(Photo By Jef-Infojef)
This day in Herstory: Édith Cresson (French pronunciation: [edit kʁɛsɔ̃]; née Campion; born January 27, 1934) is a French politician. She is the first, and so far only, woman to have held the office of Prime Minister of France. Other than her breakthrough gender role, her term was uneventful. Her political career ended in scandal as a result of corruption charges dating from her tenure as European Commissioner for Research, Science and Technology. (read more)
Parents file lawsuit against Clay County Schools, say administrators didn't disclose meetings about gender identity confusion, District denies claims
From First Coast News (USA)
Wendell and Maria Perez said the district violated their parental rights by not telling them about the meetings with their daughter until after her suicide attempts.
By Kailey Tracy
January 27, 2022
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Parents are suing Clay County District Schools after they said their daughter attempted suicide two days in a row following meetings with a counselor about gender identity confusion. The 12-year-old's parents said school administrators didn't tell them about the meetings.
"We met with the principal, the assistant principal and the police officer, and the counselor who informed us that our 12-year old-daughter, this is an elementary-schooler, had tried to commit suicide at school by hanging herself twice in two days," Wendell Perez said.
Wendell Perez said on Jan. 5, 2022, the school counselor called him and his wife and told them to come to the school immediately.
"The school counselor alleged that it [suicide attempts] was because of a gender identity issue, and that they knew we as parents would not be in agreement because of our Catholic Christian beliefs. My daughter never exhibited any signs of gender confusion or questioning her biological sex," he said.
"I asked why my daughter had tried to commit suicide. She [the counselor] said because of her identity issues. I asked what those were and she said, 'well, you know, she wants to be called this, and she wants these pronouns,' and she said, 'because she knows that you guys are not going to accept her because of your religious beliefs,'" Maria Perez said.
The Perezes said the counselor didn't tell them about the meetings with their daughter about gender identity confusion until after the suicide attempts. They said the meetings had been going on for a few months. … read full article
Chicago schools training says sex 'not rooted in biology,' tells teachers to hide gender pronouns from parents
Chicago teachers warned they could face disciplinary measures if they don't use preferred pronouns for students
From Fox News (USA)
By Sam Dorman
January 27, 2022
Chicago Public Schools mandated a teacher training program that declared sex a social construct and threatened punishment if faculty didn't use students' preferred pronouns, multiple teachers told Fox News Digital.
A 104-slide PowerPoint presentation echoed a number of left-leaning talking points that have surfaced in trainings across the country. Titled "Supporting Transgender, Nonbinary, and Gender Nonconforming Students" the presentation argued that "everyone has multiple, overlapping identities" and that sex is assigned at birth.
"Gender & sex are socially constructed, meaning they've been created and enforced by the people in a society," one slide from the presentation reads. The notes claim that "the concepts of Gender and Sex are actually not rooted in biology. Instead, they are socially constructed, which means they have been created and enforced by people in a society." … read full article
Stop saying the UK is transphobic
The Council of Europe is peddling a fantasy
From UnHerd (UK)
By Debbie Hayton
January 27, 2022
When it gathered in Strasbourg on Tuesday to condemn “the extensive and often virulent attacks on the rights of LGBTI people”, the Council of Europe singled out a small collection of the most inhospitable countries. It contained the usual suspects — Russia, Turkey, Poland, Hungary — but also a more surprising addition: the United Kingdom.
The UK has left the European Union, but we remain a member of the Council of Europe. The CoE is an older and larger organisation — hence the inclusion of Russia and Turkey — and is built around the European Convention on Human Rights. This week’s meeting revealed just how empty some of those human rights have become. … read full article
In defence of Michel Foucault
He was not responsible for American wokeness
From UnHerd (UK)
By Jarryd Bartle
January 27, 2022
Blaming French theory for the extremes of the American Left has been a popular line for that last few years. Public intellectual Jordan Peterson has blamed “postmodern neo-Marxism” for the rise of a hypersensitive yet coercive activism, connecting the term to everything from safe spaces, to cultural appropriation, to campus protests.
