J.K. Rowling: My Comments About Real Women Being Real Women Have Been 'Profoundly Misunderstood'. Please Don't Murder Me

At AoSHQ, "She says her comments about sex being real have been "profoundly misunderstood."

When Students Change Gender Identity, and Parents Don't Know

This is outrageous. Nothing good will come of sidelining parents like this --- it's tantamount to having the state take your kid away from you.

At the New York Times, "Educators are facing wrenching new tensions over whether they should tell parents when students socially transition at school":

Jessica Bradshaw found out that her 15-year-old identified as transgender at school after she glimpsed a homework assignment with an unfamiliar name scrawled at the top.

When she asked about the name, the teenager acknowledged that, at his request, teachers and administrators at his high school in Southern California had for six months been letting him use the boy’s bathroom and calling him by male pronouns.

Mrs. Bradshaw was confused: Didn’t the school need her permission, or at least need to tell her?

It did not, a counselor later explained, because the student did not want his parents to know. District and state policies instructed the school to respect his wishes.

“There was never any word from anyone to let us know that on paper, and in the classroom, our daughter was our son,” Mrs. Bradshaw said.

The Bradshaws have been startled to find themselves at odds with the school over their right to know about, and weigh in on, such a major development in their child’s life — a dispute that illustrates how school districts, which have long been a battleground in cultural conflicts over gender and sexuality, are now facing wrenching new tensions over how to accommodate transgender children.

The Bradshaws accepted their teenager’s new gender identity, but not without trepidation, especially after he asked for hormones and surgery to remove his breasts. Doctors had previously diagnosed him as being on the autism spectrum, as well as with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, PTSD and anxiety. He had struggled with loneliness during the pandemic, and, to his parents, seemed not to know exactly who he was yet, because he had repeatedly changed his name and sexual orientation.

Given those complexities, Mrs. Bradshaw said she resented the fact that the school had made her feel like a bad parent for wondering whether educators had put her teenager, a minor, on a path the school wasn’t qualified to oversee.

“It felt like a parenting stab in the back from the school system,” she said. “It should have been a decision we made as a family.”

The student, now 16, told The New York Times that his school had provided him with a space to be himself that he otherwise lacked. He had tried to come out to his parents before, he said, but they didn’t take it seriously, which is why he asked his school for support.

“I wish schools didn’t have to hide it from parents or do it without parental permission, but it can be important,” he said. “Schools are just trying to do what’s best to keep students safe and comfortable. When you’re trans, you feel like you are in danger all the time. Even though my parents were accepting, I was still scared, and that’s why the school didn’t tell them.”

Although the number of young people who identify as transgender in the United States remains small, it has nearly doubled in recent years, and schools have come under pressure to address the needs of those young people amid a polarized political environment where both sides warn that one wrong step could result in irreparable harm.

The public school that Mrs. Bradshaw’s son attends is one of many throughout the country that allow students to socially transition — change their name, pronouns, or gender expression — without parental consent. Districts have said they want parents to be involved but must follow federal and, in some cases, state guidance meant to protect students from discrimination and violations of their privacy.

Schools have pointed to research that shows that inclusive policies benefit all students, which is why some education experts advise schools to use students’s preferred names and pronouns. Educators have also said they feel bound by their own morality to affirm students’ gender identities, especially in cases where students don’t feel safe coming out at home.

But dozens of parents whose children have socially transitioned at school told The Times they felt villainized by educators who seemed to think that they — not the parents — knew what was best for their children. They insisted that educators should not intervene without notifying parents unless there is evidence of physical abuse at home. Although some didn’t want their children to transition at all, others said they were open to it, but felt schools forced the process to move too quickly, and that they couldn’t raise concerns without being cut out completely or having their home labeled “unsafe.”

Many advocates for L.G.B.T.Q. youth counter that parents should stop scapegoating schools and instead ask themselves why they don’t believe their children. They said ensuring that schools provide enough support for transgender students is more crucial than ever, given the rise of legislation that blocks their access to bathrooms, sports and gender-affirming care.

These disputes are unfolding as Republicans rally around “parental rights,” a catchall term for the decisions parents get to make about their children’s‌ upbringing. Conservative legal groups have filed a growing number of lawsuits against school districts, accusing them of failing to involve parents in their children’s education and mental health care. Critics say groups like these have long worked to delegitimize public education and eradicate the rights of transgender people.

But how schools should address gender identity cuts through the liberal and conservative divide. Parents of all political persuasions have found themselves unsettled by what schools know and don’t reveal.

Mrs. Bradshaw said she wouldn’t align herself with Republican lawmakers who sought to ban L.G.B.T.Q. rights, but she also felt as though her school’s policy left no room for nuance.

“It is almost impossible to have these discussions,” Mrs. Bradshaw said. “There is no forum for someone like me.”

Other self-described liberal parents said they registered as independents or voted for Republican candidates for the first time as a result of this issue. Although they haven’t sued, some have retained lawyers affiliated with the largest legal organization on the religious right to battle their children’s schools.

In November, Erica Anderson, a well-known clinical psychologist who has counseled hundreds of children over gender identity-related issues and is transgender herself, filed an amicus brief in a Maryland lawsuit in support of parents represented by a conservative law group. The parents have argued that their district’s policy violates their own decision-making authority.

