at BYU. In the age of ubiquitous social media and gigabytes of video being posted from every live event every second, I bet Patel and his colleague could have contacted at least two dozen individuals in attendance with about an hour of work, if only to get some color about what the atmosphere was like in the student section supposedly hurling these slurs. . . .
As of now, the Cougar Chronicle’s version of this story is better, more complete, and more accurate than The New York (freaking) Times’, in part because it didn’t treat the accusation as automatically true. Rather, the reporters did some reporting. All these days later, the Times story remains up, treating the maximalist account of this incident as more or less settled fact, spreading misinformation, without an update or follow-up article in sight.
This is reason number 2,342,392,398 why I don’t trust journalists who insist that the way forward for journalism is to intentionally stray further from the ideals of objectivity. While few will say it quite so bluntly, in practice, the idea seems to be that because in the past certain groups and claims weren’t given the benefit of the doubt, now they should reflexively be believed, with little need for due diligence.
I can’t emphasize enough how basic the stuff the Times failed to do here used to be: As a journalist, you should always have a tiny but insistent voice nipping at the back of your mind, demanding (to the extent possible) a bit more skepticism, a bit more independent confirmation, and so on. If you think things through journalistically, the fact that BYU hurriedly issued statements denouncing the racism shouldn’t be seen as proof it actually occurred, because of course the institution has its own goals and it wouldn’t look good for it to do anything but issue an abject apology.
Peter Boghossian asks a molecular geneticist whether trans women should be legally treated as woman. Her response:
The video of the entire session: