Jordan Peterson: Gender Pronouns and Free Speech War

bjorn said:

[quote author= Tristan]

https://youtu.be/VXVZfLEcPdM

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luc said:

I recommend watching this (relatively short) new video by Peterson, where he speaks about the current law that sets up 'human rights tribunals' and also reads an assessment by a lawyer about their powers. Very scary. You can start at 7:00 if you don't have much time:

https://youtu.be/mbAKQrClN8A


I find this very interesting - wouldn't many people on the left, including those who are now protesting 'against the system' and so on, embrace such tribunals? Kind of - 'now, we finally can make sure our human rights are respected!'

If you watch the video, it's clear that these tribunals are a psychopath's dream come true - finally, they can declare what they are and force people to accept them. They don't need to bother with evidence but can just declare 'they feel hurt' to convict people. They can send people to 're-education' and basically do whatever they want. The total Orwellian nightmare.

Now I was thinking - Hillary probably would have gone in that direction as well if she had won, and the fact that many Trump supporters would have freaked out would have helped to set-up and spread such tribunals and similar concepts. You know, all this right-wing violence and hate-speech must be punished! And the left cheers...

With Trump's victory, such plans aren't so straight-forward anymore, but this won't stop them from trying I guess.

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Transport for London has revealed plans to introduce gender neutral announcements on its network of trains and buses after a transgender woman was mocked by staff.

The proposal comes after Aimee Challenor was told in November that she “didn’t sound like a Miss”, during a call to TfL’s Oyster helpline.

Representing the 19-year-old, Green Party GLA member Siân Berry challenged London Mayor Sadiq Khan to apologise for the incident and review TfL’s trans awareness policies.

In his response, Mr Khan apologised unreservedly for the “inappropriate remark” and pledged to do more to foster equality, including potentially removing “ladies and gentlemen” from announcements across London’s transport network.

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“I just said but I am, I am Aimee Challenor, and they replied ‘but you don’t sound like a miss’. I was just in shock, I didn’t really know how to respond,” she told The Independent.

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She said the removal of “ladies and gentlemen” would be well-received by anyone who found the announcements out of date.

“There are many people out there with some degree of gender variance and, with our huge population, a large number of Londoners will be trans and non binary,” she told The Independent.

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here was a time not so long ago when the people shouting "-flick- you bitch" at a gender-fluid gay filmmaker would have been bigoted right-wing conservatives. But because we currently live in the year 2016, the people who heckled Kimberly Peirce—director of Boys Don't Cry, a groundbreaking film about a transgender man—during her recent appearance at Reed College were far-left students.

The students hurled a litany of insults at Peirce, putting up posters that read "-flick- your transphobia" and "you don't -flicking-g get it" among other things. Worse, when Peirce ascended to her podium, students had placed a sign there. It read "-flick- this cis white bitch." That Peirce is actually gender-fluid is quite beside the point.

The students' unbelievable rudeness crossed the line into a kind of censorship when Peirce tried to speak: the students simply shouted over her. Eventually they let her talk, but some students continued to yell things like "-flick- your respectability politics" and "-flick- you scared bitch."

You're probably wondering why the social justice left hates Peirce so much. Bear with me. She had come to campus to do a Q and A following the screening of her 1999 film, Boys Don't Cry. The film is an adaptation of the true story of Brandon Teena, who was born a woman but chose to identify and present as a man, and was murdered because of it. It's a heartbreaking love story that undoubtedly introduced countless Americans to the reality of anti-trans violence.

You're probably still wondering why the social justice left hates Peirce so much. Well, the film was ahead of its time in 1999, but in 2016 it's problematic. That's because the main character, Brandon, was played by Hilary Swank, a non-trans person. Students were also incensed at the idea of Peirce having profited from violence against trans people, which isn't a remotely accurate way to characterize things, but there it is.

Jack Halberstam, a University of Southern California professor who writes about queer issues and is friendly with Peirce, blogged about the uproar for Bully Bloggers, publishing pictures of the posters. Halberstam also made note of the students' criticisms of the film, but suggested that at the time Boys Don't Cry was released, trans people were often portrayed as "monsters, killers, sociopaths, or isolated misfits." It was revolutionary for audiences to see a trans person who was otherwise a typical twenty-something. Halberstam also pointed out that it would have been much harder to cast a trans person to play Brandon in 1999 than it is today.

But whether the criticisms of Peirce are legitimate is a separate matter. Her movie is important, and was worth screening on campus.

A spokesperson for Reed College confirmed the posters and the heckling, which he attributed to a handful of students.

"It has sparked a lot of debate on campus," the spokesperson told Reason.

Dean of Students Nigel Nicholson, to his credit, penned a strongly-worded statement in the campus paper:

The actions that I saw were not animated by the spirit of inquiry or the desire to learn that usually animates Reed audiences. The students had already decided what they thought, and came to the Question-and-Answer session to make their judgments known, not to listen and engage. Some brought posters bearing judgments and accusations. Others asked questions, that, while grammatically questions (that is, they ended with question marks), were not animated by a genuine desire to explore a question, but rather sought to indict the speaker. It felt like a courtroom, not a college.

Some students sought to dominate the space, and to take control of the space away from the speaker.

I was deeply embarrassed and ashamed of our conduct, and I hope that as a community we can reflect on what happened and make a determination not to repeat it.

Would anyone deny that the students' actions amounted to harassment, at least under the current Title IX understanding of the term? Was this not, at the very least, a bias incident? For a group of students who were ostensibly concerned about hatred directed at trans people, their own language was remarkably hateful.

Reed College, by the way charges, $50,000 a year for tuition. The opportunity to scream insults at a queer film director whose perspective is mildly different from today's leftist students is certainly an expensive privilege.

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Timótheos said:

Just saw this on twitter. The madness continues...

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Transexuals want you to use the phrase “birthing individuals” instead of “pregnant women” because, according to them, the latter promotes “trans hatred.”

LGBT activists have already convinced the Midwives Alliance of North America to stop referring to their clients as “women” and “mothers” and instead call them “pregnant people” and “birthing individuals” so transexuals won’t get offended.


“Pregnant individuals are the only direct care providers for themselves and their unborn babies, thus the most important determinant of a healthy pregnancy is the pregnant person,” MANA states on its web site. “The biological wisdom to give birth is innate, it has been held throughout time, and is experienced across cultures by all pregnant people.”


Numerous midwives protested this language change, calling it an attack on women in an open letter they wrote to MANA.


“By embracing the idea that any human other than those in a class called women carry offspring to term, give birth to them and nurse them, we are prioritizing gender identity over biological reality,” the open letter stated. “We are also contributing to the cultural erasure of women’s wisdom that the physiological power encoded in our female bodies is what creates, nourishes, and births live offspring and transmits culture.”


“Maintaining this understanding of women’s unique power to give birth does not preclude practitioners from taking into account how individuals in their care prefer to be identified.”


In response, one transexual activist called the open letter “highly offensive” to transexuals because it “denies” their gender and “implies the care provider decides the identity of the client.”


But in reality, the ability to give birth is based on the biological sex of the person, not the person’s “gender identity.” {Reality can be a very invalidating place to those determined to detach themselves from it.}



In a similar incident, Democratic representatives introduced a bill this past summer that would ban the words “husband” and “wife” from being used in federal law because they are “gendered terms” and “discriminate” against gay people.


The bill, introduced by Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.), would introduce new “gender-neutral” terms such as “spouse” or “married couple.”

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5.12
Study Limitations

There are some limitations in the study design and implementation that prevent the results from having maximum impact. First of all, due to the fact that the strategy for finding participants was a mediated snowball effect that was started by individuals all residing in Canada, a large majority of the participants are from Canada or the nearby U.S., causing a strong national (or perhaps even regional) focus. The fact that most of the surveys were completed by English monolinguals is not ideal. Though all of the results are useful, both in terms of insights into neutral language in each language and of comparing its use, the imbalanced respondent pool represents a limitation in that we are not able to generalize the experiences of bilingual French, German, and Swedish speakers in the way that we can for English monolinguals...