Transitioning socially, Dr. Anderson wrote, “is a major and potentially life-altering decision that requires parental involvement, for many reasons.”

She told the Times that she had to push aside her qualms about working with conservative lawyers. “I don’t want to be erased as a transgender person, and I don’t want anyone’s prerogatives or identity to be taken away from them,” she said, “but on this one, I’m aligned with people who are willing to advocate for parents.”

The debate reflects how the interests of parents and those of their children do not always align, said Justin Driver, a Yale Law School professor who has written a book about constitutional conflict in public schools...

 

The Year the West Erased Women

It's Ayaan Hirsi Ali, at UnHerd, "Progressives care more about semantics than emancipation."

Matt Walsh, What Is a Woman?

At Amazon, Matt Walsh, What Is a Woman? One Man's Journey to Answer the Question of a Generation.

They Questioned Gender-Affirming Care. Then Their Kids Were Kicked Out of School

From Leighton Woodhouse, at Common Sense, "Paul and Beka Sinclair didn’t like that their kids’ pricey private school was teaching first graders about 'deconstructing the gender binary'":

On May 25, Paul and Rebeka Sinclair pulled their minivan over to the side of the road, just north of Lake Tahoe, and logged onto a Zoom with Katherine Dinh, the head of the Marin Country Day School.

“Today was the last day of school for your children, Charlotte and Carter,” Dinh informed the couple. The Sinclairs—she’s 37; he’s 51—had been driving home from a vacation to celebrate their anniversary. Dinh appeared to be reading a script. Two MCDS board members joined her on the call but stayed quiet. “Please do not contact any other school employees, particularly Charlotte and Carter’s teachers, as your reaching out to them will cause them further stress,” Dinh continued. “The two of you are not to be on campus again.”

It was the closing act of a year-long drama between the Sinclairs and MCDS, which charges $40,000 per student per year and had been teaching first and second graders about “deconstructing the gender binary”—the idea that there’s no such thing as girls or boys, just a spectrum of relative girlness and boyness.

The Sinclairs weren’t the only parents who had protested the new gender-identity curriculum—most families in their daughter’s class were upset and had been talking about it among themselves. But the Sinclairs had been unwilling to stay quiet. As a result, administrators had suggested that they were homophobic and accused them of tarnishing MCDS’s reputation. (An MCDS attorney had accused the Sinclairs of “defamation” for accusing MCDS of “predatory ‘grooming’ of children.” The Sinclairs never made that accusation.) Friends had stopped replying to their texts. Teachers said they felt unsafe around them. When word got out about why Charlotte, 8, and Carter, 5, had been kicked out, the Sinclairs had to decide whether they could stay in the Bay Area.

“I had no problem being a pariah in Marin,” Beka said. “We were worried about raising our kids long term in an area that was embracing these destructive ideologies.”

Beka first glimpsed what was going on in the fall of 2020. Charlotte was in the first grade then, and the students were still in remote learning, and she saw the teacher read the kids Ibram X. Kendi’s “Antiracist Baby.” She didn’t like Kendi’s ideas, and she emailed Dinh and Stephanie Deitz, the head of the lower school, to let them know.

A few weeks later, one of Charlotte’s teachers asked the kids to introduce their stuffed animals with their pronouns. “The six-year-olds were like, ‘What’s a pronoun?’” Beka said.

A former MCDS teacher whose daughter attended the school said his little girl was similarly confused when MCDS “started introducing gender, and you can be whoever you want, and it’s fluid. She started taking that on.”

The former teacher, who declined to speak openly, said his daughter was hardly alone. A group of girls in her class started to think of themselves as gay, and then transgender. By the fourth grade, his daughter was “dating” other girls in her class. By sixth grade—last year—she had adopted male pronouns and a boy’s name, and had started wearing a breast binder.

“You could see the old going away,” the former teacher said. “It was intense. And it was just sobering to go to these meetings week after week after week, and just talk about the same thing over and over.”

Then, one day in 2021, when everyone was back on campus, Beka noticed that all the American flags had disappeared. She didn’t say anything to MCDS. It felt important, but it also felt a little weird to bring up.

The school, Paul said, seemed intent on teaching kids to feel bad about who they were—whether it was being white, or American, or a boy or a girl.

By early 2022—Charlotte was now in the second grade—MCDS parents started noticing more red flags, according to parents I spoke to and others connected to the school. One of the children wondered what they were supposed to call their stuffed animals, since they had never asked them whether they were boys or girls. Another couldn’t reconcile his interest in unicorns with his love of sports.

(Several parents I reached out to indicated that they wanted to talk but were scared. One father said he’d call me from a pay phone, if only there were pay phones.)

Parents started to hear about weird classroom exercises designed to force the seven- and eight-year-olds to decide how they identified: They were asked which gender they “felt like.” Or to pick the pronoun that seemed right to them. Or to say which toys seemed more like boy toys or girl toys...

Still lots more at the link.

The Marin County Day School is another case of the imperative to fight back against this demonic ideological agenda. Abigail Shrier is absolutely right. 

In Defense of Political Escalation

From the irrepressible Abigail Shrier, at Common Sense, "How can we get back to normal? Those waiting for the pendulum to swing back will be waiting forever":

... Here is the problem: Almost every liberal will be content to allow our institutions and corporations to punish conservatives as long as they themselves remain unscathed. They may feel a pang of discomfort watching books deleted from Amazon, but until it is a book of theirs, they will continue to show a remarkable disinclination to speak up. (Yes, with the important exception of brave souls like J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk and Joe Rogan. And the moment liberals speak out against such censorship, they are accused of being right-wing and lose the left’s protection.)

As long as Amazon never deletes books by Rachel Maddow, Bob Woodward, Ezra Klein, or Paul Krugman, America’s large and powerful center-left has proven itself all-too-willing to allow the censorship to proceed. As long as only the left weaponizes every available corporation and government agency, America will continue its decade-long shrug.

Those waiting on the mythical pendulum to “swing back,” should stop holding their breath. The gender activists are True Believers, akin to jihadists: no amount of reasoning diminishes their resolve, no appeal to data brings them pause, no urge to consider the sanctity of American liberties will convince them to cool it.

This point was best put to me by a high school teacher in Texas, a gay man, regularly hounded by his school administrators to teach gender ideology to his students. Here’s the remarkable thing: He doesn’t want to, doesn’t think it’s a good use of his time, and doesn’t believe encouraging his students to obsess over their sexual orientation during class is anywhere near as helpful to high school students as the material he trained to teach them. But he also doesn’t think passing a law banning gender ideology will make the slightest difference.

I try to tell parents, if you’re considering pulling your kids out of public school—do—because you can go to as many school board meetings as you want and complain. There’s still going to be people who are going to teach whatever they want.

If the woke continue to gain ground, where will we skeptics go to educate our children, transact commerce, find fair adjudication of our custody disputes? Where will we publish when not only the New York Times has a “gender director”—when every publication does?

That is the worry that likely motivates DeSantis, the first politician to “weaponize” the Florida tax code. He brought its hammer down on Disney to punish that one company for using its immense corporate coffers to lobby against parents’ rights in Florida. In principle, it’s a move I’m leery of. (And in the case of sending CPS after moms and dads who take their kids to drag shows, it’s a move I would oppose.)

But the gist of this stratagem—escalation—may be necessary. Indeed, it already seems to be working. Playing offense, even raising the stakes, may be the only means of achieving a much-needed truce. I’m out of better ideas. How about you?

Read the whole thing.

 

Democrats Hemorrhaging 'Black' America's Support in U.S. Cities

This is killer! 

At the New York Post, "Blacks might be on the cusp of a second Great Migration – this time in the voting booth":

“Black America is wising up to [Democrat failures] and the question now is whether or not it is too late,” said conservative commentator Candace Owens, noting that “every single metric is worse for black America under a Biden presidency than under a Trump presidency,”

There are 30 million voting-age African-Americans, and 92 percent of those who voted pulled the lever for Biden in 2020. But only 69 percent support him today, according to a recent CNN survey. A new Quinnipiac poll put black support for the president at just 58 percent, with 20 percent strongly disapproving of his leadership.

David “Shaman” Ortiz, 29, is among the growing list of disillusioned former Democrats. The bi-racial Brooklyn native, former City Council staffer and political activist marched with Black Lives Matter in 2020. This year he protested outside the US Capitol waving “F–k Biden,” “Let’s Go Brandon” and “Trump 2024” flags, sharing the images on social media.

“I’ve been the boots on the ground for the other side. So I know. It’s time to paint New York City red,” said Ortiz, who recently switched his voter registration from Democrat to Republican.

He said the public education system and left-leaning mainstream media leave black children “malnourished of the truth,” teaching them to believe only Democrats care about their issues, despite what he says is growing evidence that their policies are devastating minority communities.

Black urban communities across the nation beset by social ills have been run almost exclusively by Democrats for decades. Rising crime, failed schools, illegal immigration and anger over COVID mandates are all among issues forcing this constituency to reject the Democrat Party, political observers said. So too is the failure of the Biden Administration to live up to campaign pledges.

“You do realize … a lot of black people feel like Democrats have kept no promises since they’ve been in office,” radio host Charlamagne the God told Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg this month.

Conservative commentator and Post contributor Deroy Murdock led a group that filed a lawsuit arguing that a new city law which will allow non-citizens to vote in local elections comes at the expense of African-American voters.

“Black voters finally are concluding that continuing to vote Democrat and expecting improved results is the quintessential definition of insanity,” said Murdock.

Crime continues to ravage the black community in almost all American cities, wildly out of proportion to population. African-Americans were the victims in 65 percent of all NYC murders in 2020, according to NYPD data, despite representing just 20 percent of the city’s population.

Black students, meanwhile, have underperformed their peers for decades in what school Chancellor David Banks called an “outrageous” failure of public education.

The burden of illegal immigration is also unfairly foisted upon African-American communities, pundits say. Illegals captured at the border and then secretly flown into the New York area by the Biden Administration are not placed in cushy Cobble Hill or the Upper East Side. They’re dumped instead on poor, mostly minority neighborhoods and schools.

“I think that the sharp decline in support [for Democrats] correlates directly with the administration’s effort to create a sharp incline in importing Hispanics over the border,” said Owens. “The black vote is being threatened.”

A new generation of black Republicans is hoping to capitalize on disaffected Democrats in November, including US Senate candidate and former NFL star Herschel Walker in Georgia, who raised $5.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2021; Congressional hopeful John James in Michigan; and Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Kendall Qualls.

“There is resentment over crime and education and there is resentment over BLM, all of it tied to the Democrat Party,” said Qualls, who lived as a child in Harlem where he said he watched his mom robbed on the street in broad daylight. Decades later, he added, life for black residents in Harlem is no better.

“The seismic shift is cultural, not political,” said Qualls. “Our cultural roots are faith, family and education, not this crap we see today.”

Walker told The Post: “Across the country, black Americans are realizing that policies from President Biden … are actively failing their communities. We are focused on reducing inflation, restoring public safety, securing our borders, increasing school choice, and addressing mental health — not on dividing people over race.” Democrat insiders agree minority voters are losing confidence in the party’s leadership...

 More.

How Feminism Got Hijacked

From Zoe Strimpel, at Bari Weiss's Common Sense, "The movement that once declared 'I am woman, hear me roar' can no longer define what a woman is. What happened?":

“Pregnant people at much higher risk of breakthrough Covid,” The Washington Post recently declared. This was in keeping with the newspaper’s official new language policy: “If we say pregnant women, we exclude those who are transgender and nonbinary.”

“I’m not a biologist,” Ketanji Brown Jackson, the next Supreme Court justice and a formerly pregnant person herself, told her Senate inquisitors while trying to explain why she couldn’t define “woman.”

“It’s a very contested space at the moment,” explained Australian Health Secretary Brendan Murphy—a nephrologist, a doctor of medicine—when he was asked the same question at a hearing in Melbourne. “We’re happy to provide our working definition.”

The meaning of “woman,” the Labor Party’s Anneliese Dodds, in Britain, observed, “depended on context.” (Never mind that Dodds oversees the party’s women’s agenda.)

“I think people get themselves down rabbit holes on this one,” Labor’s Yvette Cooper added the next day, March 8, International Women’s Day. She declined to follow suit.

What were normal people—those who did not have any trouble defining woman, those who found talk of “pregnant people” and “contested spaces” and “rabbit holes” baffling—to make of this obvious discomfort with “women”? Jackson, Dodds and Cooper—and, no doubt, every individual formerly or currently capable of becoming pregnant on the masthead at The Washington Post—would call themselves feminists. Champions of women’s rights. (So, too, one imagines, would Dr. Murphy.) Once upon a time, it was women like them who proudly declared, I am woman, hear me roar. It was women like them who stood up for women and womanhood.

But now these exemplars of female empowerment—educated, sophisticated, wielding enormous influence—seemed to have forgotten what “woman” meant. Or whether it was okay to say “woman.” Or whether “woman” was a dirty word.

It wasn’t simply about language. It was about how we think about and treat women. For nearly 2,500 years—from Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” to Seneca Falls to Anita Hill to #MeToo—women had been fighting, clawing their way out of an ancient, deeply repressive, often violent misogyny. But now that they were finally on the cusp of the Promised Land, they were turning their backs on all that progress. They were erasing themselves.

How we got from there to here is the story of an unbelievable hijacking. Two, actually.

It was only five decades ago, in the 1970s, that women—mostly white, middle-class and from places like New York, Boston and north London, and fed up with being sidelined by their comrades on the left—forged a new movement. They called it Women’s Liberation.

At the start, Women’s Liberation was seen as the domain of women with money—like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and, in the United Kingdom, Germaine Greer and Rosie Boycott. But soon it became the movement of everyday mothers, daughters, wives, working women, poor women, and women regularly beaten up by their boyfriends and husbands.

They embodied a politics of action: protesting, writing, lobbying, setting up shelters. They formed sprawling, nationwide organizations like the National Organization of Women, the National Abortion Campaign and the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

And at the center of their politics was an awareness of their physicality, a keen understanding that the challenges women faced were bound up with the bodies they had been born into. Exploitation at home and at work, the threat of sexual violence, unequal pay—all that was a function of their sex. Nothing better summed up the ethos of Women’s Liberation than “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” which was published in 1973 by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Every feminist had a copy or had read one. It sold something like four million copies. It was a bible. That’s because “Our Bodies, Ourselves” rejected the old, Puritan discomforts with female sexuality that, feminists argued, had prevented women from realizing themselves, and empowered women by educating them about their own bodies.

By the 1980s, women had won several key victories. Equal pay was the law (if not always the reality). No-fault divorce was widespread. Abortion was safe and legal. Women were now going to college, getting mortgages, playing competitive sports and having casual sex. In the United States, they were running for president, and they were getting elected to the House and Senate in record numbers. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister.

In the wake of all these breakthroughs, the movement began to lose steam. It contracted, then it splintered, and a vacuum opened up. Academics took over—hijacked—the cause. There was an obvious irony: It was women’s liberationists who had successfully made women a topic worthy of academic scholarship. But now that the feminist professoriat had the luxury of not worrying about the very concrete issues the older feminists had fought for, feminist professors spent their days reflecting on their feminism—exploring, reimagining and rejecting old orthodoxies.

“As soon as the academics got hold of feminism, they ruined it,” said Kathleen Stock, a feminist philosophy professor formerly of the University of Sussex and the author of “Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism.” “It should be and is a grassroots movement about women and their interests. Academics just took it away from them.”

