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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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?
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.
Elephant in the room: should schools tell parents when their kids pretend to be Native American?
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.
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.
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.
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.
51% chance the reporter who un-subbed because B&R was unfair to Rebekah Jones is another one of Rebekah Jones’s sock puppets.
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).
Hail the all-powerful Terfs of Mumsnet! Sensible shoes = sensible minds. There is no debate.
Katie’s discussion of Dimes Square just makes me 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.
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.
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?