And another white woman spontaneously turns into a native American and Katie wants to kiss Chris Rufo and Chuck Tingle gets brought up... and more on the pod's longest episode to date*
One of the things that drives me mad about the trans/school opinion writing is that very little of it bothers to examine what schools supporting social transition means for the other students. There is significant pressure to accommodate trans students well beyond name & pronoun changes. Making toilet and changing facilities gender neutral, deciding what sports team trans students should play on, how sleeping arrangements should be decided for school trips... all of these things are affecting the whole student body, NOT just the trans student. We see this again and again in this discourse, to the point that we are regularly told to just switch our brains off and “be kind” because the issue “doesn’t affect us.” But it does, and the persistent blind spot about this only feeds into parents’ distrust of where the process is going.
This is a huge problem, because it forces all the kids into either pretending to believe or actually believing that people can change sex, AND in participating in deceiving the parents of their classmates (and perhaps also their own parents). And it’s not something like being gay, where not all the kids need to know, and those that do know can still have plausible deniability. “I thought they were just good friends!” This is a wholesale, wide-ranging deceit that everyone nearby is forced into.
A friends 12 year old child casually explained to me that the GSA (which stands for Gender Sexuality Alliance and NOT the old skool Gay Straight Alliance) is called the Unity Club at her school and if parents call and ask what the club is they are told it’s a friendship club so that parents will let their kids come to it. This is teaching the kids that secrets from your parents are a-ok. At ages 11 and 12. I find that appalling.
And there are teachers who keep closets for kids so they can cross-dress while at school.
I don't understand how the idea that going along with a fiction, pretending that a child is something which they are not, is not going to reinforce the dysphoria. It makes no sense.
There are teachers who keep binders for kids that want to transition from female to male. This was a thing some years ago where people were asking in the NYC Teachers FB group. I thought this was absurd. There was pushback, and of course everyone who disagreed was called a TERF or transphobe.
Distributing binders to students is wildly inappropriate. We know binding is risky. Binding can cause tissue and muscle damage, and can lead to difficulty breathing and all out fainting if not used correctly. That’s just insane.
Is it widespread? No. Again, I have only seen teachers mention, in a facebook group, that they keep them. I have never seen one actually have one. Of course, I agree, the extent to which I will help a kid in pain is give them a band-aid, which I keep in my desk, but for anything else, they must go to the nurse.
I believe that binders harm developing bodies, based on what detransitioners report, so I don’t think the are just clothing. They are medical interventions with serious side effects.
Well the idea is that dysphoria gets cured when they are 'affirmed' by wearing clothes stereotypically worn by the opposite sex which I think has been shown to be true with real gender dysphoric people. Of course we don't actually know if these kids are dysphoric which is the problem.
I still don’t see how the cure for one person with a false perception is that *everyone around them* has to be involved in their treatment by reinforcing the aforementioned false perception. No other condition demands such active participation & denial of reality.
I think it depends a little from what angle your looking at it. I mainly agree, but I also think it might be the most appropriate treatment for some (probably very few) people with severe body dysmorphia when they haven't been able to respond to any other treatments, such as talking therapy. This is what being transsexual used to mean and how many (perhaps most?) not-permanently online people still think about trans people.
I think you could perhaps compare this type of treatment to homes where people with Alzheimers are surrounded by music, TV, and other stimuli from their childhood or youth, and where healthcare staff and families go along with whatever the person with Alzheimers is saying is happening. This seems to alleviate stress in the patient, even though everyone else is clear that it's all just a delusion.
On the other hand, removing healthy breasts from teenage girls who are unhappy with their bodies seems more akin to letting an anorexic person starve themselves and telling them along the way that yes, they are indeed fat.
I see your point about the way some approach people with Alzheimer’s, but when compared to how many schools make everyone treat the one kid as if they ARE the opposite sex, w/different pronouns, etc. -- for the Alzheimer’s example to be more accurate in addition to just playing old music, you’d need to remove any printed material with the present date, make everyone else pretend it’s year X, have everyone hide modern technology, etc.
I see that you mostly agree so I’m not trying to be a jerk, but I think the two situations are far different in scale for what’s expected of the people in each patient’s orbit.
in part, it’s because teachers are told that it is our job to offer counseling, be a singular person that they rely on, and be agents of social change. Our admin LITERALLY tell us this. They survey the kids and they want to see 100% of students saying they have a person at school they trust to confide in. They tell us our job is to fix racism. They force us to lead discussions on rape, suicide, and other topics we are not trained to discuss. This is the result.
I think teachers should be trustworthy. And it's great if a kid forms a bond with their teacher that helps them in life or through a tough time at home...
buuuttt, I think teacher's primary responsibility should be teaching. And there's nothing wrong and everything write for any adult to say "I'm not qualified to handle this, but please let me help you find that help."
And notify the parents, please...unless they're literally the problem.
It sounds like K-12 administration is patterning itself after university administration in terms of how extreme their positions are.
I think Trace said it best in his article; something along the lines of: “a slightly liberal student body is being taught by group of moderately liberal teachers who are being ordered around by an extremely liberal administration”.
We certainly see that in northern Virginia where I live.
Teachers are stuck between a strident administration and a skeptical public. I don’t envy you at all.
Exactly! And the fact that these schools think they can make unilateral decisions about children with parental consent makes me mad. The way they behave it is as if they think all parents are evil bigots who will kill their kids if they see something in then they don't like. What kind of perspective is that?
🤣 please everyone sort this out before I have kids
Only if they do it and then pretend to have some super power like gps level sense of direction or the ability to communicate with animals empathically. And only because of how profoundly racist and unconfronted both of those things are.
Before smartphones and Google Maps, I had an almost GPS level of sense of direction. When I studied in Athens and Rome, I was always my crew's navigator. Now I fucking need actual GPS to get to fucking Target.
I used to have to get instructions for new roof jobs with my dad and I’m so glad that era is over, “for on thine right side thou shalt see a barn the colour of blood past yon hedge shaped as a bezoar, not to be confused with the curing shed the color of Eve’s fruit, then twice eleven left turns and a dove will carry away all your sins, second right.” No wonder we never made money.
I have so many thoughts about teachers concealing gender transition from parents, but most prominently: there is absolutely a type of slightly creepy high school teacher that is deeply over invested in the personal lives of students and that loves to see him/herself as championing students against their oppressive parents. There were at least two at my high school in the 1990s; they had terrible boundaries and one of them ended up getting fired after dragging a couple of my friends into her yoga cult. The other one always wanted to talk about our sex lives, under the pretext of offering to help us get access to birth control. I feel like today both of those women would be manning the trans closet.
Yes. This is the vibe. I’m a high school teacher and I don’t get it. My job, as Katie rightly said, is to teach my academic subject, not be their friend or parent. But, even admin push this idea that we are teachers because we want to influence kids and change their lives. I don’t, actually. I want to be a cog in the machine that generates doctors, scientists, and engineers who will solve problems. That is as lofty as I get. The pressure to be the teacher hero in a Disney movie is really strong and this is the result. I think it’s another aspect of anti-intellectualism in the US. Just teaching is not valued; you have to be a personal and political savior.