It wasn’t just that these academics took it upon themselves to develop fiendishly complex theories about women, dressed up in a fiendishly complex language. It was that this hyper-intellectualized feminism, by embracing this hyper-intellectualized language, excluded most women. It transformed feminism from activism to theory, from the concrete to the abstract, from a movement that sought to liberate women from the discriminations imposed on them by their sex to a school of thought that was less interested in sex than gender...

Still more.

 

Boston School Has Transgender Explain to 4 and 5-Year-Olds That Sometimes Babies Are Assigned the Wrong Sex

At AoSHQ, "David French: Republicans Are 'Against Free Speech' Because They're Instructing Government Employees What They Can Teach Kindergarteners."

Walking the Transgender Movement Away from the Extremists

This is an amazing essay.

From Jonathan Rauch, at American Purpose, "Today's radical gender ideologues are harming the transgender community the same way left-leaning activists harmed the gay and lesbian rights movement in the early 1990s":

I’m ... well aware that many of the same arguments which were used against gay people are now being deployed against trans people. Gays were (supposedly) redefining marriage; trans people are (supposedly) redefining sex. We (allegedly) smeared all disagreement as homophobic; they (allegedly) smear all disagreement as transphobic. We were usurping democratic majorities, destroying privacy, defying nature, recruiting children, and politicizing science; they’re—well, you get the idea. Seeing the many parallels makes me humble about getting the trans issue wrong.

But I also see a different and more disturbing historical parallel. A generation ago, in the early 1990s, the gay and lesbian rights movement (as it was then called) came under the sway of left-leaning activists with their own agenda. They wanted as little as possible to do with bourgeois institutions like marriage and the military; they elevated cultural transgression and opposed integration into mainstream society; they imported an assortment of unrelated causes like abortion rights. To be authentically gay, in their view, was to be left-wing and preferably radical.

A loose collection of gay and lesbian conservatives, libertarians, and centrists watched with growing concern. We thought that the activists were dangerously misguided both about America and also gay people’s place in it. We resented their efforts to impose ideological conformity on a diverse population. (In 2000, a fourth of gay voters chose Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush.) We saw how they played to the very stereotypes that the anti-gay Right used against us. We knew their claim to represent the lesbian and gay population was false...

RTWT.

 

'There are many reasons the Democratic Party shouldn't be allowed near power, and this issue has quickly vaulted itself to the top of the list...'

At the Washington Examiner, "Transgender policies poll poorly as Democrats and liberals make them top priority."

The Left Doesn't Want to Diddle Your Kids

I said basically the same thing the other day, with a similar explanation in brief, here: "'Real Time' Panel Discusses Florida's 'Don't Say Gay' Legislation (VIDEO)." 

Oh sure, there are definitely a few heinous groomers around here or there. 

They're evil. But in toto, the left is gunning for ideological hegemony over all of U.S. politics and culture, which Andrew Breitbart perceptively warned about years ago. Honestly, it may be too late to turn back the tide, so you have to put up pockets of resistance, like I do with my college students. I do a *ton* of ideological deprogramming. Young people don't read. Students today basically know nothing. The entertainment social media culture --- with an epidemic of youth narcissism  and privilege --- has destroyed their brains, and therefore their intellectual skills, critical thinking abilities, and the gift of perspective. So they glom onto anything that's trendy and allegedly cool. 

It's a fucking tragedy. 

In any case, I saw this dude Josh Daws on Twitter last night expounding like he was *the* expert on all of the. Okay, not too bad:

I'm seeing a lot of people on the right share this meme. While it may be a strong satirical response to those who get lost in nuance, it fundamentally fails to recognize why the left wants to talk to your kids about sexuality. Let's connect some dots. 🧵 1/23.

The left doesn't want to diddle kids. They want to create little revolutionaries. To do that they need to sever the bond between students and the parents they believe are raising their children to be hateful bigots. 2/23.

In order to sever the bond between parents and their children, the left is using a two-pronged approach. Critical Race Theory and radical gender ideology (properly known as Queer Theory) are not two unrelated sets of ideas. They are two parts of the same strategy. 3/23.

CRT is usually the first set of ideas to be introduced. This is often enough to radicalize racial minorities, but it's merely step one for white (or white adjacent) students. 4/23.

CRT instills in these students a negative self-identity as they're taught to believe they're recipients of enormous privilege that was stolen from others and that they are complicit in historic and ongoing injustice. In child terms, they're taught to believe they're bad. 5/23.

Apart from the shame and guilt, this also gives them a worldview at odds with the one their parents grew up with and are trying to pass on to their kids. Step one is complete. 6/23.

Once CRT is done tearing down these kids and leaving them with a negative self-identity, Queer Theory (QT) is introduced and offers them a wide assortment of positive self-identities to choose from. 7/23.

Instead of living with the shame and guilt of being a member of the oppressive dominant culture, these students can be celebrated for coming out as gender nonbinary or pansexual. 8/23.

In an instant, these kids can trade their negative self-identity and all the accompanying guilt and shame of being an "oppressor" for a positive self-identity as a much-venerated "oppressed" minority. 9/23.

At this point, the left desperately wants this new identity to stay at school so it has time to be cemented before the parents find out. In the guise of helping these students, schools withhold this information about their child's new identity from mom and dad. 10/23.

Once the parents do find out about their child's new identity it's firmly in place and an adversarial relationship between the child and parents has been manufactured. It takes extraordinarily deft parenting to repair the relationship once it has reached this stage. 11/23.

The parents' tendency will be to overreact and push the child further into the arms of the woke radicals who now have the little revolutionary they wanted from the beginning. The bond between parents and child has been severed ending the perpetuation of hate and bigotry. 12/23.

The left is determined to replicate this process in as many families as they can using whatever means at their disposal. It's not about diddling kids. It's about capturing the minds of impressionable children. 13/23.

Unfortunately, this creates environments where actual predators can thrive. When young children are isolated from their parents, encouraged to adopt different beliefs, and keep secrets from their parents, they are made easy targets for abusers. 14/23 "But my school has Christian teachers and a Christian principal. They couldn't possibly have this agenda." Aha. This is where we turn to @joe_rigney and connect another dot. 15/23.

Hear me loud and clear on this. Most teachers love the kids in their classrooms and want only the best for them...

Still more.

 

The Right's Cancel Culture Comes for Disney (VIDEO

This is from Charles Sykes at the Bullwark.  

I don't like these people, although I'm interested in this story. 

Here, "You can be forgiven if you didn’t have “Right-Wing Jihad Against Disney” on your bingo card for 2022":

But I regret to tell you that the entrepreneurs of culture war have grown tired of ginning up indignation about “Drag Queen Story Hour,” CRT, and the cancellation of Dr. Seuss. And so they have found a bright new shiny object of outrage, that bastion of moral decadence and wokeness, the Walt Disney Company.

This is, of course, the Disney of Mary Poppins, Frozen, Snow White, Moana, Encanto, High School Musical, Finding Nemo, 101 Dalmatians, Fantasia, Coco, Epcot Center, Bambi, Cinderella, Ratatouille, Splash Mountain, Beauty and the Beast, Mister Toad’s Wild Ride, Space Mountain, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, Toy Story, The Princess and the Frog, Remember the Titans, The Mighty Ducks. Old Yeller, and the It’s a Small World After All ride.

But the company has now spoken out against Florida’s new law regulating instruction about sexuality (read gayness), and, since clickbait doesn’t click itself, the new hotness is canceling Disney.

[Image of tweet from activist Christopher Rufo.]

You remember Rufo, of course. He’s this guy:

Rufo has become one of the go-to critics of CRT. His work has appeared in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, Fox News, and the NY Post; he has also been featured by Hillsdale College; and touted by the Heritage Foundation.

Rufo also reportedly inspired Trump’s personal interest in the issue…

But here is Rufo, essentially giving away the game. For Rufo, it is all about “branding,’ and the audacity of his charlatanry is breathtaking:

[Another couple of tweets from Rufo, who is a dogged oppenent of the leftist culture agenda, though he goes to far in calling for a ban on *all* instruction in critical race theory, all the up to the university level. That's actually dumb. Grappling with stuff like CRT, which started in law school journals decades ago, is what you do at university.]

Now, he’s moved on, leading the attack on all things Disney. This week, Rufo fired up the jihad with what he excitedly described as a SCOOP: “Disney corporate president Karey Burke says, "as the mother [of] one transgender child and one pansexual child," she supports having "many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories" and wants a minimum of 50 percent of characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities.”

And he attached a video with the smoking wokeness...

Here's the video:

Keep reading.  

Governor Ron DeSantis Floats Revoking Disney Company's Independent Governing Status in Florida (VIDEO)

This is blowing up the culture war, dang!

At Fox News, "DeSantis broaches repeal of Disney World's special self-governing status in Florida":

Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis addressed on Thursday the suggestion of repealing a 55-year-old state law that allows Disney to effectively govern itself on the grounds of Walt Disney World, following the company’s public opposition to a controversial parental rights law in Florida.

"What I would say as a matter of first principle is I don’t support special privileges in law just because a company is powerful and they’ve been able to wield a lot of power," DeSantis said during a press conference in West Palm Beach, Florida on Thursday...

Laura Ingraham's video is embedded at the article, "Angle: Disney turns its back on millions of Americans."

Inflation Is Taking Biggest Toll on Nonwhite Voters, WSJ Poll Shows

Batya Ungar-Sargon can't say it enough: Democrat Party identity socialists, woke-leftist mainstream media goobers, craven corporate America, Marxist university elites, and Silicon Valley tech-totalitarians hate the very people they purport to champion and support. 

Biden's now set to release "a million barrels of oil a day" from the strategic petroleum reserves, which won't make a dent in the rising price curve for gasoline, groceries, consumer goods, heavy industry, manufacturing, shipping, and more. 

Inflation's the number one issue driving the concerns of everyday Americans, that is, the American voters. Add the crazy gender assault on morality and the schools, and the Democrats are looking to put themselves out in the political wilderness for a generation. 

It's bad.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Black women and Hispanic men reported the highest levels of inflation worry among different demographic groups":

Nonwhite voters are more likely than white voters to say the highest inflation in four decades is triggering major financial strain in their lives and that appears to be giving Republicans an opening with a growing segment of the electorate that traditionally favors Democrats, the latest Wall Street Journal poll shows.

Eight months before the midterm election, 35% of Black, Hispanic, Asian-American and other voters who said they were something other than white expressed that level of inflationary pain, compared with 28% for white voters. Black women and Hispanic men, both at 44%, reported the highest proportions of major strain among various demographic and gender combinations.

