Sunday, June 19, 2022
On this day in Herstory: Phylicia Rashad, born June 19, 1948, is an American actress, singer, and director. She is known for her role as Clair Huxtable on the NBC sitcom The Cosby Show (1984–1992) which earned her Emmy Award nominations in 1985 and 1986. She also played Ruth Lucas on Cosby (1996–2000). She was dubbed "The Mother of the Black Community" at the 2010 NAACP Image Awards. (more)
World swimming bans transgender athletes from women’s events
From AP News (USA)
By CIARÁN FAHEY
June 19, 2022
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — World swimming’s governing body has effectively banned transgender women from competing in women’s events, starting Monday.
FINA members widely adopted a new “gender inclusion policy” on Sunday that only permits swimmers who transitioned before age 12 to compete in women’s events. The organization also proposed an “open competition category.”
“This is not saying that people are encouraged to transition by the age of 12. It’s what the scientists are saying, that if you transition after the start of puberty, you have an advantage, which is unfair,” James Pearce, who is the spokesperson for FINA president Husain Al-Musallam, told The Associated Press. ... read full article
UK: Feminists Surrounded, Harassed by Mob of Trans Activists After Pro-Woman Event
From REDUXX (USA)
By Jennifer Seiland
June 19, 2022
Feminists faced extreme aggression today at a pro-women’s rights demonstration in Bristol after masked activists interrupted the event, screamed obscenities, and attempted to instigate physical altercations with the women.
Popular British women’s rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen and a number of individual feminists spoke at Bristol Speaker’s Corner today on issues surrounding women’s sex-based rights. But even before the event started, there was resistance from a crowd of trans activists that gathered in counterprotest.
The event was initially delayed from starting due to the noise level of the heckling from the trans activists, and because the women did not feel safe. An organizer of the event told Reduxx the feminists requested Bristol police call-in more officers as the mob of trans activists continued to escalate their aggression. ... read full article
Male violence or the right side of history? Who knows? I do.
From Letters From Suzanne (UK)
By Suzanne Moore
June 19, 2022
I am old and ugly enough to know male violence when I see it. So forget your slogans and your mantras or your inner spiritual gendered essence. I don’t have one as I am non-binary because I don’t accept that gender IS a binary. Anyway, as Tom Hanks didn’t say, my Mars is in its own house Aries, so back the fuck off.
Silence is lucrative but I will not be silent about men trying to stop women meeting, speaking, and thinking. I am so sick of the DMs and emails from those that support my stance in private but don’t want to get involved in the whole ‘gender thing’.
Cos it’s icky and they want to sell their books and to be forever likeable. Anyway, all these scaredy-cats don’t have a problem with trans people. Nor do I actually. Do they care at all about women, about girls though? ... read full article
Gender Dysphoria and Self-Harm
A reader responds to Elizabeth Hummel
From Glenn Loury (USA)
By Glenn Loury
June 19, 2022
On Thursday, I posted a communiqué from reader Elizabeth Hummel in which she argues that the normalization of transitioning poses grave threats to children and teens. In my view, it’s a heartfelt piece written from a place of sincere concern. …
But we cannot have healthy discourse about trans issues or any issues unless there is room for difference. …
To that end, I’ve invited another regular commenter to respond to Elizabeth’s post. If you spend any time at all in the comments section, you know Maci Branch. …
Maci Branch’s response to Elizabeth:
The studies about skeletal damage and brain development and their suppression horrify me. I also know and am thinking about the parents of trans kids. The Texas order from Governor Abbott about investigating this care as child abuse is concerning. That said, the dialogue is not a dialogue so much as it is a hostage situation. The position that gender dysphoria is so horrible that trans people are at risk of self-harm if they do not receive this care is irresponsible. It leads to tragic consequences. … read full article
Gender Logic 2: Is gender even real?
The second in a series of articles on fundamental logical questions about gender identity ideology (read Gender Logic 1 here)
By Lee Patterson (GC News Editor)
June 19, 2022
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who have a reasonable tolerance for ambiguity and those who divide the world into two kinds of people.
The longer I reflect on the many loops in this Gordian Knot that is the gender identity debate, the more I think that it’s largely fueled by the difficulty many people have with accepting that some aspects of reality are just not simple.
Gender Logic 1 addressed the question “can humans change sex?” That seemed the best place to start, given my goal for this series: to help clarify some of the logical issues involved in the debate. That question is the most fundamental, in my view. After we’ve answered that one with an unequivocal “No,” the next to arise for many readers will concern the role of gender in this discussion.