Do you think it has always been this way, or do you think there has been a shift in how teachers view themselves, or how admins view teachers' purposes?
I don’t think it’s super recent, but I don’t think it’s always been this way. I’d probably say it’s the long shadow of the 1960s and the rise of youth culture. The idea that adults should envy, emulate, or want to befriend the young hasn’t been around forever. Pre-1960s, it was more common for kids to look yearningly up to adulthood than for adults to look yearningly downward to youth.
I find it strange that the push for inclusivity and anti racism coincides with intense disdain for "older" people, when historically one of the few universal traits was reverence for the elderly, be it urban Germany or rural Ethiopia.
I think the 1920s is when youth culture started. But since the 1960s, we as a culture have decided, like you said, that we learn from kids
I am just surprised that so many teachers feel like their job is to be the kids' saviors. Was it always like that and I didnt see it?
I came of age in the 80s gay rights movement, and to my mind what's happening today with trans rights is way, way, WAY beyond. Back then, we weren't demanding that schools hide things from our parents. We didn't insist on drugs and surgery to permanently alter our bodies, before we were even old enough to drive. We didn't claim the right to barge into cross-sex spaces like we owned them. We didn't make "scientific" arguments that there was no such thing as heterosexuality. We didn't insist that the ACLU dumb down its dedication to free expression so we could feel better about ourselves. We just wanted to have jobs and rent apartments and go on dates and enjoy the same privileges as EVERYONE ELSE.
These days, lefty Americans have made it our job to validate the feelings of trans/non-binary/genderqueer/whatever people, but THIS lefty is punching his time card and handing in his notice. I will vote for the right of trans adults to dress, act, and speak any way they like, and to be able to work and live in a matter consistent with that. When it comes to puberty blockers and hormones and surgery and this endless, rapacious need for emotional affirmation...they're on their own.
Great comment, I completely agree with you, with one caveat regarding "the right of trans adults to dress, act, and speak any way they like, and to be able to work and live in a matter consistent with that". For those whose transition is motivated by a paraphilia - AGPs, straight men getting off on becoming "trans lesbians", straight women who fetishise gay men so much they decide to become them - I don't support that right. Going out "en femme" in public (especially in front of real women) is often part of the kink for autogynephilic MtFs. We've all seen the Reddit posts about how being perceived as a woman, addressed as a woman or referred to as "she" (particularly by real women) gives them "euphoria boners". The public cannot and should not be expected to participate in someone's fetish without consent, and that includes having to share a workplace with an AGP.
Thank you, this is an often overlooked aspect of it.
If I shouldn’t be expected to refer to a BDSM-loving colleague as “Master” or “filthy slave”, then I shouldn’t be required to use wrong-sex pronouns to titillate an AGP co-worker.
I pronoun on a case by case basis. There are a couple of old school trans women in my work life orbit and everyone pretends not to know they’re bio men - as they are trying very hard to pass - which I think is kind and lovely and have had no problem doing for like 30 years. (The kids these days act like they invented pronouns but they’ve actually been in use for quite some time ;) I refuse to do it for people like this Dylan Mulvaney guy who is doing a caricature of women or the Canadian fetishist wood shop guy who is trying to make people participate in his autogynephilia. The difference couldn’t be any more obvious at least to me.
Hmm. If a straight guy wants to live as a woman, whatever. My main issue is the idea that trans women are women. Also. I do not care so much about bathrooms but changing rooms...I have complex feelings.
Not sure how you'd even make that distinction. I mean, sure, if every time they're called 'she' they start making sex noises, we can probably agree that's whack. But just wearing women's close? I don't see how you can go around policing their sex life.
"Yes. So you wore a dress today. Mmm hmm. And does that turn you on? How erect are you when I call you 'she'?" and so on.
Nope. People can wear whatever they want. And I imagine some edgy teens are going to cross dress just to piss off their parents (a tried and true teen rite of passage). And I don't think that should be policed either.
I mean, there's a fetish for everything. I'm sure there are fur fetishists walking around in fur coats cheesing themselves, but I'm not going to carry around a questionnaire and figure out how to separate them out and tell them Nope! No fur for you, Perv!
The thing is, AGPs and HSTS are super-easy to tell apart. They're completely different demographics of men who transition for completely different reasons. Think how different Blaire White, Laverne Cox, Paris Lees, Rebekah Shelton, Dana International etc. are from your standard poorly passing AGP who isn't at all naturally feminine and looks and dresses like they don't have the faintest understanding of what a woman is. Maybe it's because I'm gay and have super-good gaydar but I can confidently tell them apart in 99% of cases.
I'm not on board with basing policy on some arbitrary (and almost certainly inconsistent) transdar.
Even if we accept that you're 99% accurate, are you confident that Ron DeSantis is? Because it's not likely going to be you making the policy.
Same for gaydar...even if yours is 100% accurate in all cases. Would you be ok with legal policy being based on some arbitrary law makers gaydar?
I wouldn't.
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*edit*
And what would such policy look like anyway? "You're allowed to wear women's close to work if you look feminine enough to pass according to <insert trans inspectors name> criteria."
Not only would someone have to make an arbitrary distinction on who is sufficiently "feminine," and thus "HSTS" instead of "AGP," but someone would also have to make an arbitrary distinction on what counts as cross-dressing. Do capri pants count? How about a huge necklace, but worn with men's clothes? What if one item is pink? What if his whole outfit is pink?
As for having "the faintest understanding of what a woman is," drag queens are usually gay, but their depictions of femininity are unrealistic. Do they get an exception because they're gay? Or do we say they can wear feather boas and sequins inside the gay bar, but not outside it?
Personal disgust cannot be the basis of official policy.
Once, a friend of mine bought me a Chuck Tingle book on Amazon called "Gay T-Rex Law Firm: Executive Boner" as a gag gift. Pretty funny! I hopped on Amazon to send it directly to the e-reader so I could get the requisite chuckles out of it. It didn't send to the e-reader, though. Couldn't make it connect.
Turns out: I had last been on Amazon under my dad's account so I could steal his Prime Video subscription to watch a TV show. So I sent "Gay T-Rex Law Firm: Executive Boner" directly to HIS e-reader.
Anyway I had to rapidly send an apology/explanation text so I didn't get canceled by my own parents
I stopped listening to Red Scare over a year ago, so this was like hearing an unexpected update about someone obnoxious former friend.
Also, as a public school teacher, I promise an overwhelming majority of teachers are very uninterested in helping children and teens transition. Teachers (of all people) are acutely aware of the power of social contagion in teens. If you spend 40 hours a week with them, it’s immediately clear how driven they are by conformity. Hence, why crocs and pajama pants are the new school uniform.
