“I have a gender studies degree.”

So boasts Ms Kyl Myers in the pages of Time magazine. I’ll give you a moment to experience the inevitable hushed awe.

Having, as she does, a degree in gender studies, Ms Myers is vexed by many things. Such as being asked, kindly, while pregnant, whether she was expecting a boy or a girl. This, we’re informed, is not “a simple question with a simple answer.”

My partner Brent and I had found out our child’s sex chromosomes in the early stages of my pregnancy, and we had seen their genitals during the anatomy scan. But we didn’t think that information told us anything about our kid’s gender. 

No, of course. No clues there. No information at all, in fact. Just random noise.

The only things we really knew about our baby is that they were human, breech and going to be named Zoomer.

Being enlightened and conscientious parents, Ms Myers and her partner Brent have chosen for their child the name Zoomer. Readers may wonder whether that detail tells us something too. Other fruits of this “gender-creative parenting” include pointedly not “assigning” a gender to their child – though experiments of this kind tend to be inflicted on boys – and instead insisting on “the gender-neutral pronouns they, them and their.” A contrivance whose modishness we’ve touched on before. 

We were committed to raising our child without the expectations or restrictions of the gender binary.

And as trans activists keep telling us, continually interacting with people who aren’t sure what gender you are – in this case, thanks to mommy’s niche fixations – is in no way stressful or aggravating, and could never, ever result in demoralisation and psychological problems. And pretending that your son or daughter isn’t actually a boy or girl will, somehow, in ways never quite specified, “eliminate gender-based oppression, disparities and violence.” It’s “preventative care,” we’re told.

New York Times contributor David Kaufman, writing here, wants us to know that he’s rendered distraught by “subtle streams of everyday racism that course through our homes, our workplaces, and the outside world.” An endless assault that “bombards people of colour.” People such as himself. It is, we’re told, time for a “cultural reckoning.”

For me, this reckoning begins with traffic signals.

Hm. Perhaps retracing our steps will help. Make things less confounding.

A few months back, before Covid-19 kept us in our homes and George Floyd made us take to the streets, I was walking with a friend, her daughter, and my twin sons. My friend is White and I’m not — something I’d never given a second thought until we reached a crosswalk. “Remember, honey,” she said to her daughter as we waited for the light to turn green, “we need to wait for the little White man to appear before we can cross the street.”

 And in the very next breath:

I realise that White people like to exert control over nearly everything everyone does, I thought, but since when did this literally include trying to cross the street?

It’s a bold leap. Dense with assumptions. And hey, no racism there. Mr Kaufman – who can doubtless detect racism in the motions of subatomic particles – would have us believe that his friend was using the word white as a racial descriptor, rather than, as seems more likely, an unremarkable acknowledgement of a traffic light’s colour when talking to a child. In light of which, Mr Kaufman’s claims of being “bombarded” with racism – daily, everywhere – become at least explicable, if not convincing.

As a Black dad, I was struck by the language at play. How is it possible that well into the 21st century, parents all over Manhattan — well-meaning, #BLM-marching parents — are teaching their children to ask “little White men” for permission to cross the street? And why doesn’t this seem to bother them? It certainly bothered me.

The pedestrian crossing signal that so distresses Mr Kaufman – a rudimentary humanoid figure, made of white lights on a black background – can be seen here, from a safe distance. You may want to steady yourselves. It’s all very upsetting, at least for the exquisitely sensitive – people finer than ourselves, and who write for the New York Times. Mr Kaufman then goes on an investigative journey, in which he learns why, in a society with lots of non-English speakers, crossing signals with words – walk / don’t walk – are being replaced by simple, universal graphics, calibrated to capture attention – say, by using lights of a certain hue:

A concerned parent, a white Slate reader, seeks counsel from the woke hive mind: 

My sons have graduated, and their closest friends are still a mix of black, Hispanic, and white kids. I have never been concerned about the kids having any issues around race.

That’s nice. However, inevitably, the sky soon begins to cloud:

But one of our sons mentioned recently how irritated he is by the form he has to fill out regarding a college roommate. He has to specify his race, and all of the profiles of potential roommates he views also include race. He says all he cares about is if they are male or female and what their interests are — he doesn’t care about race.

At which point, sharp-eyed readers may sense where this is heading.

I’m doing more reading on racism, and if I’m understanding correctly, not caring about race is almost as bad as focusing only on race. Should he care what race his friends are? Is there something we should be doing or talking to our kids about before they go to college, or is it too late? Are they just as racist as someone who only has white friends, or am I worrying about nothing?

Slate’s purveyor of progressive wisdom, Michelle Herman, knows a rube when she sees one:

Not caring about or noticing race is a privilege reserved for people who are white. 

A bold, indeed sweeping, claim, evidence for which is not forthcoming, presumably on grounds that time is better spent inculcating neurosis – and habitual, exploitable insecurity – all in the name of piety:

Matthew Continetti on the competitive pieties of woke schooling: 

Parents opted their children out of standardised tests, which they deemed “structurally biased, even racist, because non-white students had the lowest scores.” Without tests, there was no way to measure the progress of the student body. The school, without telling parents, changed all of its bathrooms, “from kindergarten to fifth grade,” from single-sex to gender-neutral. At a Parent–Teacher Association meeting, families split into warring factions. One side was furious at the school for making such an important decision arbitrarily and autonomously. “The parents in the other camp argued that gender labels — and not just on the bathroom doors — led to bullying and that the real problem was the patriarchy. One called for the elimination of urinals.”

Mr Continetti is referring to this first-hand tale of bewilderment and woe, in which there’s much to widen the eyes. Regarding the toilet drama mentioned above, this bears quoting:

The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms… As children, they didn’t think to challenge the new adult rules, the new adult ideas of justice. Instead, they found a way around this difficulty that the grown-ups had introduced into their lives. It was a quiet plea to be left alone.

Update, via the comments: 

We’ve been here before, of course:

Parents only discovered the campaign – which asserts that white pupils are complicit in an “invisible system of privilege” – when their children began complaining about it.

Also, open thread. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

Her Loveliness Revealed.

Slate’s Christina Cauterucci has discovered a “brilliant new weapon of progressivism.”

You see, those “right wing, centrist, or politically complacent parents” – the parents you love, presumably – must be purged of their “ill-informed allegiances” and made to conform politically, with the threat of never seeing grandchildren. Which is how well-adjusted adult offspring behave, of course… Ms Cauterucci’s parents are no doubt proud of their daughter and her charming, terribly enlightened fantasies of coercion, in which children are imagined primarily as a form of political leverage, a tool of rather sadistic emotional punishment. And all in the name of progressive piety.

Your Failure To Enthuse Is Violence, Apparently.

Roy G Guzmán is oppressed by the “violence” of people not liking his poetry.

After dismissing the recent, rather negative appraisals of his work as driven by “toxic masculinity” and “(white) male fragility” – no other possibilities being conceivable, of course – Mr Guzmán has apparently retired from Twitter. We are, it seems, a terrible disappointment to him.

Hear The Lamentations Of Unstable Leftist Women.

Their marriages failed, they have psychiatrists on speed-dial, and it’s all Trump’s fault. Oh, and white men, obviously.