What was I saying…? Oh yes. Open thread. Share ye links and bicker. 

Or, The Minefield Of Modern Progressive Manners:

When we picked up our daughter, it was clear on her face that something was incredibly wrong.

Colorado mother Erin Lee describes her discovery of what her 12-year-old daughter is being taught:

She explained to my daughter that if she is not 100% comfortable in her female body, then she is transgender… She then told the kids that parents aren’t safe and that it’s okay to lie to them about where they are… She explicitly asked the kids who they’re sexually attracted to. There were 11, 12 and 13-year-olds in the room when this happened.

She doubled down, [saying] that parents aren’t safe, that heterosexuality and monogamy are not normal, and she then proceeded to hand out her personal contact information to the kids, encouraging them to connect with her without their parents’ knowledge, by cell phone, by email, and by chat platforms like WhatsApp and Discord, where parents can’t see the communication. She also sends them invites to her secret meetings through these channels.

This predacious stranger, it turns out, had absolutely no qualifications to be speaking with children about sexuality. She’s not a licensed therapist or counsellor, she’s not a full-time teacher in the district. Her only qualification is that she’s a lesbian.

A longer video, which may be somewhat eye-opening, can be found here. And a YouTube version here.

The described events, including subsequent meetings with the self-styled instructor, the school’s principal, and members of the school board – and the inevitable accusations of “homophobia,” “transphobia” and “intolerance” – don’t get any less concerning. One might say creepy.  

Update:

For newcomers and the nostalgic, more items from the archives:

Damned If You Do.  

How dare you like, or not like, her aboriginal-feminist poetry:

We’re told that being a “coloured” or “Indigenous” writer is fraught with “structural oppression,” on account of being “marginalised” – as when being invited to literary award parties and then swooned over by pretentious pale-skinned lefties. “Whiteness” and “white men” are particular burdens to Ms Whittaker and her peers, whose suffering – their “collective plight” – is seemingly endless and endlessly fascinating, at least among those for whom such woes are currency. As Ms Whittaker’s world is one of practised self-involvement, her point is at times unobvious. However, our unhappy poet appears to be annoyed both by “underwhelming responses” to her own writing and by insufficiently convincing displays of approval. All that “endless patronising praise.” At which point, the words high maintenance spring to mind.

She Does All This For Us, You Know. 

Or, The Thrill Of Hand Dryers:

I thought I’d cheer you with another chance to marvel at the mind-shattering talents of Ms Sandrine Schaefer, a performance artist whose adventures with lettuce and underwear have previously entertained us. Ms Schaefer, who teaches performance art to those less gifted than herself, has been described by the senior curator at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art as “amazing,” “compelling” and yet inexplicably “underfunded.”

You Can Either Concur Or Agree. 

At Edinburgh University, performative neuroticism reaches new heights:

Time for an open thread, I think. You’ve got that restlessness about you.

But first, Amanda Trenfield shares a tale of romance for our times:

I had decided only the week earlier to attend the three-day event with my husband. It wasn’t in the family holiday plan, and we had to arrange care for the children, but I saw it as a perfect opportunity for us to reconnect… I believed that time away from the stress of everyday life was the perfect remedy to reignite our relationship.

Needless to say, it did not go as planned.

Ms Trenfield, by the way, is a life coach, ready to “empower” you with her expertise, while teaching you to “understand and appreciate the most important people in your life.”

Via TomJ.

Now share ye links and bicker. 

A tearful tale, care of Kelsey Smoot, “a cultural and gender theorist, a writer, an advocate, and a poet”:

As a nonbinary trans person who uses they/them/theirs pronouns as my terms of address, I suppose I should be celebrating this influx of discourse on the proper usage of pronouns. Truthfully, I’m exhausted.

Exhausted. Because of course them is. And issuing all those terms of address can really take it out of a girl, even one with chin fluff.

Within several of my closest relationships, the fact that I require ungendered pronouns when referring to me in the third person has become the source of deep strain and disappointment.

Specifically,

I feel duped by some of the positive reactions from my friends and loved ones when I initially came out as transmasc/nonbinary. In retrospect, that was the easy part. I was the only one changing.

More specifically,

In the years since, I have come to find that I am in constant competition with my past. For a while, I flinched when I was misgendered but said nothing. Then, I began giving gentle reminders, followed by long-winded overtures of understanding. I felt guilty and embarrassed and made sure to emphasize that effort was all that mattered to me. Recently, though, I’ve begun pushing back: “You’ll have to do better” is my new refrain.

And who wouldn’t want a friendship based on an ultimatum? A demand that you will perceive what you are told to perceive. The issue, it seems, is that friends and relatives who have known Ms Smoot for some time, as a young woman and a girl, aren’t finding it easy to pretend or to forget what they know. And what they know necessarily casts some doubt on the whole themness business.

Who wish to damage others: 

One [activist] non-profit, which the Fund for Santa Barbara paid to provide “social emotional learning (SEL) certification workshops,” is called AHA! Santa Barbara (Attitudes, Harmony, and Achievement). It gathered students into circles alongside adults, including one who served time in prison, to share intimate details of their lives. The programme was created by Jennifer Freed, a “certified astrologer & psychotherapist” who tells people she can understand them based on “cosmic DNA.” […]

Just Communities is an offshoot of a now-defunct group called NCCJ whose offspring have a disturbing record of mistreating children in the name of social justice. At another NCCJ-related camp in Northern California, students were “ordered to separate by race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation… while their peers are instructed to call out every slur and stereotype they know about them,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2018. If students were too kind, the adults twisted the dagger by using the most painful of stereotypes, according to the report. After students called out “good at math” for Asians, staff yelled out “small penises.”

