Some items from the archives:

How Dare You Not Pretend.

On pronouns, politeness, and the strange mental rumblings of Ms Laurie Penny.  

Regarding rudeness, I’m generally polite by default, at least in person, and don’t go out of my way to needlessly put a kink in someone else’s day. I’ve had perfectly civil chats with people who regard themselves as transgender or gender-non-conforming or whatever. Nobody got upset. But what is often being asked – or demanded – is not a small thing, not in its implications.

Taken broadly, we are being asked to affirm, wholesale, a bundle of phenomena that includes not only actual gender dysphoria, whether the result of developmental anomalies or childhood molestation, but also autogynephilia, serious personality disorders, adolescent pretension, and assorted exhibitionist and unsavoury compulsions. The expectation seems to be that we should take these different phenomena, with very different moral connotations, as being one and the same thing, and then defer to them, habitually and uncritically. Which is asking rather more than can readily be agreed to.

Turf War.

At Middlebury College, woke piety erupts. A 74-year-old scholar is quite literally chased off campus.

Jonathan Kay on woke mysticism and the latest must-have identity niche:  

[O]ne of the main themes of the 32-page document is that the task of defining the Two-Spirit concept is (quite literally) beyond the powers of Western language and epistemology. And in any case, the category is almost completely open-ended: The act of proclaiming oneself Two-Spirited could be a statement about one’s gender, or sexual orientation, or both, or neither. Or 2S can be a statement about one’s politics, spirituality, or simply one’s desire to present as “anti-colonial.” […]

While the authors of the report were careful to source their work to Indigenous writers and interviewees, it’s interesting to note that all of the listed societal roles attributed to ancient Two-Spirited people align uncannily with the avant-garde outlook of a white 2022-era environmentalist who’s embraced intersectional conceptions of gender… We are told no fewer than nine times, for instance, that the authors are following an “anti-oppressive” approach. Colonialism is denounced more than a dozen times, including in its “heteronormative” (three times) variant.

Needless to say, the whole thing is a bit of a two-legged stool and, shall we say, not entirely consonant with anthropological evidence.

Libby Emmons on cheated female athletes and transgender overreach:

Further to recent rumblings in the comments, the Globe and Mail’s Phoebe Maltz Bovy offers what I believe is called a hot take:

Most will be familiar with the following scenario: a young girl, a teen or tween, gets in trouble with her school’s administration for a dress-code violation. Her supposed crime against decency: looking provocative. It will turn out that the girl was wearing some normal teenager outfit, jeans and a T-shirt or something equally boring, but had the audacity to attend school in a body with breasts, hips and a post-pubescent-looking behind… She is not choosing to draw attention to herself simply by existing. It’s the fault of the adults around her for sexualising her.

Given what follows, do keep that last line in mind.

But in a twist to the typical narrative, this time around, a high-school teacher in Oakville, Ont., made headlines for her curvaceous classroom presence.

That would be this chap’s curvaceous classroom presence.

“The conservative press and right-wing social media” are then mentioned, complete with implied hissing, on grounds that those irredeemable right-wingers have noticed something untoward:

And in totally-radical-toilet news:

Female students at one of Latin America’s top Universities say trans activists staged a coup of a single-sex washroom on their campus,

It started, you see, with feminist students painting a lesbian pride symbol on a wall near a campus library. As one does. This act of fearless self-involvement apparently inflicted nerve-shredding trauma on the trans activist contingent, who promptly denounced the lesbians as “TERFs, colonial fascists, and transphobes,” before announcing that lesbians are only permitted to use symbols of lesbianism that they, the trans activists, find congenial.

Shortly after, as a result of the lesbian symbol that had been painted, the trans students reportedly declared that they “did not feel safe” on the campus and went to administrators to demand a gender-neutral washroom be established in that area. While administrators agreed to create one, the students did not wait for it to be designated. Less than 24 hours later, the activists took over the largest female restroom, which was on the second floor of the Faculty of Philosophy.

Ah, the life of the mind.

Naturally, the first task was to give the toilets a makeover via the uplifting medium of graffiti, thereby communicating the life-enhancing qualities of prostitution:

Canada’s interim Green Party leader, a dysmorphic woman who expects everyone else to refer to her as “he” and “they,” but also sometimes “she,” apparently at random, was recently rendered tearful and distraught by an electronic caption:

On Saturday, September 3, at a public media event kicking off the Green Party of Canada’s leadership contest, the wrong pronouns were presented beside my name in a way that I could not change myself. I acknowledge that mistakes can happen and the need to learn from them. What happened here impacted me much more than a slip of the tongue. It made me feel hurt and isolated at a moment that should have been filled with inspiration and anticipation.

You see, a captioning oversight – or if you prefer, an accidental acknowledgment of reality – is part of a “system of oppression” and therefore a basis for a grand project of social correction. One that must address the seemingly bottomless sorrows of “Black, Indigenous and racialised people and 2SLGBTQIA+ people,” and thereby prevent a fearless politician from feeling “hurt and isolated.”

“I am assumed male nearly always by strangers,” says Ms Kuttner, which, frankly, seems a tad implausible. We’re also told that perceiving her as a man, not a woman, requires “effort,” an effort that is expected by Ms Kuttner – which would appear closer to the truth, if not entirely consonant with the previous claim.