Are you able to say these things publicly in your school? I don't feel that I can. Even if many teachers are skeptical of social transition, we're still obligated to go along.
I pulled the "gender parity is an absurd delusion" in stem citing Sweden with one of the biggest libs/hiring chair in our department this week. Stunning and brave I know
Also a public school teacher, but in more liberal NYC. Now, I work in a very small school, of black and hispanic students. My running theory (that no one seems to care about) is that this stuff is more prevalent at affluent liberal enclave, predominantly white schools. We have a couple trans students and yes, one mom was not happy to learn that their daughter/son was using a different name. I was just honest with her "Nothing I can do, talk to the chancellor."
My understanding from interactions with other teachers via FB is that MOST, not all, but MOST teachers are simply unware of these things. Like, they do not get involved unless it becomes a thing.
There are likely some teachers who think they are doing the right thing. After all, MOST teachers care deeply about their students. Very few get into the profession for the FAME and GLORY (that's a joke). The idea that parents are assumed to be monsters is crazy and I agree with Katie's take on this, as I usually do as she is the far superior barpod host.
My school, near Portland, Oregon, is filled with teachers who have pro-trans posters and flags all over their walls. They seem obsessed. We were told explicitly that we have to hide pronouns and names from families. I overheard a male 6th grade teacher talking about a young girl’s breasts and her desire for a binder. Multiple teachers told me they assume parents are abusive. That is across the board: they won’t email home about anything. None have kids, of course. It’s crazy, it’s wrong, and it’s very common. I hate it.
Imagine thinking the vast majority of parents in… PORTLAND FREAKIN OREGON… would be “abusive” to a “trans child”? What kinda Mean World Syndrome is that?
I’m a shoe contrarian. Anytime a controversial shoe hits the market, I have to have it. I don’t know why I am like this. But as a result, I own multiple pairs of Crocs. Platform Crocs, goth Crocs, furry* Crocs, Crocs slides.
*ETA: These are Crocs covered in periwinkle faux fur. They are of no relation to the furry subculture. I am not that much of a deviant.
Have two pairs of those too, and I’d even wear them to work, but they’re not so good if you’re kneeling or using the hose in the yard. Whereas crocs you can just hose off.
The simple and elegant solution to the issue of trans kids is to simply ban gender affirming endocrine or surgical interventions on minors- there is no evidence they accomplish anything worthwhile and a mountain of evidence of harms they cause and the only reason a kid 'coming out' as trans is more fraught than 'coming out' as goth or any other adolescent identity experimentation is because the involvement of the american medical industrial complex raises the spectre that kids who experiment in this way will be subjected to frankensteinian medical experimentation.
The interesting thing is that it almost shows their own version of American exceptionalism (which is funny considering a lot of these people can’t even relax & enjoy 4th of July because it’s problematic (for the record I’ve always hated fireworks & crowds, and socializing in general but it’s a great day to have strawberries & blueberries with whipped cream). They’re willfully ignoring the backtracking after systemic reviews & fall back on the AAP. Because countries w/national healthcare systems that don’t have pharma companies drooling for trans kid $$$ are somehow inferior to our profit-oriented healthcare system (that they used to hate until COVID). Makes no sense.
It is elegant in that it brings transgender care back into the normal working order of medicine. The entire trans phenomenon breaks with ethical and procedural norms and rules. Ethics are kind of important in our business.
Of course, the activists will call it "gatekeeping", but that's literally what the entire medical profession is. Gatekeeping is totally normal.
In a future episode Katie will deliver the heartbreaking news that Moose was, in fact, all along Rebekah Jones in a fur suit with a pair of "Neuticles" attached to it.
This episode had me marveling at how much of my time and brainpower (not to mention Jesse's and Katie's) has been consumed by trans (not to mention other identity-focused) issues in the last few years. Just think of all the real problems we could have been solving if it weren't for the small but influential subset of people who created a whole new set of problems out of critical-theory ideas incubated on Tumblr. And then there are the hipsters who are mocking the wokesters, the pontificators that you can't tell from one minute to the next which side they're on, the purely opportunistic grifters, etc. I'm seriously starting to think that this hellscape we call the Internet was a huge mistake (thanks, Al Gore).
I think Jesse and Katie have a ton of integrity. Way more than most journalists out there. And I totally get that we all have to make a living (I'm no paragon of virtue in my chosen career). But the only thing that makes me question it a bit is I know early on they were saying how much they were tired of the trans issue and wish they could talk about other things. I get it, it *is* tiresome to tackle the same issue. My most charitable interpretation is that they still feel that way but it's just a really, really important issue that people aren't addressing correctly so they feel called to comment on it.
This was the beginning. In 1995 people were haranguing each other on Usenet and credulously sharing email hoaxes, and the Web was well on its way to becoming the vast cesspool we recognize today. But it's true that the insanity wasn't quite as widespread yet, and there weren't nearly as many identities to choose from.
I haven’t read mumsnet at all and I may be very wrong here but I get a chuckle out of the audacity someone must have to frame parents being worried about irreversible medical procedures being performed on their children as a hate group.
I can’t help but notice the inherent sexism of how they go after Mumsnet & moms in general (saving some ire for irascible fathers of rape victims reacting normally to being taunted by some dismissive turnip at a school board meeting). Maybe it’s not done consciously but holy hell I see it everyday from the TRAs.
I wasn’t peaked by Mumsnet, but I was radicalized by it. There was a transwoman in around 2015 trying to get moved to a women’s prison in the UK and Mumsnet was the only place I could find that had the same “WTF” reaction that I did.
There’s a particular snobbishness about Mumsnet in the UK, that it’s full of buttoned-up yummy mummies who screech “think of the children!”, when in reality it’s full of incredibly smart, funny women covering every issue you can think of, often giving each other support and advice and one of the only true female spaces on the internet. (Weirdly enough it seems to have avoided being swamped with “actual” women, I wonder why?)
Absolutely. I discovered it when my wife’s sister was being legally harassed by her ex because she wanted to move house somewhere that added five minutes to his occasional visits to his daughter. It included him setting the police on her child minder to investigate fabricated accusations of sexual abuse - mission accomplished, the child minder packed it in - and ended with a court case for custody. He was completely broke, but represented himself with online help, which dragged the process out further and added to the cost.
Long story short, Mumsnet was great for support and advice. Whatever is happening, someone has gone through it before. So with the Trans issues...women whose husbands have suddenly transitioned but expect to be fully validated by their newly lesbian wife (Trans Widows), lesbians told that deep down, they’ve always been men and that transwomen are more authentically female than them, fear and disbelief at what is proposed for their children.
Well she abandoned the move, but the judge laughed him out of court in the custody case. She couldn’t claim costs off him though because he’s got nothing except time on his hands, particularly since he self diagnosed with chronic long Covid.