The "snowball effect" might also conclude that a large inherent bias drove the findings, so more than a "limitation."

On another note, and it was bound to happen (and this is not new), is a rewrite of a gender neutral bible - seriously:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1367570/New-Bible-translation-causes-controversy-addition-women-gender-neutral-language.html

I will make you a fisher of PEOPLE': New gender-neutral Bible translation angers conservatives

[...]

In older prints Mark 1:17 reads: 'And Jesus said to them, "Follow Me, and I will make you become fishers of men."'

In the new version the verse reads: '"Come follow me," Jesus said. "And I will send you out to fish for people."'

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Oxajil said:

Meanwhile in London: 'Sadiq Khan looks to scrap ‘ladies and gentlemen’ in favour of gender neutral announcements on London trains and buses':

Transport for London has revealed plans to introduce gender neutral announcements on its network of trains and buses after a transgender woman was mocked by staff.

The proposal comes after Aimee Challenor was told in November that she “didn’t sound like a Miss”, during a call to TfL’s Oyster helpline.

Representing the 19-year-old, Green Party GLA member Siân Berry challenged London Mayor Sadiq Khan to apologise for the incident and review TfL’s trans awareness policies.

In his response, Mr Khan apologised unreservedly for the “inappropriate remark” and pledged to do more to foster equality, including potentially removing “ladies and gentlemen” from announcements across London’s transport network.

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“I just said but I am, I am Aimee Challenor, and they replied ‘but you don’t sound like a miss’. I was just in shock, I didn’t really know how to respond,” she told The Independent.

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I think that at least Challenor should've been aware that her voice might not sound like a miss, especially if she still has a male voice. Their reply therefore might not be that strange. To scrap 'ladies and gentlemen' for this small instance is perhaps over the top... and if this goes through, what will be changed next?

She said the removal of “ladies and gentlemen” would be well-received by anyone who found the announcements out of date.

“There are many people out there with some degree of gender variance and, with our huge population, a large number of Londoners will be trans and non binary,” she told The Independent.

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Out of date? The majority of people, and no doubt Londoners, are not 'genderqueer'. Fwiw.

Source

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Timótheos said:

Just saw this on twitter. The madness continues...

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LGBT rights and pro-pit-bull advocacy are niche passions for the Ontario NDP's Cheri DiNovo. The latter cause was my introduction to the MPP. Today's column is about the former, specifically the recently passed Bill 28, DiNovo's "All Families are Equal Act."

Motivation for the bill was the aim of bringing legislative compliance to a 2006 judicial ruling, in the case of MDR v. Ontario, to stop requiring same-sex couples to adopt their own children if they used surrogates or reproductive technologies. That, Bill 28 does. It also allows parenting agreements among as many as four people.

But DiNovo went further still. In deference to transgender activists' opposition to binary gender categories, her bill replaces most uses of the words "mother" and "father" in Ontario law, substituting for them "birth parent" and "parent." According to DiNovo, "the right of people to be called neither mother nor father" is "equally important" to the right to be called mother or father.

Bill 28 passed not only without opposition from the province's Progressive Conservative party, but with its leader, Patrick Brown, demanding his MPPs skip the vote if they couldn't support it. This may explain why the newly elected MPP, 19-year-old Sam Oosterhoff, a social conservative, delayed his swearing-in until after the Nov 29 vote. Oosterhoff has publicly stated Bill 28 is "a horrible piece of legislation," and, on Facebook, that it is "poorly written" and "disrespectful to mothers and fathers."

Because Oosterhoff is a socially conservative Christian, accusations of homophobia rained down on him. But there are like-minded others, such as Toronto activist Queenie Yu, who has voiced the hostility to Bill 28 from within parts of the Chinese community. "Chinese immigrants didn't expect the Wynne government would outdo the communists and get rid of mothers entirely," Yu said. She and Oosterhoff were hardly the only opponents of this bill.