The same move is made by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their book Cynical Theories. They argue that the adoption of French theory — particularly the work of Michel Foucault — has given rise to bizarre, grievance-filled academic specialties which threaten all claims to knowledge.
Peterson, Lindsay, and Pluckrose are wrong, and perhaps even guilty of Francophobia. Contrary to their claims, French theory is not the original sin from which our current woes sprang. What’s missed in their analysis are the distinctly American cultural influences driving a political culture of cancellations, violent protests and hypersensitivity.
Let’s focus on the ultimate fall guy for ‘wokeism’, the French philosopher Michel Foucault. If you were to read anti-woke commentary about Foucault, you would be under the impression that his main insights are: nothing is true, all truth is power and all claims to truth are oppressive. This is a deliberately misleading. … read full article
Penny’s pointless battle
Fighting about pronouns gets in the way of real feminism
From The Critic (UK)
By Suzanne Moore
January 27, 2022
Some things add to the gaiety of the nation — and Laurie Penny’s self-absorption is one of them. In case sensitive readers get hold of the wrong end of the stick, I’m using gaiety in the sense of “the state or quality of being light-hearted or cheerful”.
Penny, as we all know, is as polymorphously perverse as my cat is vegan; it’s a lovely idea but the reality is my idiot cat does not like butternut squash. I just have to live with my disappointing pussy cos them’s the breaks.
There are lots of deeply terrible things going on in the world and I hardly need list them, but surely beneath the imminent invasion of Ukraine we must designate the misgendering of Laurie Penny in a book review by Julie Bindel in the top ten list of horrors.
Who knows what Bindel’s pronouns are? She Who Must Be Obeyed is my guess. Anyway, Bindel reviewed the latest Penny pamphlet and called her “she” throughout the review. Bindel is an utter monster make no mistake — but she read Penny as female because… she is? … read full article
The cost of sexual liberation
There's a price to pay for emancipation
From UnHerd (UK)
By Mary Harrington
January 27, 2022
“Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,” wrote Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch (1970). Last week, a tall, moustachio’d 25-year-old serial shagger in New York City became Exhibit A for this claim – and also for men’s defence against it.
West Elm Caleb reportedly slept with a lot of women via dating apps, and wasn’t very honest with any of them about what he was doing. Then some of his dates compared notes via TikTok and the result caused so much arguing it was even reported in India.
Why all the noise about some two-bit Lothario in a city a long way away? Well, in one sense, this is as old as humans: the ongoing resonance of mythic figures such as Helen of Troy show we’ve been quarrelling about men, women and sex for a very long time.
But the contours of the argument are also uniquely modern. It concerns a dream of hedonistic freedom that blossomed in the mid-20th century, and that Greer herself helped to articulate. And it also captures the way that dream has soured in the hyper-mediated 21st-century world. … read full article
Tolerance and complicity
From Writing Behavior
By Eliza Mondegreen
January 27, 2022
What does it mean to be complicit? Does it still cleave to the dictionary definition: to be involved in a crime? What does ‘involved’ mean? And what’s a crime these days? How have our ideas about complicity changed over time?
I’m tempted to look at how broader ideas about complicity may have emerged as part of the reckoning over the Holocaust. How does a society carry out genocide on that scale, given the number of people who had to be involved at different levels, given that much of the groundwork for genocide was laid in view of the public. What might complicity mean, taking into account both material contributions to genocide and ideological justifications? Among other things, I’d also want to look into the literature on bystanders, which I suspect will show a similar evolution, and at discussions of complicity with state violence—e.g., Vietnam War protests, protests against police violence—which seems to me a more legitimate basis than vague accusations of complicity with “white supremacy” or “systems of oppression.”
In any case, I think ideas about complicity have morphed, with the charge covering an ever-broader range of behaviors (including inaction) and beliefs while retaining its moral weight. “Silence is complicity” comes to mind—connected, crucially, to ideas like “silence is violence.” … read full article