People with the lowest incomes also were most likely to report major financial challenges from inflation. Almost half with incomes of less than $60,000 reported major financial strain, while just 13% of those making $150,000 or more did so.

Some poll participants said they blame President Biden for inflation because he has taken actions to limit oil-and-gas drilling and pipelines in the U.S.

Roger Stephens, a 62-year-old mostly retired airplane mechanic who is Black and lives in the Harbor City neighborhood of Los Angeles, said gas is running close to $6 a gallon in his area. He is troubled by prices at the pump and those at grocery stores and restaurants.

“Uncle Joe has put us on a diet,” he said in a reference to Mr. Biden. “I like to have a steak once or twice a month. I can’t do it now.”

Mr. Stephens is a registered Democrat who said he twice voted for Democrat Barack Obama for president and then for Republican Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. He said he was more likely to back Republicans than Democrats in this year’s election. Inflation, he said, is one of the issues he is weighing.

The inflation numbers help explain why almost two-thirds of voters think the economy is headed in the wrong direction even as jobs are plentiful, wages are rising, home values are up and stock prices remain above where they were when Mr. Biden took office. Rising energy, food and services prices pushed inflation to 7.9% last month compared with a year ago. The Consumer Price Index, which measures the cost of goods and services, hasn’t been this high since it reached 8.4% in January 1982. Overall, 58% of poll participants said inflation was causing them major or minor financial strain, up slightly from 56% in a similar survey taken in mid-November.

In a potentially troubling sign for Democrats now running Washington, a 47% plurality of voters said they think Republicans can best tame inflation, compared with 30% who listed Democrats.

Almost 9 in 10 Republican voters think the economy is headed in the wrong direction, compared with 36% percent of Democrats.

Among independent voters—a key group in most close elections—71% say the economy is going the wrong way. Hispanic voters are even more likely to feel that way, with 78% expressing a negative view.

Stronger dissatisfaction with the economy among nonwhite voters could translate to softer support for Democrats in November if things don’t improve before then.

“They’re sour economically,” said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster whose firm conducted the poll with the firm of Democratic pollster John Anzalone...

  

Disney Admits It Wants to Queer Your Kids

From Rod Dreher, at the American Conservative, "Well, here you go."

BONUS: It's Karol Markowitz, at the New York Post, "I’m quitting Disney after seeing it boast about pushing ‘gender theory’."

Groomer Teachers Are Absolutely Determined to Talk About Their Sexual Fetishes With Your Children

At AoSHQ, "Teachers organized a 'Pride' march inside a publicly funded government grade school -- in Texas. Check out the video. Teachers are waving rainbow flags at elementary school students on their 'Pride' march."

A Generation of American Men Give Up on College: ‘I Just Feel Lost’

This isn't new, though indeed folks don't talk about it on campus, at all (at least at my college, and I surmise others, most others, in fact). 

Props to WSJ for the excellent reporting here. 

ICYMI, Christina Hoff Sommers has written on this stuff, here: The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men.

And from the article:

The number of men enrolled in college this year trails women by record highs, part of a nationwide education gap. Nobody wants to talk about it. https://t.co/RzPzSDIDPd

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) September 8, 2021

Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.

This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.

No reversal is in sight. Women increased their lead over men in college applications for the 2021-22 school year—3,805,978 to 2,815,810—by nearly a percentage point compared with the previous academic year, according to Common Application, a nonprofit that transmits applications to more than 900 schools. Women make up 49% of the college-age population in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau.

“Men are falling behind remarkably fast,” said Thomas Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, which aims to improve educational opportunities for low-income, first-generation and disabled college students.

American colleges, which are embroiled in debates over racial and gender equality, and working on ways to reduce sexual assault and harassment of women on campus, have yet to reach a consensus on what might slow the retreat of men from higher education. Some schools are quietly trying programs to enroll more men, but there is scant campus support for spending resources to boost male attendance and retention.

The gender enrollment disparity among nonprofit colleges is widest at private four-year schools, where the proportion of women during the 2020-21 school year grew to an average of 61%, a record high, Clearinghouse data show. Some of the schools extend offers to a higher percentage of male applicants, trying to get a closer balance of men and women.

“Is there a thumb on the scale for boys? Absolutely,” said Jennifer Delahunty, a college enrollment consultant who previously led the admissions offices at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore. “The question is, is that right or wrong?”

Ms. Delahunty said this kind of tacit affirmative action for boys has become “higher education’s dirty little secret,” practiced but not publicly acknowledged by many private universities where the gender balance has gone off-kilter.

“It’s unfortunate that we’re not giving this issue air and sun so that we can start to address it,” she said.

At Baylor University, where the undergraduate student body is 60% female, the admission rate for men last year was 7 percentage points higher than for women. Every student has to meet Baylor’s admission standards to earn admission, said Jessica King Gereghty, the school’s assistant vice president of enrollment strategy and innovation. Classes, however, are shaped to balance several variables, including gender, she said.

Ms. Gereghty said she found that girls more closely attended to their college applications than boys, for instance making sure transcripts are delivered. Baylor created a “males and moms communication campaign” a few years ago to keep high-school boys on track, she said.