The hearings on the bill, for example, produced scarifying criticism from Joe Clark, a designer of digital technologies for the disabled and a writer. Clark described himself to me in a telephone interview as the "most unpopular gay man in Toronto" (among other maverick acts that have stigmatized him and even led to threats against him, Clark registered a complaint to Pride Toronto against Black Lives Matter for their disruptive actions in last summer's parade). He's a controversial polemicist and what he has to say makes Oosterhoff's comments look insipid by comparison.

Clark calls Bill 28 "the Handmaid's Tale Act," referencing Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel in which women are coerced into bearing children for infertile theocratic elites. That's because it "literally rewrites motherhood and fatherhood," he says. "In fact, it redefines motherhood out of existence." Considering the mandate for the bill as it was originally circumscribed by the MDR ruling, Clark says that "in a classic example of scope creep ... this bill attempts to rewrite human biology."

Mocking the transgender argument that people are whatever gender they feel they are — male, female, something in between, or none of the above — Clark refuses to concede longstanding facts of life: "Men don't have vaginas or female anatomy ... and women don't have penises," he says. "There are two sexes — two, not an unknown number." Clark also ridicules a change that Bill 28 will make to Ontario's Vital Statistics Act. Where it now reads "'birth means the complete expulsion or extraction from its mother of a fetus..." DiNovo is changing to "the complete expulsion or extraction from a person of a fetus..." It is, Clark says, as though a mother were, like Atwood's handmaids, "generic, bodiless, (and) sexless."

Clark played hardball with the committee, but he had a point when he lectured the MPPs that they had never been elected or given a mandate to socially re-engineer the province. He testified: "you had one job: clearing up parental rights for gay and lesbian couples. Yet you arrogated the right to ... deny biological sex." Speaking to Di Novo, he reminded her, "Human biology did not change because you got elected to the Legislature, Ms. DiNovo..."

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The Transgender Movement Targets Autistic Children
ELISE EHRHARD

Last May, Dr. Kathleen Levinstein, a professor of social work at the University of Michigan, wrote a heartbreaking piece about her autistic daughter, a teenaged girl who became convinced that she was really a man trapped inside a woman’s body. With encouragement from transgender activists at the local organization of PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), the vulnerable young woman took sex-altering hormones and cut off her breasts. Dr. Levinstein now grieves the mutilation of her daughter’s body and the increased psychological confusion her daughter is experiencing as a result of the hormones.

She states, “She has been taken advantage of. Healthy organs were amputated…. It is a crime not just against women, but particularly against disabled women. So many of these young women who are ‘transitioning’ are also autistic.”

Some contemporary studies have made a connection between gender “dysphoria” and autism. A recent article in The Atlantic uses these studies to push the idea that “transitioning” is a healthy, even necessary, option for those on the spectrum who want it. The author asserts that any effort to discourage such “medical care” to those with special needs is callous. In this way, The Atlantic interweaves natural sympathy for the growing autism awareness movement with transgender ideology.

The Atlantic has it backwards. To help and protect individuals on the spectrum, there needs to be greater awareness of transgenderism’s lies and why those on the spectrum could be susceptible to its manipulation. Encouraging sex-change or an alternate gender identity is destructive to individuals with autism or Asperger’s (previously in a separate diagnostic category), only furthering their private pain.

Why would those who are neurobiologically different also come to see themselves as a different biological sex with the rising influence of the transgender movement? Neurologically atypical individuals spend much of their childhood and adolescence quietly struggling with how others misunderstand them and how they understand themselves. It is critical to understand this struggle in order to push back against the encroachment of transgender ideology into the gifted and special needs community.

With boys, the struggle may be outwardly noticeable. With young girls, the struggle is often more hidden (and undiagnosed). I can offer some insight into this struggle through my own childhood experience as an undiagnosed girl with Asperger’s.