Probably anyone reading this will accept that the two words “sex” and “gender,” although occasionally used as synonyms, are most often understood as referring to two distinct categories. Kathleen Stock, in the first chapter of her excellent book Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism , closely examines the common uses of “gender,” and identifies four different meanings. Finding much discord and little clarity, she declares the whole topic such a hot mess that she elects to avoid the word altogether (p. 39). I don’t know if she thinks that others would be wise to follow her lead, but I sympathize with her decision.
All the same, the word is undeniably at the heart of this entire controversy. “GC” in the name GC News stands for “gender critical.” It would be intellectually anemic to edit a publication claiming to be gender critical but be unwilling to commit to any statement regarding the concept of which I am critical. For all of the confusion that attends the word “gender,” it is basic to the logical tangles of the debate.
Some people who oppose gender identity ideology call themselves “gender atheists,” presumably signaling they don’t believe gender is real. Others maintain that gender is nothing other than a set of social stereotypes, which don’t correspond to anything other than conventions that people agree to. Without responding to these views in depth, I think it’s fair to accept that there’s a meaningful distinction between sex and gender, as summarized in this newsletter from the NIH: “Sex is biological. … Gender is a social or cultural concept. It refers to the roles, behaviors, and identities that society assigns to girls and boys, women and men, and gender-diverse people. Gender is determined by how we see ourselves and each other, and how we act and interact with others.”
Unlike the binary dimorphism associated with sex, the boundaries involved in gender distinctions are very complicated and hard to define. For the purpose of understanding the basic logical constituents of gender identity ideology and the arguments against it, I will accept the NIH description given above.
Many concepts we use every day are poorly understood and have tenuous relationships with physical reality, but we would not therefore say they are meaningless or lack reality. Examples include society, justice, democracy, beauty, intelligence, morality, etc. If these (and so many other) ideas are, although intangible, nonetheless real, there’s no good reason to say gender is not also real.
So, yes, gender is real, at least in some sense. It isn’t merely a nonsense term like “mimsy” (of Jabberwocky fame). We’re justified in asking what it is and how it relates to concerns such as identity, self-concept, and legal rights. These questions bring up some of the central confusions of gender identity ideology, so they will be our focus for the next few entries in the Gender Logic series.
California school district doubles down on gender identity indoctrination after parents' complaint
"I'm not sure how or why you would think that an eight year old could understand what transgender even means," a father told the Conejo Valley school board.
From The Post Millennial (USA)
By Libby Emmons
June 19, 2022
A California family in the Conejo Valley Unified School District was horrified to learn that their daughter had been exposed to harmful gender ideology in her third grade classroom, against their wishes and without their being notified. They only found out about it when the little girl came home and told her parents that a little boy in her class had been reintroduced to the students with a new, girl's name. The teacher had read the class a book about a "trans child" to help explain things.
The teacher used the book to explain that boys and girls were not unique sexes, but interchangeable. The story, Call Me Max, explains to children that sex is something adults decide about a baby upon birth, and that a child then can decide later that the adults who made that decision were wrong. The book tracks a little girl who dresses like a boy, and describes that this, along with internal, undefined feelings, means the child is actually a boy. ... read full article
‘A Drag Queen in Every School’ Is Modern Left’s ‘Chicken in Every Pot’
From The Daily Signal (USA)
Jarrett Stepman
June 19, 2022
For today’s left, it seems that, politically, “A drag queen for every school” has replaced “a chicken in every pot.”
Really.
Here’s what Michigan’s Democratic attorney general, Dana Nessel, who is gay, had to say about the trend of bringing drag queen events to schools.
“Drag queens make everything better. Drag queens are fun,” Nessel said, according to a Detroit News reporter on Twitter.
“A drag queen for every school,” she added. ... read full article
Drag Queen Story Hour is the intentional 'queering' of early childhood education
"Ultimately, the authors propose that 'drag pedagogy' provides a performative approach to queer pedagogy that is not simply about LGBT lives, but living queerly."
From The Post Millennial (USA)
By Libby Emmons
June 19, 2022
Drag queens are not in schools by accident. It was and is an intentional act to upend educational models, to subvert norms of morality and human behavior, and to "queer" early childhood education. "Drag," writes authors Harper Keenan and Lil Miss Hot Mess, "is firmly rooted in play as a site of queer pleasure, resistance, and self-fashioning."
