No inspiration for you
Oh did they indeed.
No inspirational women allowed.
Oxfam has bowed to the transgender lobby by withdrawing a children’s bingo game celebrating ‘inspirational women’ from sale in its stores and online.
Inspirational men are no problem, of course, but women…ick.
The game, which sold for £14.99, uses pictures of 48 famous women rather than numbers on cards that are matched with tokens showing the same female figures, including Jane Austen, US civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, climate-change activist Greta Thunberg and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai.
And JK Rowling. Enough said.
But in an email last week, the charity told staff: ‘We have taken the decision to withdraw the product Wonder Women Bingo as it has been brought to our attention that it is not in line with Oxfam’s values.’
So Oxfam’s values include disappearing and stifling inspirational women? Why’s that?
Oxfam, which campaigns to end poverty and improve women’s rights, told The Mail on Sunday last night it had cleared the game from its shelves after transgender staff complained about it.
It added: ‘We took the decision to remove the game from sale following concerns raised by trans and non-binary colleagues who told us it didn’t live up to our commitment to respect people of all genders.’
Well no, not all “genders.” They certainly have zero respect for women in light of this move.
Women criticised the decision, including Labour MP Rosie Duffield MP, who decided not to attend her party conference last month after receiving threats from trans activists for insisting that ‘only women have a cervix’.
‘I am disappointed Oxfam considers taking a political view of gender identity politics more important than raising as much money as possible for those most in need,’ she said. ‘The track record of some charities with regards to women’s rights has been far from good, and discriminating against some women due to their beliefs will do nothing to repair that.’
Nor will removing a game intended to teach children about women who get shit done.
Julie Bindel suggested the game may have been ditched because it includes Rowling and fellow author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who have challenged the transgender belief that there is no difference between trans and biological women.
In short there’s a filter in place now for everything to do with women, that filters out all women who question the stupid reality-denying new dogma that men are women if they say they are, while leaving men to carry on as normal, no matter what they think and say about trans dogma. Men are to be unmolested, women are to be punished and threatened and erased from public life. That’s fair, right?
Oh, come on. That’s almost all genders..
Respect for men? Check.
Respect for enbies? Check.
Respect for neutrois people? Check.
Respect for agender people? Check.
Respect for bigender people? Check.
Respect for polygender people? Check.
Respect for women? No, but why do women need to make everything about themselves? 99% of genders are respected.
Remember when just a few days ago Margaret Atwood was chastised, ridiculed and insulted for daring to share an article on how we can’t say “woman” anymore? Good times!
A guy came to our door last night soliciting for a charity (not Oxfam), and, in explaining what they do, he said “pregnant women” and immediately corrected himself saying “pregnant people”. I corrected him back, saying “Pregnant women. Only women get pregnant.” He nodded and continued on with his pitch. This all happened in German. It’s here, too.
Jeeeeeeeeeez.
gary has the right of it, but his short comment does not adequately convey the gravity of the situation, or the potential stakes on offer.
The American gender and race brain worms are here in Germany; that is not particularly surprising, as Germany is still under a de-facto occupation by the United States. They are technically allies, but this alliance was pretty much a fig leaf and is a relic of the Cold War, a relic which American policymakers find less and less relevant with each passing election cycle. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, this alliance-which-is-definitely-not-an-occupation-hey-look-we-signed-a-treaty-and-everything largely fell off the list of priorities of the American foreign policy apparatus, but its effects have lingered in Germany, and in many ways it is still going on autopilot.
In particular, Germany is currently undergoing an energetic vocabulary replacement and cultural colonisation, driven organically by German youth themselves and almost entirely beneath the notice or concern of any Americans outside of the neo-beatniks in Berlin, who are hardly instruments or agents of any sort of official policy.
Languages develop continuously, and cultural exchange brings novel concepts and novel vocabulary into every major language; this is an unremarkable process, repeated countless times in recorded history. English itself is famous for coming across a new thing or a concept, asking a local about what it’s called, and just taking that word (or an anglicised version of the word) and calling it English. That’s one reason why the spelling bee winning words are now almost always sourced directly from Southeast Asia or the Amazon or something.
Linguistic exchange of this unremarkable sort is happening to German as well, where novel concepts or technologies carry their English names into German. German even takes English words and deploys them for its own purposes in ways English speakers would not recognise; Handy and Oldtimer and Public Viewing, among many other examples, are thoroughly German nouns which happen to have been appropriated from English (in this case for mobile phone, classic car, and a large public gathering to witness a sports or cultural broadcast on a large screen, respectively). Germans call this phenomenon — carrying over English names for new technologies and appropriating English vocabulary for entirely unrelated German concepts — “Denglish”, or perhaps “Denglisch”, though I believe the former more anglicised spelling is an appropriate metonym.
But Denglish has recently begun a much more fundamental transformation of the German language, with a concomitant shift in German cultural outlooks and attitudes. Young Germans are replacing their core vocabulary word by word. For example, words such as Story, Song, Family, Community, ready, easy, and happy have replaced their indigenous German equivalents (respectively Geschichte, Lied, Familie, Gemeinschaft, bereit, locker/einfach, glücklich) in regular usage for many younger Germans, and are being employed with gathering frequency by adults who wish to retain some manner of cultural relevance.