(I wasn’t peaked by any of these sites ppl think. I was peaked by the masculine she/hers in the Be Kind community writing death/rape threats in response to JKR. “Listen to trans voices.” ✅ Did it. I’m quite confident dismissing the bulk of what’s going on as a power grab by Anime porn addicts to access women’s spaces, which strangely benefits Big Pharma.)
What they don't get is that most of those opposed to gender ideology and self-ID did "educate ourselves" and listen to "trans voices", and we realized the whole thing is nutters.
Yeah, I can see supporting the kid stuff just because you hadn’t thought about it very much or because it got some blessing from people you read as part of your group, but when people are out attacking moms my interpretation of their motives gets much less generous.
I mean it's not like the TRA crowd took it easy on Jessie because he's a he.
There just aren't a ton of men sticking their necks out on this issue, which makes sense because women going down the trans path don't pose nearly the same direct threat to us.
I'll echo what Katie and the several academics whose emails were cited at the beginning of the episode said about universities being as "woke" in Florida, Western NC, and other stereotypically not-woke regions as anywhere else. The reason is that academic hiring is done nationally. Traditionally, if you're a junior academic looking for a job, you apply to all the jobs listed in your field in the US. So colleges and universities in Florida are hiring from the same applicant pool as all the other institutions are. If anything, given that there's a strong bias in favor of hiring applicants with Ivy-League and other elite PhDs, schools that feel worried about their relative prestige are MORE likely to hire candidates from institutions where there's a lot of progressivism.
The real divide between woke and non-woke institutions, as some commenters here touched on last week, runs along secular vs. seriously religious lines. (Think Vassar vs. Covenant College.) Even at the more religious and less woke institutions, there will be more progressivism in certain departments, and faculty will generally be more progressive than first-year students.
And in a national search, the hiring committee composed of faculty has a large role in the process. It is the first interview a candidate has before the committee creates a short list for campus visits. A candidate who makes the short list has likely read the same books and come to the same conclusions as those on the committee, and would signal them by talking about how their research fits into the latest intellectual trends. That means very little deviation in worldview within departments as people naturally would want to hire people like themselves. I’m not sure how hiring in admin works, but it is probably similar, and they go through the same educational leadership programs.
Truth about academia and national hiring. I'm most familiar with law, where the faculty of even East Podunk Law Skule is littered with elite law school grads. I know a scammy "for profit" school that had these faculty members.
Google "Dan Markel". Double Harvard grad ends up teaching in Tallahassee, much to the consternation of his cosmopolitan wife, who preferred Miami area near her cosmopolitan family and friends. Ugly divorce/custody battle ended with Markel being murdered by hit men hired by wife's family.
I know I presented a very extreme example, but it's a good illustration of the type of people who populate academia in "flyover" country.
1) Everybody in that New York scene deserves to be wiped from the earth, like a judgment from the God of the Old Testament.
2) "The film isn't mocking trans people, it's mocking insecure, fragile, male narcissism." It is remarkably easy to confuse those two things though, so I understand their confusion.
3) Katie, please - Dylan Mulvaney still looks like a man, just a slightly prettier one.
So in 2023, the Woke will still try to defame someone by calling him gay! When things like this slip through, you know there isn't an ounce of sincerity in these circles. (A few of the replies on Twitter took her to task for this, but most were doubling down!)
I see this, too, when some man that Left-Leaning Women don't like goes to jail. Read the news articles and many comments are mocking prison rape ("I'm sure he'll make a great prison bitch!") Yes, the left loves to make rape jokes. I've noticed it in the NY Times comment forums (ok, I'm a fool for looking at the comments) about everyone from Steve Bannon to Paul Manafort.
Because this is "Blocked and Reported" I blocked "Rebekkah" and reported her tweet as harassing someone because of their sexual orientation or identity. Twitter's response was that the tweet didn't violate their terms of service.
Respectfully submit that the misogyny directed at conservative women feels very similar. I'm sure every slightly heterodox "marginalized group" person gets it
To be fair I honestly think this isn't because he's gay per say but rather because there's always been a running joke among liberal comedians that homophobic Republicans are secretly gay and are simply being homophobic to compensate for their hidden sexual orientations.
Nothing to do with the latest pod, but I’m totally baffled why the Memphis police killing is the lead story on the BBC news here in England for the second night running. Is it the same elsewhere in the world outside the USA?
It is not big news here in the US. Possibly because everyone involved is black. Which I should have realized, since the first articles said that a black man had been killed by police officers, not that a black man had been killed by white officers. ,
I saw a headline in the NYT that it "opens up a complicated discussion about race." I didn't read it because why make this about race at all, if all the principals were the same race. It's horrifying and condemnable enough without shoehorning another agenda into it.
It IS about group dynamics though, which should be investigated. I think the idea of. "Race" now is that white supremacy is part of say police departments, regardless of the officers' race.
My money is on cynical media types hoping for a new George Floyd situation to liven up an otherwise slow-news January/February.
Outside of the US, it gives them not just a moral high from observing how evil are the jackbooted police thugs, but also the secret satisfaction from the ensuing riots showing the Americans as being utter barbarians — and all from the relative safety of east of the Atlantic (or north of the 49th, in my countrymen’s case).
One of the things that drives me mad about the trans/school opinion writing is that very little of it bothers to examine what schools supporting social transition means for the other students. There is significant pressure to accommodate trans students well beyond name & pronoun changes. Making toilet and changing facilities gender neutral, deciding what sports team trans students should play on, how sleeping arrangements should be decided for school trips... all of these things are affecting the whole student body, NOT just the trans student. We see this again and again in this discourse, to the point that we are regularly told to just switch our brains off and “be kind” because the issue “doesn’t affect us.” But it does, and the persistent blind spot about this only feeds into parents’ distrust of where the process is going.
This is a huge problem, because it forces all the kids into either pretending to believe or actually believing that people can change sex, AND in participating in deceiving the parents of their classmates (and perhaps also their own parents). And it’s not something like being gay, where not all the kids need to know, and those that do know can still have plausible deniability. “I thought they were just good friends!” This is a wholesale, wide-ranging deceit that everyone nearby is forced into.
A friends 12 year old child casually explained to me that the GSA (which stands for Gender Sexuality Alliance and NOT the old skool Gay Straight Alliance) is called the Unity Club at her school and if parents call and ask what the club is they are told it’s a friendship club so that parents will let their kids come to it. This is teaching the kids that secrets from your parents are a-ok. At ages 11 and 12. I find that appalling.
And there are teachers who keep closets for kids so they can cross-dress while at school.
I don't understand how the idea that going along with a fiction, pretending that a child is something which they are not, is not going to reinforce the dysphoria. It makes no sense.
There are teachers who keep binders for kids that want to transition from female to male. This was a thing some years ago where people were asking in the NYC Teachers FB group. I thought this was absurd. There was pushback, and of course everyone who disagreed was called a TERF or transphobe.
