From time to time, I wonder whether I overuse the word psychodrama. And then, within days, I find another one of these:

In crime news:  

A 25-year-old Chicago woman with a concealed carry license shot and killed a man who attempted to rob her at gunpoint last week. Police say the armed 19-year-old man approached the young woman at a bus stop in Chicago’s Fernwood neighbourhood Tuesday morning. Surveillance video captured across the street from the bus stop shows a struggle between the two before the woman pulls out her own firearm and shoots the man in the neck.

One less rat, you might think. However, a woman defending herself from an armed male mugger is, it turns out, terribly problematic: 

“If she had let him rob her” is an interesting series of words. “She should not have had a gun in the first place,” says Zack.  

Mr Ford, now busy deleting tweets, is “LGBTQ Editor” at ThinkProgress. And, says he, a “proud SJW.”

Update, via the comments:

Christopher DeGroot on attempts to pathologise masculinity: 

Published this week, the American Psychological Association’s Guidelines for Psychological Practice for Boys and Men is a remarkable and frightening document. Throughout, value judgements are expressed under the guise of “science.” Social constructivism is assumed to be true, the implication being that “gender roles” don’t represent anything deeper, such as biology or an enduring human nature. Thus, if most nurses are women, and if most engineers are men, the only explanation is the patriarchy, that insidious, mysterious, inescapable evil. One is struck by the facile, trendy cant that the authors take for granted. Three sentences in, we read this assertion: “Boys and men, as a group, tend to hold privilege and power based on gender.” There is no recognition here of male accomplishment — that falls into the category of “privilege and power,” words which, like “patriarchy,” we encounter with mind-numbing frequency.

Readers who can bear to plough through the entire APA document, supposedly thirteen years in the making, will note the framing of masculinity (or “traditional masculine ideology”) as entailing violence, bullying, sexual harassment, “dominance and aggression,” ableism, ageism, racism, and outright sociopathy. Or as Stephanie Pappas says in a summary here: “Traditional masculinity… is, on the whole, harmful.” In poking through the document, readers may also note the absence of any meaningful reference to biology, testosterone, evolution, etc., as if such details were irrelevant to fathoming male behaviour. However, the word privilege occurs 19 times, and the word transgender no fewer than 60.

As DeGroot points out, it seems unwise to redefine masculinity in order to flatter the resentments and insecurities of the fringe and maladjusted – say, “social justice” enthusiasts who consider themselves “marginalised” by expectations of competence, competitiveness and emotional self-possession. Or those who describe themselves as transsexual, non-binary or “gender non-conforming.” As if a proclivity for adventurousness or risk-taking, and a desire for achievement, were fundamentally a problem, something to be fixed. And it goes without saying that the writers of the APA’s guidelines would be unlikely to enjoy lives of comfort and status without a great many others embracing the values and inclinations – including ambition, stoicism and courage – that our self-imagined betters strive to pathologise.

The Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania sent out an email to parents after a photograph of a student in a white hooded robe made the rounds on social media and caused some sort of panic. The individual was in a hallway in Lower Merion High School.

Run, children! The Klan are in town! 

The student was wearing part of a monk costume from the play Romeo and Juliet, which was being used by a 9th grade class. The student appeared to be returning to the classroom.

The image, of a child dressed as a monk for a school play, was deemed “disturbing” by school administrators, and as a result of this mind-shattering trauma, “The costume will not be used in future enactments of Romeo and Juliet.”

With expectations of competent spelling:

[Professor Inoue] will lecture about “language standards that just kill our students” by subjecting them to “single standards,” which perpetuate “White language supremacy.”

You see, those composition classes you’re paying for, or that some poor sap is paying for, shouldn’t teach students how to write clearly. Instead, “compassionate” classrooms should be grounded in “dimension-based rubrics” and “labour-based contracts,” which presumably reward the length of time a student spends getting something wrong, repeatedly, irrespective of whether they actually, eventually, get it right; thereby avoiding “white racial habits of language.” It’s the path to “a socially just future,” apparently. And not, as one might suppose, somewhat narrowed hopes of employment. Because an “anti-racist” education, at a university, should ideally leave its beneficiaries sounding uneducated. With mangled conjugation, missing verbs, and saying axe instead of ask.

Professor Inoue has, of course, been mentioned here before.

Very much related, this. In which, fellow “social justice” enthusiast Dr A W Strouse informs us that correcting errors of spelling and basic grammar can “make students feel bewildered, hurt, or angry,” and should therefore be avoided. We’re also told that job applicants who, as graduates, struggle with even elementary spelling, should bristle at any acknowledgement of this shortcoming, telling potential employers – and I quote – “Fuck you.”  

Update, via the comments: