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Anthropology Free-For-All Parenting Politics

She Should “Just Be Able To Have” Things

November 14, 2023 61 Comments

Via Mr Muldoon in the comments, umbrage is detected:

The circle of life can be summed up like this: you’re born, you work, pay taxes and then die.

Following generations repeat the process. This girl gets it. pic.twitter.com/ReKTY65ofy

— Dr. Jebra Faushay (@JebraFaushay) November 12, 2023

As this chap quips in reply,

Like, I get that someone has to work for society to function, but why does it have to be me?

And this one,

A lot of complaints about capitalism are more properly bug reports to God.

Update, via the comments:

Rafi adds,

I like that you tagged this ‘parenting’.

Well, addressing the matter earlier might have spared our unhappy madam a lot of pierced and tattooed grumpiness.

There is, of course, plenty of scope for grumbling about the seemingly endless range of things that can be taxed. And existential angst – or existential pouting – can be difficult to avoid, the human condition being what it is. See the aforementioned “bug reports to God.” But the emotional assumption that Things Should Just Be There For Me, Forever, In Unlimited Quantities™ is, I think, something best addressed before one’s children venture out into the world.

Children who, as adults, may then make TikTok videos of themselves bemoaning the fact that they aren’t simply being given a free house, and free food, and a free car, and free petrol for the free car. Children who, as adults, may then seem genuinely bewildered by the prospect of being responsible for the feeding and clothing of any children that they, in turn, might have.

Another thing occurs to me. If pretty much everything you need, or want, should just somehow be there anyway, on an indefinite basis, via some oddly unarticulated rearrangement of the universe, then it’s not obvious how gratitude might fit into such a mindset.

Also, open thread.

Continue reading
Reading time: 1 min
Written by: David
Academia Anthropology Parenting Psychodrama

Cosmetics Were Applied

September 12, 2023 63 Comments

One for the totally-balanced-educator files:

Meet DeDe Duffy. A preschool teacher in Cape Coral, FL. She says she teaches her students that if they don’t like their parents, they can find another family.

She also says she teaches them to be gay.

These are the people teaching your kids. pic.twitter.com/e5HJFzMOvD

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 11, 2023

Those pre-school children are in good hands, clearly. Ms Duffy’s pronouns, since you ask, are they and them.

Update, via the comments:

Rafi adds,

A teaching job isn’t meant to be therapy for the teacher. 

Well, it would be nice – refreshing, even – if these people worked out their serious mental health issues on their own time. Rather than, as seems to be the fashion, inflicting them on other people’s children.

Chris G offers the following,

If you are an adult and looking for validation from children, you should probably reconsider a lot of things.

Indeed. Ditto TikTok likes. And yet, as we’ve seen many times, the more scrupulously woke a teacher is, the more likely he is to issue the class instructions to remember his birthday, to use his made-up pronouns, to browse his social media accounts, and to tell him, seemingly daily, just how pretty he is.

Ms Duffy has now locked her social media accounts, so further illumination is, sadly, denied us. But it occurs to me that if I were employed to work with small children, I don’t think I would choose to film myself having eye-widening meltdowns – or to then share the recordings with lots of random strangers on TikTok and Instagram.

But maybe that’s just me. Shy soul that I am.

Azi asks,

How do these people get hired?

The supply of bedlamite educators does seem all but inexhaustible. Such that one might wonder whether schools and universities, those fiefdoms of the progressive, are actively favouring the psychologically marginal. Presumably, there are people doing the hiring who think that emotional instability and pretentious “non-binary” pronouns denote an ideal candidate, an exemplar for impressionable children.

Rather than… well, you know.

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Reading time: 1 min
Written by: David
Academia Parenting Pronouns Or Else Sports

This Little Red Light Keeps Flashing

August 24, 2023 80 Comments

A tale of a girls’ tennis team, a locker room, and a high-school hiring dispute.

First, the view from afar, all rather fragrant and elevated:

One father read a letter on behalf of his son, who was not present. The former tennis player for the [Pennsylvania] high school stated: “Sasha [formerly David, Yates] is a woman. Over the past four years I have watched her realise this, and have watched as she has transitioned into her true self,” going on to urge those motioning not to rehire Yates to “fix their hearts.”

And,

Dr Sonya Deltredici… identified herself as a leader of an “LGBT health curriculum” at York Hospital. She said, “It does not hurt our children to be in the presence of trans people… What hurts our children is discrimination against trans people.”

The words “transphobia” and “hate” were of course deployed.

And now the view from close quarters:

According to the reprimand issued to Yates, many of the female students said they were uncomfortable with the man’s presence in the facility, as well as with the comments he made to the girls. “I was too busy picking my jaw up off the floor when I read it,” [school board member, Michelle] Smyers said. “Because the second incident outlined where he’d gone into the same locker room and was… talking to them about their menstrual cycles and what type of panties they like to wear.”

See? All totally innocent and above-board. Not weird or creepy at all. Oh, and then there was the time Mr Yates followed a sixteen-year-old girl – a girl he wasn’t coaching – into the girls’ bathroom, otherwise unoccupied, and attempted to strike up a random conversation, resulting in the girl’s alarm and some hurried texting.

The reprimand mentioned above – or rather, reprimands, because, well, what’s behaviour without a pattern? – did not seem to deter Mr Yates. Nor did the provision of private bathroom and changing facilities, typically used by sports officials, including coaches. Direct appeals from the girls also failed to discourage him from parading around their locker room in a bra-and-panties ensemble and various states of undress. Such that the girls were left in little doubt that their cross-dressing coach was, as one board member put it, “still fully a man.” And all while seeking out details of the girls’ menstruation cycles and their preferences in underwear.

Indeed, when subsequently challenged, Mr Yates, seen here, invoked “discrimination” and insisted that he is entitled to use “any bathroom.” The school is currently weighing the views of parents against the prospect of legal action and accusations of “transphobia,” with another meeting on the matter scheduled for September. Mr Yates is, he says, “completely overwhelmed with how the community is coming out and supporting me.”

At which point, readers may wonder whether such overwhelming support, largely from progressive women, is actually part of the problem.

Above, Mr Yates, being supported.

Update, via the comments, where Nikw211 adds,

Let’s be clear – a female teacher, an actual one that is, who behaved in this way would not only be reprimanded, but fired. This isn’t “discrimination” because he’s a transwoman. Any teacher talking about such intimate details with children in their care while parading around in their underwear should and would be suspended on the spot, almost certainly fired. This shouldn’t even be a question.

Well, one might think so. And yet here we are.

Still, it’s interesting to see how Mr Yates’ supporters – again, largely progressive women – will merrily elevate themselves with the airing of modish views, their displays of compassion and inclusivity, while in effect screwing over the girls. Girls, who, by disapproving, even politely, become low-status.

Update 2:

A decision has been reached regarding the future of Mr Yates’ teaching career. And by extension, his workplace interest in the panties of young girls. See if you can guess which way it went.

Update 3:

The further adventures of our strapping madam.

Update 4:

Our strapping madam invokes victimhood.

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Reading time: 3 min
Written by: David
Academia Parenting Pronouns Or Else

An Unconvincing Basis For Applause

August 22, 2023 72 Comments

I’d suggest that this is precisely what raises doubts as to Ms Ashley Markham’s fitness to be a school principal in charge of 12-year-olds.

This is a school principal. These are the people in charge of your children’s education. pic.twitter.com/kJOZtPhmal

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) August 21, 2023

To boast of abandoning reality at the drop of a hat – and by extension, coercing others to be unrealistic too – and to boast of creating an environment in which manipulative pretension and mental illness thrive – is an odd moral flex.

Readers are welcome to ponder exactly how “safe” an environment is in which such practised affectations are dominant or mandatory, and in which one can expect to be scolded and punished for not wishing to pretend, for not wishing to become dishonest and absurd.

Oh, and by the way, should you ask Ms Markham about the implications of her position – say, as touched on above – she may make a smug and dismissive TikTok video in which she expects you to pay her $100 an hour, plus an extra $250, for an expert “consultation” on why she is right.

Lifted from the comments, which you’re reading of course.

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Reading time: 1 min
Written by: David
Anthropology Parenting

Let’s Do It, But In A Way That’s Less Likely To Work

August 14, 2023 84 Comments

Come, huddle round. Let us poke at the Guardian:

We’re a queer couple looking for co-parents to raise a child with.

The parenting pages. Let’s start there.

For us, the ideal parenting setup would consist of three or four of us sharing responsibility for a child (the others involved would also be responsible for providing the sperm).

Providing the sperm. A joyous and maternal turn of phrase. Also of note, the idea of wanting a baby, but with only a third or a quarter of the responsibility. A kind of low-commitment parenting. Bodes well.

The way we see it, why not use the implicit obstacles we face as a same-sex couple to become parents in a way that works for us and redefines the family unit completely?

Eleanor Margolis, the lady keen to redefine the family unit completely – which also bodes well – details some of those implicit obstacles:

There are a number of different matching services out there for those looking to find someone to raise a child with: PollenTree, CoParents, Just a Baby, and others. We haven’t been impressed by the design of the websites

Look, when you’re redefining the family, and redefining it completely, website design matters.

It gets worse.

some of them harbour some distinct creepiness. From men sending unsolicited offers of sperm, to those messaging us with elaborate fantasies about watching one of us give birth to their child, we’ve run into a number of what I suppose can only be called “procreation freaks.”

I guess that can happen when you wander off the beaten track, away from the tried and tested. People at the margins tend to meet other marginal people.

Scrolling through the apps can be a jarring experience in itself when you’re not planning on sleeping with the person pictured. Some of them let you swipe – Tinder-style – through the faces of potential dads, as if what you’re looking for is attraction, rather than someone who’s going to do their fair share of nappy changing.

I say again, redefining the family. By harnessing the untapped power of unrelatedness, diffused responsibility, and a total lack of attraction. And it’s perhaps worth noting that, throughout the article, the potential child is referred to only in terms suggesting some sort of task.

So far, we’ve been on a few “dates” with potential fathers. None have gone horribly, and we’ve met some really thoughtful people, but we’re yet to find anyone we fully gel with.

It turns out that “co-parenting dates” are not without issues:

It’s vital to us that we build a friendship with whoever we decide to commit to, before moving on to the actual, mildly frightening procreation side of things. Call me old-fashioned but if I’m going to have any contact with someone’s sperm, I’d really prefer it if we were friends first.

You see, the person with whom Ms Margolis and her lesbian partner plan to have a child – on what seems to be a time-share basis, via “contact with someone’s sperm” – should at least be tolerable. And not overtly monstrous.

Take that, conventional family structure.

The subject of “queer, platonic, co-parenting meetups” is also raised, along with its complications:

At first, we tried to implement a speed-meeting setup, but in the end, the meetup has established itself as something closer to a support group.

At which point, further comment would seem unkind.

Still, things are not, it has to be said, going entirely to plan:

Leo and I are still waiting to meet somebody right for us. Since starting our meetup group, we’ve been inundated with messages from people thanking us for setting it up. We’ve learned that there are plenty of people looking, like us, to do parenting differently. We just hope that, somewhere among them, is someone for us.

However, Ms Margolis remains optimistic, her dream of parenting differently – much like sharing a villa in Spain – still intact:

It has been energising to see that – niche as it may be – there is a call for this kind of family structure,

Albeit among people with whom the author doesn’t gel, and who often exude, and I quote, a “distinct creepiness.”

Readers are invited to ponder the appeal, for any gentleman with fatherhood in mind, of effectively becoming a sperm donor who is also expected to perform household chores, for many years, and to pay child maintenance. In a sexless relationship with random lesbians who may find him barely tolerable, a necessary complication. But this, it seems, is how one “redefines the family unit completely.” It’s “the ideal parenting setup.”

Oh, and one final conundrum:

but the eggs-to-sperm ratio remains an issue. In our experience, co-parenting seems to overwhelmingly appeal to cis women, trans men and non-binary people assigned female at birth. Without any exhaustive studies on this, I can only guess why.

One more time:

cis women, trans men and non-binary people assigned female at birth.

I think the word that applies here, to all three groups, and which is nonetheless being danced around, is women.

Ms Margolis lives in London. Pronouns “she/her.”

Update:

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Written by: David
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In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.