Distributing binders to students is wildly inappropriate. We know binding is risky. Binding can cause tissue and muscle damage, and can lead to difficulty breathing and all out fainting if not used correctly. That’s just insane.
A school nurse can't give a kid a Tylenol or cough drop without prior consent. But some are giving girls binders like this is 1901 China?
I hope this isn't true and is like the cat litter urban legend.
At my crazy school, teachers are not allowed to facilitate this, but I heard one teacher say he was guiding a student to helpful websites.
Is it widespread? No. Again, I have only seen teachers mention, in a facebook group, that they keep them. I have never seen one actually have one. Of course, I agree, the extent to which I will help a kid in pain is give them a band-aid, which I keep in my desk, but for anything else, they must go to the nurse.
They need so many bandaids. Why does that stop when you get older? The mystery.
I believe that binders harm developing bodies, based on what detransitioners report, so I don’t think the are just clothing. They are medical interventions with serious side effects.
I'm genuinely confused about why Mermaids got in trouble for that, but teachers don't. Was it an age thing?
I think since maybe Mermaids was more prominent about it. Whereas these are just individual teachers and is not an actual DOE policy.
I thought Mermaids actually weren't prominent about it, but were caught at it in an undercover deal?
Well the idea is that dysphoria gets cured when they are 'affirmed' by wearing clothes stereotypically worn by the opposite sex which I think has been shown to be true with real gender dysphoric people. Of course we don't actually know if these kids are dysphoric which is the problem.
I still don’t see how the cure for one person with a false perception is that *everyone around them* has to be involved in their treatment by reinforcing the aforementioned false perception. No other condition demands such active participation & denial of reality.
I think it depends a little from what angle your looking at it. I mainly agree, but I also think it might be the most appropriate treatment for some (probably very few) people with severe body dysmorphia when they haven't been able to respond to any other treatments, such as talking therapy. This is what being transsexual used to mean and how many (perhaps most?) not-permanently online people still think about trans people.
I think you could perhaps compare this type of treatment to homes where people with Alzheimers are surrounded by music, TV, and other stimuli from their childhood or youth, and where healthcare staff and families go along with whatever the person with Alzheimers is saying is happening. This seems to alleviate stress in the patient, even though everyone else is clear that it's all just a delusion.
On the other hand, removing healthy breasts from teenage girls who are unhappy with their bodies seems more akin to letting an anorexic person starve themselves and telling them along the way that yes, they are indeed fat.
I see your point about the way some approach people with Alzheimer’s, but when compared to how many schools make everyone treat the one kid as if they ARE the opposite sex, w/different pronouns, etc. -- for the Alzheimer’s example to be more accurate in addition to just playing old music, you’d need to remove any printed material with the present date, make everyone else pretend it’s year X, have everyone hide modern technology, etc.
I see that you mostly agree so I’m not trying to be a jerk, but I think the two situations are far different in scale for what’s expected of the people in each patient’s orbit.
If clothing can do that, why are hormones or surgery "necessary"?
It's considered a 'step' in the process I guess. I also think it doesn't work for all trans people.
Replace the dysphoria with delusion? Require others to play along?
I do not think this has been shown to be true. Nor could it be--there's no objective test for "real" gender dysphoria.
in part, it’s because teachers are told that it is our job to offer counseling, be a singular person that they rely on, and be agents of social change. Our admin LITERALLY tell us this. They survey the kids and they want to see 100% of students saying they have a person at school they trust to confide in. They tell us our job is to fix racism. They force us to lead discussions on rape, suicide, and other topics we are not trained to discuss. This is the result.
I think teachers should be trustworthy. And it's great if a kid forms a bond with their teacher that helps them in life or through a tough time at home...
buuuttt, I think teacher's primary responsibility should be teaching. And there's nothing wrong and everything write for any adult to say "I'm not qualified to handle this, but please let me help you find that help."
And notify the parents, please...unless they're literally the problem.
That’s a lot of responsibility to put on one person considering how many students you have.
It sounds like K-12 administration is patterning itself after university administration in terms of how extreme their positions are.
I think Trace said it best in his article; something along the lines of: “a slightly liberal student body is being taught by group of moderately liberal teachers who are being ordered around by an extremely liberal administration”.
We certainly see that in northern Virginia where I live.
Teachers are stuck between a strident administration and a skeptical public. I don’t envy you at all.
Really important points & you’re right that this does not only affect the individual students.
Exactly! And the fact that these schools think they can make unilateral decisions about children with parental consent makes me mad. The way they behave it is as if they think all parents are evil bigots who will kill their kids if they see something in then they don't like. What kind of perspective is that?
🤣 please everyone sort this out before I have kids
Elephant in the room: should schools tell parents when their kids pretend to be Native American?
When kids *pretend* to be Native American? I think you owe an apology to our Trans Indigenous Youth.
"repent motherfucker"
Only if they do it and then pretend to have some super power like gps level sense of direction or the ability to communicate with animals empathically. And only because of how profoundly racist and unconfronted both of those things are.
Before smartphones and Google Maps, I had an almost GPS level of sense of direction. When I studied in Athens and Rome, I was always my crew's navigator. Now I fucking need actual GPS to get to fucking Target.
I used to have to get instructions for new roof jobs with my dad and I’m so glad that era is over, “for on thine right side thou shalt see a barn the colour of blood past yon hedge shaped as a bezoar, not to be confused with the curing shed the color of Eve’s fruit, then twice eleven left turns and a dove will carry away all your sins, second right.” No wonder we never made money.
This is poetry.
This is one of the funniest things I have read, maybe ever
Terry Pratchett is pretty good.
I think you mean the wolf or the falcon in the room.
I have so many thoughts about teachers concealing gender transition from parents, but most prominently: there is absolutely a type of slightly creepy high school teacher that is deeply over invested in the personal lives of students and that loves to see him/herself as championing students against their oppressive parents. There were at least two at my high school in the 1990s; they had terrible boundaries and one of them ended up getting fired after dragging a couple of my friends into her yoga cult. The other one always wanted to talk about our sex lives, under the pretext of offering to help us get access to birth control. I feel like today both of those women would be manning the trans closet.
Yes. This is the vibe. I’m a high school teacher and I don’t get it. My job, as Katie rightly said, is to teach my academic subject, not be their friend or parent. But, even admin push this idea that we are teachers because we want to influence kids and change their lives. I don’t, actually. I want to be a cog in the machine that generates doctors, scientists, and engineers who will solve problems. That is as lofty as I get. The pressure to be the teacher hero in a Disney movie is really strong and this is the result. I think it’s another aspect of anti-intellectualism in the US. Just teaching is not valued; you have to be a personal and political savior.
Do you think it has always been this way, or do you think there has been a shift in how teachers view themselves, or how admins view teachers' purposes?