Luke Rosiak on the woke child-abuse industry.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

After turning 2 years old, my son, Avishai, started demanding that he only wear tractor shirts, and my mind spiralled into darkness.

So writes Jay Deitcher, a social worker and therapist, a declarer of pronouns, and, it seems, someone accustomed to the aforementioned mental spiralling:

I catastrophised worst-case scenarios, imagining a world where he fell for everything stereotypically manly. I envisioned him on a football field, barrelling through mega-muscled opponents. Imagined him waxing a sports car on a warm summer day.

We seem to be in a high rhetorical gear. For a two-year-old’s choice of shirt.

Mr Deitcher – who has, he says, “always judged other guys who seemed boxed in by masculinity” – airs his view of maleness:

Men didn’t hug. Men didn’t say I love you. Men were angry. Aggressive. Inept as parents. I became determined. I was going to create a bond stronger than any parent had ever achieved, but I told myself that to do so I needed to distance myself from anything deemed masculine.

This line of thought goes on for some time.

I grimaced at anyone driving a Ford car, the John Wayne of automobiles. I hated men who wore plaid. Felt ill if someone mentioned a wrench or another tool.

And because things aren’t sufficiently dramatic:

My body spiralled into panic any time I attempted manual labour.

Given these fevered thoughts, all this tool-induced upset, readers may wish to peek at the photographs accompanying the article, and which may bring to mind the words grown adult, albeit ironically. Readers may also wish to ponder the prospects of a father-son relationship premised on a dogmatic, near-hysterical disdain for maleness, for “anything deemed masculine.”

Dr Erec Smith, an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania, on educators who would prefer minority students not to be understood, or indeed successful:

[W]hat is perhaps most troublesome about [“anti-racist” educator, Asao] Inoue’s statement is that he is projecting negative emotionality onto students because of something—their desire to learn standard English—that would otherwise suggest a positive and confident self-image. By framing this desire to succeed as hopeless, he is encouraging healthy young people to adopt attitudes that will hinder their development.

Possibly because expectations of failure, and cultivated resentment, are more exploitable by race-hustling educators. People whose paycheque depends on propagating misery.

Implicit in Inoue’s statement is the notion that the only way “students of colour”—particularly black and Latino students—can successfully navigate American society is to be phony and put on an act for white people’s approval. The thought of a black person seeing the pragmatic benefit of standardised English, or of a black person coming to college already proficient in it, are by this standard of black or Latino authenticity either impossible or reprehensible.

Authenticity being defined, it seems, as inarticulate ghetto knucklehead.

For Dr Inoue, a minority student wishing to be articulate, precise, and understood by a wider audience, by being fluent in the language of his academic peers and potential employers, is “selfish” and “immature.” Opting for comprehensibility and success is, we’re told, to surrender to “white supremacy” and “capitalist-inflicted bullshit.” “You can… mouth the words that are white, but… they’re coming from a [black] body,” says Dr Inoue, as if expecting applause.

Dan Springer on Seattle’s woke, broke public transport:  

At a recent Sound Transit Board meeting, the outgoing CEO summed up the situation. “Our fare collection system relies overwhelmingly on an honour system,” Peter Rogoff said, “and our increasingly acute problem is that our riders aren’t honouring the system.” By one measurement, as many as a staggering 70% of all passengers are free riders. But even that is only an estimate as there is almost no fare enforcement. Sound Transit did away with fare enforcement officers after a study revealed people of colour were disproportionately getting fined.

Sound Transit Board member Claudia Balducci appears untroubled by this trajectory, insisting that “People are feeling more welcome on our system and less afraid to use it because there’s less of a fear of fare enforcement.” Apparently, this is a good thing. The views of local, law-abiding taxpayers, who are subsidising this experiment in social progress, are left to the imagination.

Ben Sixsmith on the steep decline of Swedish education:

Many of the problems [Magnus] Henrekson and [Johan] Wennström diagnose will be familiar to anyone acquainted with the British education system. Grade inflation has masked declining standards, which, in Sweden, manifested themselves with a Wile E Coyote-esque fall down the PISA rankings. […] Sweden has, in recent decades, undergone an extraordinary demographic transformation. As of 2020, a quarter of Swedish residents had a foreign background. In 2015, research by Dr Gabriel Heller-Sahlgren suggested that “the change in pupil demographics due to immigration explains almost a third of the average decline between 2000 and 2012: 19 per cent in mathematical literacy, 28 per cent in reading literacy, and 41 per cent in scientific literacy.” 

And Emil Kirkegaard on super-progressive Ontario, where “diversity” trumps standards: 

It is now illegal to use a math test to make sure that math teachers know the material they would be teaching.

The motives for removing tests of educator competence soon become apparent. The likely effect on students – including minority students, in whose name competence is being sidelined – is a topic on which readers may care to speculate.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.