Of that “oppressive document,” the United States Constitution:  

When this idea came up in our newsroom about campus administrators shredding the Constitution because it’s a trigger against students, we didn’t think people would actually fall for it. We underestimated just how stupid and politically correct these people are.

The impossibly fretful and neurotic student featured in the video is actually a journalist playing a role. The obliging administrators, including an Assistant Director of Equal Opportunity at Vassar College and a Director of Feminist Studies at Oberlin College, are quite real. 

Why I call my son ‘he’, against my better judgement. 

Yes, it’s a parenting column in the pages of the Independent, care of “non-binary” parent and pronoun contester, Dorian Stripe: 

It’s a question I’m asked occasionally: “why do you use gendered pronouns for your son?” It’s no surprise, as I move entirely in queer circles, and am a non-binary person who uses “they” pronouns for myself instead of “he” or “she.” So naturally people wonder why I’m not allowing my son that neutrality.

I’m not sure that wilfully disregarding your son’s biological sex, and actively challenging it with a hint of self-congratulation, is actually neutrality.

My son was born with a penis and testes. They were identified five months before he was born. Everyone around me had started to ask the fatal question, “boy or girl?” every time they saw my bump. My brain screamed “neither” – it’s nothing! It’s a bundle of cells that doesn’t even have fingers yet! 

Here’s a typical foetus at four months, a nascent human being. Or as Dorian puts it, “nothing… a bundle of cells.” Note the fingers. 

My employer bought me a weird, cutesy towel-tree in a pastel blue, with little cars and aeroplanes on it. I shudder to think what the girl towel-tree looked like.

Isn’t it just terrible when people buy you gendered baby gifts? The unenlightened fuckers.

I have a large, supportive biological family, who are (as the vast majority of people are) uneducated on trans issues and the nature of pronouns. While the majority of them support my right to parent how I wish, very few of them would respect “non-standard” pronouns – they would revert to using whichever pronoun they think matches his genitalia whenever I’m not in the room, and even when present, they would need constant correction.

Pronoun correction, it’s what brings a family together. Though when relatives do this kind of thing during pregnancy, I suspect they’re not cooing about foetal genitals as such, so much as the psychology, the maleness or femaleness, that they generally signify and prefigure. Those cooing relatives may be affectionately anticipating what kind of person that little “nothing” may become.

This gets to the heart of why I made this decision: using non-binary pronouns is exhausting. 

Well, quite. And at this stage of the game, it does look like an affectation that’s more about the parent than the child. After all, gendered pronouns are only apt almost all of the time.

Peter Hasson discovers that questioning the premise of microaggressions is itself now deemed a microaggression and therefore impermissible: 

The phrase “politically correct” is now a microaggression according to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The university’s “Just Words” campaign is the work of UWM’s “Inclusive Excellence Centre” and aims to “raise awareness of microaggressions and their impact” — microaggressions like “politically correct” or “PC.”

According to its mission statement, the Inclusive Excellence Centre “invests time, energy and resources to create a socially just campus in order to include different perspectives, engage in authentic and challenging dialogue, and build connections with vibrant and global communities.” And therefore, obviously, students are warned to avoid such emotionally crushing terms as “crazy,” “trash” and “thug.” The latter being particularly heinous because it “assumes that violence is the sole motivating factor in an action. Ignores issues of poverty, education and other institutional barriers. Used as synonym for Nigga/er.”

Regarding the offensive term “politically correct,” the centre’s website says, 

I’d like to add Politically Correct (PC) to [sic] program… and seek a way to succinctly outline/define PC for its basis, purpose [sic] especially how its [sic] used now to let people hide their bias but also minimize the pushback they received after contributing aggressive [sic].

As I said, excellence. 

But setting aside the intriguing prose, it’s all feelings, sensitivity and fluffy goodness. Good people with high minds and good hearts, doing good, good things. 

Interestingly enough, while the university’s Inclusive Excellence Centre has labelled several common-use adjectives harmful, the man running the campaign, Warren Scherer, the director of the university’s Inclusive Excellence Centre, has taken to Twitter to express his displeasure with Republican presidential candidates in a non-inclusive manner. Scherer tweeted “fuck every fibre of your being” to Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and also accused him of “pandering to Republican Jews.” Scherer, who identifies himself as an UWM employee on his twitter profile, also accused presidential candidate Rand Paul of courting “rich Jews.”

I know. You’re shocked. 

Mr Scherer also shares his wisdom via YouTube. 

Update, via the comments: 

FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff talks with the Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas: 

Not only is the situation on campus bad for freedom of speech, I think we’re teaching students to engage in cognitive distortion. We’re teaching them to magnify problems, we’re teaching them to personalise problems, we’re teaching them to engage in all-or-nothing thinking. All things, research indicates, that if you adopt them as mental habits are going to make you miserable. 

“Censorship is like taking Xanax for syphilis. Essentially, it just makes you feel a little better, calms you down, but it sure isn’t doing anything for your disease.”

Kevin D Williamson on New York City Council’s perverse choice of heroes: 

The Communist movement worldwide murdered some 100 million people over the course of the 20th century. The Soviet enterprise specifically, to which Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were fiercely committed — they are described as “devoted” in the Soviet literature — had at the time of the Rosenbergs’ recruiting already intentionally starved to death some 8 million people in Ukraine for the purposes of political terror. I do not wish to include them here, but put “Holodomor” into Google images if you want a visual indicator of this. 

Janice Fiamengo on toxic feminism: 

Repeating the [‘male privilege’] mantra is a hazard to your mental and emotional health. If you come to believe it, it requires your shame as a man.

John Galt on leftist thuggery and tantrums: 

So inured are we to the childish, yet violent behaviour of the left, that for the most part we are more disgusted than surprised, but could you imagine the opposite happening? A bunch of sneering Young Conservatives turning up to protest at the Labour Party conference? No – me neither. This is the fundamental problem at the heart of the left – that when their arguments are rejected by the electorate, they don’t seek better arguments, they just reach into their grab-bag of socialist solutions for what has worked in the past and try and apply that. The problem being that strikes and sit-ins and the rest of the panoply of student union politics seldom works in the real world for the simple fact that the real world is not made up of 20-somethings who’ve never had a job and have too much time on their hands. As the left crumbles, expect more intimidation and “Direct Action,” but the more they do it, the more the general populace will become alienated by it and contemptuous of those who practice it.

Regarding the above, our dear friend Laurie Penny offers her wisdom. 

And added via the comments, Matthew Hennessey on “progressive” priorities: 

How else to explain the decision earlier this year to allow 33-year-old Rebecca Wax to graduate from the Fire Academy despite having failed the Functional Skills Test five times? The FST was designed to mimic the conditions of an actual fire. Probationary fire-fighters are required to complete a gruelling six-floor obstacle course while hauling 50 pounds of gear and breathing through an oxygen tank. Wax succeeded in completing the course on her sixth try but took nearly four minutes longer to do so than is typically permitted. Nevertheless, she was allowed to graduate and was assigned to Engine 259 in Sunnyside, Queens. FDNY commissioner Daniel Nigro admitted at a city council hearing in December that the department had lowered the fitness bar to allow more women to pass the test.

Dramatically lowering standards of competence puts lives at risk, both of fire-fighters and the public, but apparently what matters is that we mustn’t have a fire department that’s mostly male.

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