I don’t think it’s super recent, but I don’t think it’s always been this way. I’d probably say it’s the long shadow of the 1960s and the rise of youth culture. The idea that adults should envy, emulate, or want to befriend the young hasn’t been around forever. Pre-1960s, it was more common for kids to look yearningly up to adulthood than for adults to look yearningly downward to youth.
I find it strange that the push for inclusivity and anti racism coincides with intense disdain for "older" people, when historically one of the few universal traits was reverence for the elderly, be it urban Germany or rural Ethiopia.
I think the 1920s is when youth culture started. But since the 1960s, we as a culture have decided, like you said, that we learn from kids
I am just surprised that so many teachers feel like their job is to be the kids' saviors. Was it always like that and I didnt see it?
Isn't there a word for when adults tell children to keep secrets from their parents, especially when it has to do with the child's body and sexuality?
Out of fucking line.
I came of age in the 80s gay rights movement, and to my mind what's happening today with trans rights is way, way, WAY beyond. Back then, we weren't demanding that schools hide things from our parents. We didn't insist on drugs and surgery to permanently alter our bodies, before we were even old enough to drive. We didn't claim the right to barge into cross-sex spaces like we owned them. We didn't make "scientific" arguments that there was no such thing as heterosexuality. We didn't insist that the ACLU dumb down its dedication to free expression so we could feel better about ourselves. We just wanted to have jobs and rent apartments and go on dates and enjoy the same privileges as EVERYONE ELSE.
These days, lefty Americans have made it our job to validate the feelings of trans/non-binary/genderqueer/whatever people, but THIS lefty is punching his time card and handing in his notice. I will vote for the right of trans adults to dress, act, and speak any way they like, and to be able to work and live in a matter consistent with that. When it comes to puberty blockers and hormones and surgery and this endless, rapacious need for emotional affirmation...they're on their own.
Great comment, I completely agree with you, with one caveat regarding "the right of trans adults to dress, act, and speak any way they like, and to be able to work and live in a matter consistent with that". For those whose transition is motivated by a paraphilia - AGPs, straight men getting off on becoming "trans lesbians", straight women who fetishise gay men so much they decide to become them - I don't support that right. Going out "en femme" in public (especially in front of real women) is often part of the kink for autogynephilic MtFs. We've all seen the Reddit posts about how being perceived as a woman, addressed as a woman or referred to as "she" (particularly by real women) gives them "euphoria boners". The public cannot and should not be expected to participate in someone's fetish without consent, and that includes having to share a workplace with an AGP.
Thank you, this is an often overlooked aspect of it.
If I shouldn’t be expected to refer to a BDSM-loving colleague as “Master” or “filthy slave”, then I shouldn’t be required to use wrong-sex pronouns to titillate an AGP co-worker.
I pronoun on a case by case basis. There are a couple of old school trans women in my work life orbit and everyone pretends not to know they’re bio men - as they are trying very hard to pass - which I think is kind and lovely and have had no problem doing for like 30 years. (The kids these days act like they invented pronouns but they’ve actually been in use for quite some time ;) I refuse to do it for people like this Dylan Mulvaney guy who is doing a caricature of women or the Canadian fetishist wood shop guy who is trying to make people participate in his autogynephilia. The difference couldn’t be any more obvious at least to me.
Hmm. If a straight guy wants to live as a woman, whatever. My main issue is the idea that trans women are women. Also. I do not care so much about bathrooms but changing rooms...I have complex feelings.
Not sure how you'd even make that distinction. I mean, sure, if every time they're called 'she' they start making sex noises, we can probably agree that's whack. But just wearing women's close? I don't see how you can go around policing their sex life.
"Yes. So you wore a dress today. Mmm hmm. And does that turn you on? How erect are you when I call you 'she'?" and so on.
Nope. People can wear whatever they want. And I imagine some edgy teens are going to cross dress just to piss off their parents (a tried and true teen rite of passage). And I don't think that should be policed either.
I mean, there's a fetish for everything. I'm sure there are fur fetishists walking around in fur coats cheesing themselves, but I'm not going to carry around a questionnaire and figure out how to separate them out and tell them Nope! No fur for you, Perv!
The thing is, AGPs and HSTS are super-easy to tell apart. They're completely different demographics of men who transition for completely different reasons. Think how different Blaire White, Laverne Cox, Paris Lees, Rebekah Shelton, Dana International etc. are from your standard poorly passing AGP who isn't at all naturally feminine and looks and dresses like they don't have the faintest understanding of what a woman is. Maybe it's because I'm gay and have super-good gaydar but I can confidently tell them apart in 99% of cases.
I'm not on board with basing policy on some arbitrary (and almost certainly inconsistent) transdar.
Even if we accept that you're 99% accurate, are you confident that Ron DeSantis is? Because it's not likely going to be you making the policy.
Same for gaydar...even if yours is 100% accurate in all cases. Would you be ok with legal policy being based on some arbitrary law makers gaydar?
I wouldn't.
-----
*edit*
And what would such policy look like anyway? "You're allowed to wear women's close to work if you look feminine enough to pass according to <insert trans inspectors name> criteria."
Yeah, as much as I'm not crying any tears for fetishists (https://shannonthrace.substack.com/p/your-kink-is-not-interesting), policing a man's cross-dressing based solely on his internal feelings and/or presumed sexual orientation is not workable.
Not only would someone have to make an arbitrary distinction on who is sufficiently "feminine," and thus "HSTS" instead of "AGP," but someone would also have to make an arbitrary distinction on what counts as cross-dressing. Do capri pants count? How about a huge necklace, but worn with men's clothes? What if one item is pink? What if his whole outfit is pink?
As for having "the faintest understanding of what a woman is," drag queens are usually gay, but their depictions of femininity are unrealistic. Do they get an exception because they're gay? Or do we say they can wear feather boas and sequins inside the gay bar, but not outside it?
Personal disgust cannot be the basis of official policy.
I have unending respect for those in the 80s gay rights era. I can’t even imagine the strife and heartache of being gay (esp a gay man) in the 80s.
Once, a friend of mine bought me a Chuck Tingle book on Amazon called "Gay T-Rex Law Firm: Executive Boner" as a gag gift. Pretty funny! I hopped on Amazon to send it directly to the e-reader so I could get the requisite chuckles out of it. It didn't send to the e-reader, though. Couldn't make it connect.
Turns out: I had last been on Amazon under my dad's account so I could steal his Prime Video subscription to watch a TV show. So I sent "Gay T-Rex Law Firm: Executive Boner" directly to HIS e-reader.
Anyway I had to rapidly send an apology/explanation text so I didn't get canceled by my own parents
Did they laugh about it?
My dad‘s response was basically, “I guess this is one of your Internet things…“ which I think should prompt some self-reflection on my part!
You win the comments section
I'd have deleted it from device and prayed they didn't see it.
😂😂😂
I stopped listening to Red Scare over a year ago, so this was like hearing an unexpected update about someone obnoxious former friend.
Also, as a public school teacher, I promise an overwhelming majority of teachers are very uninterested in helping children and teens transition. Teachers (of all people) are acutely aware of the power of social contagion in teens. If you spend 40 hours a week with them, it’s immediately clear how driven they are by conformity. Hence, why crocs and pajama pants are the new school uniform.
Are you able to say these things publicly in your school? I don't feel that I can. Even if many teachers are skeptical of social transition, we're still obligated to go along.
I am pretty open with my terfiness at my school. It requires no bravery because the district is in Trump country.
I pulled the "gender parity is an absurd delusion" in stem citing Sweden with one of the biggest libs/hiring chair in our department this week. Stunning and brave I know
Not a peep. I would be ostracized.
Also a public school teacher, but in more liberal NYC. Now, I work in a very small school, of black and hispanic students. My running theory (that no one seems to care about) is that this stuff is more prevalent at affluent liberal enclave, predominantly white schools. We have a couple trans students and yes, one mom was not happy to learn that their daughter/son was using a different name. I was just honest with her "Nothing I can do, talk to the chancellor."
My understanding from interactions with other teachers via FB is that MOST, not all, but MOST teachers are simply unware of these things. Like, they do not get involved unless it becomes a thing.
There are likely some teachers who think they are doing the right thing. After all, MOST teachers care deeply about their students. Very few get into the profession for the FAME and GLORY (that's a joke). The idea that parents are assumed to be monsters is crazy and I agree with Katie's take on this, as I usually do as she is the far superior barpod host.
My school, near Portland, Oregon, is filled with teachers who have pro-trans posters and flags all over their walls. They seem obsessed. We were told explicitly that we have to hide pronouns and names from families. I overheard a male 6th grade teacher talking about a young girl’s breasts and her desire for a binder. Multiple teachers told me they assume parents are abusive. That is across the board: they won’t email home about anything. None have kids, of course. It’s crazy, it’s wrong, and it’s very common. I hate it.
Imagine thinking the vast majority of parents in… PORTLAND FREAKIN OREGON… would be “abusive” to a “trans child”? What kinda Mean World Syndrome is that?
Right? I have never even seen evidence of abuse in my district.
It's insane, I agree!
I’m a shoe contrarian. Anytime a controversial shoe hits the market, I have to have it. I don’t know why I am like this. But as a result, I own multiple pairs of Crocs. Platform Crocs, goth Crocs, furry* Crocs, Crocs slides.
*ETA: These are Crocs covered in periwinkle faux fur. They are of no relation to the furry subculture. I am not that much of a deviant.
Crocs are great <10. Above that, at school anyway… not so much.
(I have two pairs for the back yard. Don’t judge.)
Oh, we're judging alright. We're judging HARD.
(Just kidding, I don't care what you wear... in the privacy of your own yard)
#Birks4eva
Have two pairs of those too, and I’d even wear them to work, but they’re not so good if you’re kneeling or using the hose in the yard. Whereas crocs you can just hose off.
The worst was the Crocs button trend. Yuck.
The simple and elegant solution to the issue of trans kids is to simply ban gender affirming endocrine or surgical interventions on minors- there is no evidence they accomplish anything worthwhile and a mountain of evidence of harms they cause and the only reason a kid 'coming out' as trans is more fraught than 'coming out' as goth or any other adolescent identity experimentation is because the involvement of the american medical industrial complex raises the spectre that kids who experiment in this way will be subjected to frankensteinian medical experimentation.
The interesting thing is that it almost shows their own version of American exceptionalism (which is funny considering a lot of these people can’t even relax & enjoy 4th of July because it’s problematic (for the record I’ve always hated fireworks & crowds, and socializing in general but it’s a great day to have strawberries & blueberries with whipped cream). They’re willfully ignoring the backtracking after systemic reviews & fall back on the AAP. Because countries w/national healthcare systems that don’t have pharma companies drooling for trans kid $$$ are somehow inferior to our profit-oriented healthcare system (that they used to hate until COVID). Makes no sense.
It is elegant in that it brings transgender care back into the normal working order of medicine. The entire trans phenomenon breaks with ethical and procedural norms and rules. Ethics are kind of important in our business.
Of course, the activists will call it "gatekeeping", but that's literally what the entire medical profession is. Gatekeeping is totally normal.
Both.
51% chance the reporter who un-subbed because B&R was unfair to Rebekah Jones is another one of Rebekah Jones’s sock puppets.
It's Rebekah Jones all the way down.
In a future episode Katie will deliver the heartbreaking news that Moose was, in fact, all along Rebekah Jones in a fur suit with a pair of "Neuticles" attached to it.
Also, does the premium sub come with a discount code for some Adderall so I can focus enough to follow this dime square stuff?
I was a bit lost at times, too. (Ritalin fail)
It seems crazy that could be a real person. Anyone offended by things like that would've stopped listening to B&R after one episode
Yeah, THAT was the final straw but the MAPs episodes?) and the one about lifelike baby dolls were NBD.
This episode had me marveling at how much of my time and brainpower (not to mention Jesse's and Katie's) has been consumed by trans (not to mention other identity-focused) issues in the last few years. Just think of all the real problems we could have been solving if it weren't for the small but influential subset of people who created a whole new set of problems out of critical-theory ideas incubated on Tumblr. And then there are the hipsters who are mocking the wokesters, the pontificators that you can't tell from one minute to the next which side they're on, the purely opportunistic grifters, etc. I'm seriously starting to think that this hellscape we call the Internet was a huge mistake (thanks, Al Gore).
I think Jesse and Katie have a ton of integrity. Way more than most journalists out there. And I totally get that we all have to make a living (I'm no paragon of virtue in my chosen career). But the only thing that makes me question it a bit is I know early on they were saying how much they were tired of the trans issue and wish they could talk about other things. I get it, it *is* tiresome to tackle the same issue. My most charitable interpretation is that they still feel that way but it's just a really, really important issue that people aren't addressing correctly so they feel called to comment on it.
This has all happened before, and this will all happen again.
https://mtprof.msun.edu/Win1996/HgonRev.html
This was the beginning. In 1995 people were haranguing each other on Usenet and credulously sharing email hoaxes, and the Web was well on its way to becoming the vast cesspool we recognize today. But it's true that the insanity wasn't quite as widespread yet, and there weren't nearly as many identities to choose from.
Hail the all-powerful Terfs of Mumsnet! Sensible shoes = sensible minds. There is no debate.
I haven’t read mumsnet at all and I may be very wrong here but I get a chuckle out of the audacity someone must have to frame parents being worried about irreversible medical procedures being performed on their children as a hate group.
I can’t help but notice the inherent sexism of how they go after Mumsnet & moms in general (saving some ire for irascible fathers of rape victims reacting normally to being taunted by some dismissive turnip at a school board meeting). Maybe it’s not done consciously but holy hell I see it everyday from the TRAs.
