A nuance too many
Well of course they do.
Their “conceptions” of “gender” are “more nuanced” because that’s what’s available to them. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right. That question still has to be decided on the merits.
Sometimes teenagers are indeed in the vanguard in a good way: civil rights activists in the 1960s for example. Even then, though, there were plenty of teenagers on the other side, and besides that, not every vanguard is On the Right Side of History.
By “gender” Jack Turban means sex as well as gender. By “nuanced” he doesn’t mean “people can wear whatever they like” but “men are women if they say they are.” Some things shouldn’t be “nuanced” in that way. What “woman” means shouldn’t be “nuanced” in that way.
It would matter less if Jack Turban were not chief fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine.
He seems to have ublocked me!
I’d better tweet at him until he blocks me again.
Now why would he unblock you and not me? You’re every bit as obnoxious as I am.
Well quite.
There are elite-educated political scientists who advocate for endless wars and who never seem to notice how everything they advocate turns into a disaster.
There are PhD economists who inflexibly push neo-liberalism and never seem fazed at how none of their golden promises ever come true. They never acknowledge that the opposite of what they forecast is what tends to happen.
And now we have this Stanford University expert on child psychiatry pronouncing confidently that “gender” is a real, existing thing that accurately reflects people’s inner selves. If pressed I’m certain he couldn’t even define his terms. He won’t mention the transwomen with massive boob implants dressing like 1970’s streetwalkers. He won’t mention the several sexual predators found (or simply posting videos of their adventures) in women’s changerooms. He won’t mention the overwhelming use of gender stereotypes by people supposedly expressing their true selves.
Just another expert whose opinion isn’t worth a whole helluva lot.
When I was on Twitter he blocked and unblocked me and then reblocked me. I think he’s got a random unblocker bot.
I have experience as an adolescent, a parent of adolescents, and an observer of adolescents and I am quite certain that they really don’t have much clarity on the nuances and subtleties of either sex or gender. They get messages that conflict and who can make sense of that if their bodies are developing and responding to changing levels of sex hormones, while their peers are also doing the same thing, all in an environment of various degrees of sexism and homophobia? Bring into the mix, being raised by parents who don’t have a clear picture of sex and gender themselves so they don’t really know where they get good information so they turn to: the internet.
And, as I recall, even before the internet, my peers were getting info that they shared but much more slowly, by word of mouth, rather than through broadband.
I think Dr. Turban is full of nonsense. Kids have no idea what’s going on. That they don’t let this stop them from proclaiming certaintude (believe the children!) is not evidence that they are smarter than us.
This goes right along with the trend in teaching to assume that the youth know the best way to teach them and test them. My experience is that they are as clueless as I was when I started college, and that is plenty clueless. In fact, close to completely clueless.
That’s a trend? How…dumb.
That is definitely a trend. Our faculty is being pushed that direction and I have resisted. Since I plan to retire in 2 years, I may be able to hold out, but now that we have so much material online, even in our face-to-face courses, my associate dean has said he plans to check on our courses for adherence to “Quality Matters” (which is what they call this stupid idea). So far our entire science faculty is resisting; I suspect it won’t be long until resistance is futile.
You know…if they give it just a little more thought they’ll realize these genius students will very soon turn into the dim-witted adults the rest of us are, so really is it worth the trouble? Is teaching even useful?
iknklast #8
So, this is what I wonder — when the Glorious Youth of academia and social work have replaced all the Fuddy Duddy Olds in a few years – who will they blame when things keep getting worse for gender believers or not getting better?
Will the boogeyman White Supremacist Cis Male still be hiding under every bed? Will it all be the blame of terf Karens who hold nowhere near the power in society as the men they claim we are oppressing? As the Glorious Young get most of the power and then still can’t convince Jane/Joe Working Class that men are women, what then?
When all the “treatments” given to kids to trans them starts to destroy their bodies, who will be to blame?
Baby Boomers, of course. We are single-handedly responsible for every bad thing that has happened, even if we weren’t alive yet. Dinosaurs? Our fault they went extinct. We are going to be single-handedly responsible for every bad thing that happens after we are all dust. We are a very powerful generation.
But don’t worry about the young wokesters. They’ll solve it all with memes.