As a child, I flapped my hands and engaged in what it called “stimming.” My particular type of stimming involved opening my mouth wide in a self-stimulatory manner. My jaw dropped and my hands shook repetitively while my voice sounded as if it was out-of-breath (I wasn’t struggling for breath at all). Most clinicians in the 1970s and 1980s did not even know what “stimming” was. Autism was not fully on the cultural radar yet and the groundbreaking writings of Hans Asperger had only been recently translated from the original German. I loved stimming and still do. It felt relaxing: a kind of natural, harmless high in the brain that others around me would never know and could not attain. Nonetheless, I learned at a young age to only stimmy in private so as to avoid ridicule.

From a young age, I always knew I was different in some way. Females with Asperger’s often go unrecognized because young girls are better able to “fake it until they make it” in the neurotypical world. They are better at it up to a point. That point is usually adolescence. During adolescence, the stresses of holding all the quirks and idiosyncrasies in check can be too much to bear in the face of increased social expectations.

As a result, Asperger’s girls growing up often prefer the company of boys and generally find it far easier to relate with males. As psychiatrist Martin L. Kutscher writes in The Syndrome Mix, “Many women who have Asperger’s syndrome have described to psychologists and in autobiographies how they sometimes think they have a male rather than a female brain, having a greater understanding and appreciation of the interests, thinking, and humor of boys during their early school years.” Sound familiar? This aspect of their cerebral wiring—the conflict between what they feel, how they perceive the world and how the world perceives them—existed long before the neo-Gnosticism of transgender ideology came into vogue.

Their thinking is often highly literal. Their mothers struggle to understand them and they find it easier to relate to their fathers.

Due to their unusual traits, they are also prime targets for bullying by “mean girls” during adolescence, further alienating them. I can attest to that from personal experience having ended up with a concussion and blood streaming down my face in middle school. These girls are not “boys trapped in a girl’s body.” These are girls who think differently and are often misunderstood by the other young girls around them. They don’t need to be encouraged to become males. Others need to be encouraged to better understand them as unique young women.

Boys on the spectrum face other sets of struggles. Sensory-seeking little boys may like to touch the ruffles, tutus or lace on girls’ clothes for comfort. They often have delayed gross motor skills, making it difficult for them to engage in the contact sports through which boys generally bond. Boys who toe-walk due to problems with their vestibular system may be mocked for “walking like a girl” or “acting girly.” Boys on the spectrum are routinely bullied or rejected by other boys, leading them to question their very identity as boys.

You could explain to parents and teachers that boys touching girls’ clothes need greater sensory input. You could encourage parents to help their children improve gross motor skills through physical therapy or individualized sports such as gymnastics or martial arts. You could have an occupational therapist work with them on their vestibular system. You could help them develop the friendships with other boys that they desperately crave, such as by finding parents or groups who have children with shared interests or needs.

Or you could play into false and shallow stereotypes of the sexes and tell parents that their child is really a “girl trapped in a boy’s body.” Sadly, you can see this is already happening just by perusing internet forums for moms of children with Asperger’s. Some mothers of Aspies now refer to their sons as “male-assigned” rather than boys.

These parents do not need to be told to accept that their child is really a “male trapped in a woman’s body” or “a woman trapped in a man’s body.” They need to be further educated on special needs and taught ways to relate to their quirky and gifted son or daughter with Asperger’s.

A new campaign has sprung up on social media with the hashtag #AutisticTransPride. A movement telling young people on the spectrum that the identity issues they will struggle with as they grow-up can be solved through sex change or “gender questioning” is cruel. Surface changes in clothes and pronouns will solve nothing and only exacerbate their suffering. What they need is not biological alteration, but greater acceptance and understanding of their neurobiological differences.

For a pseudo-religious movement to target this vulnerable population of youths for their own ideological ends is nothing less than child abuse. The latest Atlantic piece is just another shot across the bow. If we do not remain vigilant in speaking the truth, young people with special needs will just be the latest victims in the left-wing cultural assault against human biology.

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