I wasn’t peaked by Mumsnet, but I was radicalized by it. There was a transwoman in around 2015 trying to get moved to a women’s prison in the UK and Mumsnet was the only place I could find that had the same “WTF” reaction that I did.
There’s a particular snobbishness about Mumsnet in the UK, that it’s full of buttoned-up yummy mummies who screech “think of the children!”, when in reality it’s full of incredibly smart, funny women covering every issue you can think of, often giving each other support and advice and one of the only true female spaces on the internet. (Weirdly enough it seems to have avoided being swamped with “actual” women, I wonder why?)
Absolutely. I discovered it when my wife’s sister was being legally harassed by her ex because she wanted to move house somewhere that added five minutes to his occasional visits to his daughter. It included him setting the police on her child minder to investigate fabricated accusations of sexual abuse - mission accomplished, the child minder packed it in - and ended with a court case for custody. He was completely broke, but represented himself with online help, which dragged the process out further and added to the cost.
Long story short, Mumsnet was great for support and advice. Whatever is happening, someone has gone through it before. So with the Trans issues...women whose husbands have suddenly transitioned but expect to be fully validated by their newly lesbian wife (Trans Widows), lesbians told that deep down, they’ve always been men and that transwomen are more authentically female than them, fear and disbelief at what is proposed for their children.
How did your sister-in-law’s situation work out, if I may ask?
Well she abandoned the move, but the judge laughed him out of court in the custody case. She couldn’t claim costs off him though because he’s got nothing except time on his hands, particularly since he self diagnosed with chronic long Covid.
(I wasn’t peaked by any of these sites ppl think. I was peaked by the masculine she/hers in the Be Kind community writing death/rape threats in response to JKR. “Listen to trans voices.” ✅ Did it. I’m quite confident dismissing the bulk of what’s going on as a power grab by Anime porn addicts to access women’s spaces, which strangely benefits Big Pharma.)
What they don't get is that most of those opposed to gender ideology and self-ID did "educate ourselves" and listen to "trans voices", and we realized the whole thing is nutters.
Yeah, I can see supporting the kid stuff just because you hadn’t thought about it very much or because it got some blessing from people you read as part of your group, but when people are out attacking moms my interpretation of their motives gets much less generous.
I mean it's not like the TRA crowd took it easy on Jessie because he's a he.
There just aren't a ton of men sticking their necks out on this issue, which makes sense because women going down the trans path don't pose nearly the same direct threat to us.
Katie’s discussion of Dimes Square just makes me hate young people
Interesting that you need an excuse to hate young people
I think Katie summed up our whole public discourse in one phrase: rat king circle jerk
I'll echo what Katie and the several academics whose emails were cited at the beginning of the episode said about universities being as "woke" in Florida, Western NC, and other stereotypically not-woke regions as anywhere else. The reason is that academic hiring is done nationally. Traditionally, if you're a junior academic looking for a job, you apply to all the jobs listed in your field in the US. So colleges and universities in Florida are hiring from the same applicant pool as all the other institutions are. If anything, given that there's a strong bias in favor of hiring applicants with Ivy-League and other elite PhDs, schools that feel worried about their relative prestige are MORE likely to hire candidates from institutions where there's a lot of progressivism.
The real divide between woke and non-woke institutions, as some commenters here touched on last week, runs along secular vs. seriously religious lines. (Think Vassar vs. Covenant College.) Even at the more religious and less woke institutions, there will be more progressivism in certain departments, and faculty will generally be more progressive than first-year students.
And in a national search, the hiring committee composed of faculty has a large role in the process. It is the first interview a candidate has before the committee creates a short list for campus visits. A candidate who makes the short list has likely read the same books and come to the same conclusions as those on the committee, and would signal them by talking about how their research fits into the latest intellectual trends. That means very little deviation in worldview within departments as people naturally would want to hire people like themselves. I’m not sure how hiring in admin works, but it is probably similar, and they go through the same educational leadership programs.
Truth about academia and national hiring. I'm most familiar with law, where the faculty of even East Podunk Law Skule is littered with elite law school grads. I know a scammy "for profit" school that had these faculty members.
Google "Dan Markel". Double Harvard grad ends up teaching in Tallahassee, much to the consternation of his cosmopolitan wife, who preferred Miami area near her cosmopolitan family and friends. Ugly divorce/custody battle ended with Markel being murdered by hit men hired by wife's family.
I know I presented a very extreme example, but it's a good illustration of the type of people who populate academia in "flyover" country.
Thoughts on this episode in no particular order:
1) Everybody in that New York scene deserves to be wiped from the earth, like a judgment from the God of the Old Testament.
2) "The film isn't mocking trans people, it's mocking insecure, fragile, male narcissism." It is remarkably easy to confuse those two things though, so I understand their confusion.
3) Katie, please - Dylan Mulvaney still looks like a man, just a slightly prettier one.
So in 2023, the Woke will still try to defame someone by calling him gay! When things like this slip through, you know there isn't an ounce of sincerity in these circles. (A few of the replies on Twitter took her to task for this, but most were doubling down!)
I see this, too, when some man that Left-Leaning Women don't like goes to jail. Read the news articles and many comments are mocking prison rape ("I'm sure he'll make a great prison bitch!") Yes, the left loves to make rape jokes. I've noticed it in the NY Times comment forums (ok, I'm a fool for looking at the comments) about everyone from Steve Bannon to Paul Manafort.
Because this is "Blocked and Reported" I blocked "Rebekkah" and reported her tweet as harassing someone because of their sexual orientation or identity. Twitter's response was that the tweet didn't violate their terms of service.
Respectfully submit that the misogyny directed at conservative women feels very similar. I'm sure every slightly heterodox "marginalized group" person gets it
To be fair I honestly think this isn't because he's gay per say but rather because there's always been a running joke among liberal comedians that homophobic Republicans are secretly gay and are simply being homophobic to compensate for their hidden sexual orientations.
Nothing to do with the latest pod, but I’m totally baffled why the Memphis police killing is the lead story on the BBC news here in England for the second night running. Is it the same elsewhere in the world outside the USA?
It is not big news here in the US. Possibly because everyone involved is black. Which I should have realized, since the first articles said that a black man had been killed by police officers, not that a black man had been killed by white officers. ,
I saw a headline in the NYT that it "opens up a complicated discussion about race." I didn't read it because why make this about race at all, if all the principals were the same race. It's horrifying and condemnable enough without shoehorning another agenda into it.
It IS about group dynamics though, which should be investigated. I think the idea of. "Race" now is that white supremacy is part of say police departments, regardless of the officers' race.
That’s always the tell isn’t it.
My money is on cynical media types hoping for a new George Floyd situation to liven up an otherwise slow-news January/February.
Outside of the US, it gives them not just a moral high from observing how evil are the jackbooted police thugs, but also the secret satisfaction from the ensuing riots showing the Americans as being utter barbarians — and all from the relative safety of east of the Atlantic (or north of the 49th, in my countrymen’s case).