In a 2021 article called "Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood," authors Harper Keenan, an education academic, and Lil Miss Hot Mess, a "founding queen" of Drag Queen Story Hour, opined at length on how progressive and revolutionary it is to put men in garish women's costumes in classrooms. Their reasoning is five fold. ... read full article
Some LGBTQ+ members upset with ‘progress’ banner replacing rainbow
The new "Progress Flag" that replaced the original Gay Pride rainbow flag has caused a rift in the LGBT community.
From New York Post (USA)
By Jon Levine
June 18, 2022
A growing rift has emerged among some in the LGBTQ+ community over the upstart “Progress Flag” — ripping it as “ugly,” “dumb” and a “monstrosity.”
The traditional “Rainbow Pride” banner incorporates red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet displayed along six horizontal bars. … read full article
Woke Progressives Encourage Teenage Gender Change
From The Independent (USA)
By Howard Sierer
June 19, 2022
To remain relevant, woke progressives must continually find new identity-group victims of oppression. Once identified, all who consider themselves woke must jump on the bandwagon, no matter how far-fetched the claim, or risk being ostracized and shamed by true believers in the woke media.
Progressive’s latest craze and the most disturbing so far: gender change encouragement and counseling for teenagers without parental consent.
What the medical profession calls pediatric gender dysphoria – the feeling that one’s gender identity is different from one’s biological sex – has been rising at a rate that can’t be explained by either improved diagnosis or by increasing social acceptance.
Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” explores why, in the last decade, gender dysphoria has been transformed from a vanishingly rare affliction applying almost exclusively to boys and men to an epidemic among teenage girls. ... read full article
Abigail Shrier: In Defense of Political Escalation
How can we get back to normal? Those waiting for the pendulum to swing back will be waiting forever.
From Common Sense (USA)
By Abigail Shrier
June 19, 2022
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis earned uncommon rebuke from conservative pundits last week, when he indicated he might sic Child Protective Services on parents who take their children to drag shows.
“I’m a very big fan of DeSantis and very not a fan of kids at drag shows,” writer Bethany Mandel wrote on Twitter. “But conservatives have to recognize the Pandora’s box we’re opening by involving CPS in judgment call parenting decisions. It’s not abuse.” ... read full article
Allison Bailey case is a microcosm of the wider debate about transgender rights
Barrister’s unlawful discrimination case sees levels of engagement rare for an employment tribunal
From The Guardian (UK)
By Haroon Siddique
June 19, 2022
With its own dedicated (unofficial) Twitter account and people following proceedings daily live via video, the unlawful discrimination case brought by barrister Allison Bailey against her chambers Garden Court and Stonewall has seen levels of engagement rare for an employment tribunal.
The reason is that the case, due to hear closing arguments on Monday, is a microcosm of the wider debate about transgender rights.
In the one corner is Bailey, a lesbian and founder of the LGB Alliance, set up in direct opposition to Stonewall and accused of transphobia. In the other is a chambers that prides itself on being progressive and the LGBTQ+ charity. ... read full article
Women-Only University to Accept Male Students Who Identify as Women
From Women Are Human (Canada)
By Diana Shaw
June 19, 2022
JP — Okayama, Chugoku. “Those whose gender identity is female” will be accepted as students at a private women-only university in Japan starting in 2023, the university’s president has announced.
Sister Aoi Tsuda, President of Notre Dame Seishin University, a four-year liberal arts and sciences university in Okayama “committed to pursuit of truth, goodness and beauty in the tradition of Christian faith,” has revealed in her June 1, 2022 press release:
Notre Dame Seishin Women’s University aims to realize the educational philosophy of the university by deciding to accept from 2023 transgender women who wish to study at Notre Dame Seishin University based on their gender identity (those who identify themselves as women even though their gender identity is male in the family register). ... read full article
EXPLAINER: Title IX update faces polarized challenges
From AP News (USA)
By EDDIE PELLS
June 19, 2022
At least 19 states now either bar or limit participation in sports by transgender athletes, who are at the center of a polarizing, politicized debate, even though only a fraction of them are believed to be among America’s 8.5 million high school and college athletes.
Transgender athlete bans are being challenged in court and advocates on both sides are citing or pointing to Title IX, the landmark anti-discrimination law that has protected and helped girls and women since its passage in 1972. … read full article