Among the messages to mothers in the campaign, Ms. Gereghty said: “ ‘At the dinner table tonight, mom, we need you to talk about getting your high school transcripts in.’ ”

Race and gender can’t be considered in admission decisions at California’s public universities. The proportion of male undergraduates at UCLA fell to 41% in the fall semester of 2020 from 45% in fall 2013. Over the same period, undergraduate enrollment expanded by nearly 3,000 students. Of those spots, nine out of 10 went to women.

“We do not see male applicants being less competitive than female applicants,” UCLA Vice Provost Youlonda Copeland-Morgan said, but fewer men apply.

The college gender gap cuts across race, geography and economic background. For the most part, white men—once the predominant group on American campuses—no longer hold a statistical edge in enrollment rates, said Mr. Mortenson, of the Pell Institute. Enrollment rates for poor and working-class white men are lower than those of young Black, Latino and Asian men from the same economic backgrounds, according to an analysis of census data by the Pell Institute for the Journal.

No college wants to tackle the issue under the glare of gender politics, said Ms. Delahunty, the enrollment consultant. The conventional view on campuses, she said, is that “men make more money, men hold higher positions, why should we give them a little shove from high school to college?”

Yet the stakes are too high to ignore, she said. “If you care about our society, one, and, two, if you care about women, you have to care about the boys, too. If you have equally educated numbers of men and women that just makes a better society, and it makes it better for women.”

The pandemic accelerated the trend. Nearly 700,000 fewer students were enrolled in colleges in spring 2021 compared with spring 2019, a Journal analysis found, with 78% fewer men.

The decline in male enrollment during the 2020-21 academic year was highest at two-year community colleges. Family finances are believed to be one cause. Millions of women left jobs to stay home with children when schools closed in the pandemic. Many turned to their sons for help, and some young men quit school to work, said Colleen Coffey, executive director of the College Planning Collaborative at Framingham State University in Massachusetts, a program to keep students in school.

“The guys felt they needed to step in quickly,” Ms. Coffey said.

It isn’t clear how many will return to school after the pandemic...

I don't trust this Framingham study. 

I'm at community college. I've been teaching online since March 17th last year. I suspect just as many women have been working outside the home to support their families as have men.

Who know, though? I'd have to see the data.

Either way, boys and young men are indeed getting screwed. Gender identity theory, and whatever other brain dead ideological abominations, have left men high and dry. 

Still more.

The Equality Act Makes Women Unequal

It's Inez Feltscher Stepman, who's a very classy babe, at WSJ, "H.R. 5 Erases ‘Sex’ as a Legal Category, with Dire Consequences":

All people are created equal, but Congress is considering a bill that would make some people more equal than others.

H.R. 5, styled the Equality Act, would redefine “sex” under federal civil-rights laws to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” overriding basic biology along with millennia of tradition.

This isn’t only a question of semantics. Nor is it merely an attempt to prohibit employment discrimination against sexual minorities. A 2020 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court already does that.

The Equality Act would go much further by making it illegal to distinguish “identity” from biology and thereby prioritize transgender people over women. By erasing sex as a distinct legal category, the measure threatens to open up female-only spaces and opportunities designed to increase representation for girls to biological men, which can endanger the safety of women and girls.

The Equality Act would threaten the existence of women’s prisons, public-school girls’ locker rooms, and women’s and girls’ sports teams. It would limit freedom of speech, freedom of association, accurate data collection, and scientific inquiry. It would threaten the rights of physicians who doubt the wisdom of performing life-changing, reproduction-limiting procedures, and parents who seek to protect their minor children from such treatment...

The thing is, of course, none of this is a surprise. China Joe's minions, and his far-left Democrat congressional enablers, don't care about the rights of women. They care about power, and they care about ramming unpopular policies down the throats of Americans, all the while pushing massive distractions, like the bogus threat of "white supremacist domestic terrorism," which in turn, justifies the continued deployment of thousands of National Guard troops in D.C., hunkered down behind barricades and barbed wire.

It's really sickening, in fact. But if it's not this piece of legislation, it'll be one of the literally dozens of "executive orders" that will come back to bite Biden in the butt. The border crisis, to take yet another example, just can't be swept away now as "all Trump's fault." The far-left radicals in power, again, have no clue about how devastating their policies are, and they frankly do not care.

The 2022 midterms will be a real reckoning, I'd put money on it. Former President Trump is expected to speak at CPAC this weekend and it's gonna be hella lit. The left is doing everything they can to damage Trump, and that's to say nothing of the 74 million patriots who voted for him, including the larger (and getting larger) number of ethnic minorities (especially in Florida and Texas) who pulled the lever for the red ticket.

I'm not enjoying politics much right now, and I teach this stuff for a living. But it's gonna be pure schadenfreude when the voters' hammer comes down on the heads of idiot Dems in less than two years from now. 

There's more from the beautiful Ms. Stepman, at the link.

'Andrew Sullivan detects anti-gay bigotry: "So you agree not wanting to have sex with someone because they have a vagina is a form of bigotry, right?...'

 At Althouse:

Does genitalia matter? I can see thinking that a person's inner being matters far more than what's on the outside, and that "gender identification" is part of what's on the inside, but when it comes to sexual attraction, we're not required to go solely by what's on the inside, and indeed, if only the inside — the mind — counts, why are we having sexual intercourse at all? How can you say genitalia is irrelevant when what you're talking about is something you do with your genitalia?

More.