Concomitantly, German young people are bringing over American “woke” racial and gender concepts, sometimes translating and German-ifying the terms, and often not; most of the acronyms in particular are simply brought over intact. A particularly egregious and ill-fitting example of this is “POC” and the related — and relatively novel — “BIPOC”, which for those blessedly less obsessed than I am with these issues stands for “Black, Indigenous, People of Colour”. Among other problems with that last term, the conception of who counts as an “indigenous” German or general European is a very different question than for the Americas or anglophone Oceania, verging on nonsensical in the context in which it is employed by the young SJW set here.
This sort of phenomenon, of linguistic and cultural subsumation up to core vocabulary and value replacement, usually only happens when one linguistic community becomes dominated and subjugated by another linguistic community. This of course happened to Germany in the middle of the last century, and for very good reason, after the Germans began and then deservedly lost what was essentially a civil war for the meaning and future of Western civilisation. And though a third of what was left of Germany was dominated by the Russians for a couple of generations, there is essentially no Russian influence left on German society a generation after West Germany annexed East Germany, bringing it under the aforementioned lingering American hegemony as well.
One of the actually translated terms, more relevant to the particular madness at hand, is “gebärender Elternteil”, which translates to “birthing parent”. It is not very common, and used at least as often by critics as by proponents of the new progressive gender ideology, but it is not inconceivable that it will become dominant among the proponents and then mandatory for the rest of society in the not too distant future.
This phenomenon is also dovetailing with, and adding fuel to, an intrinsically German cultural and linguistic revolution over the usage of grammatical gender as it applies to people.
German, like most non-English European languages, has grammatical genders for its nouns. These “genders” have nothing in principle to do with the human sexes, though of course humans are pattern-matching animals and so most gendered languages categorise male and female people into different linguistic genders, and either as cause or effect, most such languages (including German) name these two cases “masculine” and “feminine”. German has these two genders, as well as a third which it calls “neuter”.
There is an important argument emerging in German culture about the effect of these sex-coincident grammatical genders on society, as well as deeper questions of sexism. For example, German job titles and social roles are usually expressed in a (gramatically) gendered manner corresponding to the person fulfilling the role. But for certain examples there is only one word for both men and women of a particular role; in other examples there is a distinction in the singular, but there is only one plural, which often coincides with the masculine form. That last is a general pattern in German, where many (though far from all) masculine nouns use the same word in the singular and plural, because plural nouns are treated distinctly in such a way that there is no ambiguity between a singular masculine noun and its plural.
This cultural argument is thus, in part, about reforming the language to make every single such case fully representative of males and females — and, lately, of “diverse” people, which is the probably-no-longer-PC German way of expressing trans- and non-binary-identified individuals. Whereas in previous times this reform would have simply increased German vocabulary by giving every referential role masculine and feminine forms for singular and plural cases, thanks to the new gender ideology on the rise here, the reforms on offer involve making a sweeping innovation to the structure German language (namely, introducing neuter or even individuated forms for nouns referencing people).
That represents a more burdensome and awkward reform than English pronoun individuation, which itself is burdensome and awkward enough, despite what so many “allies” insist whenever the subject of pronouns comes up. And in any case, this reform would make the German language more rather than less tightly bound to notions of sex and gender in people, and consequently make these notions more paramount to every German. Both of these obvious facts are hotly contested by activists in the same self-deluded manner as English-speaking TRAs insist their ideology entails the liberation of individuals from the tyranny of gender rather than their further oppression under its reification.
The “gendering” argument currently building in German society goes deeper, to be sure, and it is not entirely misbegotten; there is empirical evidence that the patterns German children observe in the way they use language does have some effect on how they see themselves, and traditional German attitudes toward gender roles are more…fraught…than those of the English-speaking world (though they are infinitely more progressive than you will find in most of the rest of the world, to be sure). Therefore it is not completely ridiculous to think that some kind of reform could have a marginal benefit, though in this German activists tend to be as provincial as Americans, in that they often overlook how sexist cultures can be even when their language has no grammatical gender at all.
Nevertheless, the American ideologies colonising Germany on the back of so many decades of American political and cultural hegemony threaten the cultural foundations of German society as, well, German. With the organic bottom-up vocabulary replacement and the imposed top-down grammatical changes underway, it is conceivable that there will one day be German authors still alive when their books might be as challenging and foreign and archaic for German adolescents to read as Shakespeare is to American adolescents today. The pace of German linguistic change is not too far from that trajectory already.
Americans are right to be worried about their own institutions under the pressure of this new religious movement they have nurtured and are now releasing upon the rest of the Western world. I am quite worried about German institutions, which were demolished and then rebuilt in the image of Westminster under the eye of Washington. That eye is roving elsewhere, now, even as the effects of its gaze take a life of their own here.
Germany as a nation-state is quite young, but as a culture it has a long history, and it has fought more than one brutal war — civil and otherwise — at the cost of millions of people’s lives over the legitimacy of obvious delusions. Eight million people were sacrificed upon the alter of the Reformation and the resultant Thirty Years’ War, and that was back when you had to stab or starve or plague people to death. Eight million is far from the highest body count resulting from Germans wishing to settle theological and philosophical disputes amongst themselves and their neighbours.
What democracy and open discourse Germany enjoys now it has at the behest of its American conquerors, who became its occupiers, who became its “allies”, and who are now busy looking every which way but Europe as their religious movement spills over their own shores and has begun lustily spreading here. One day, sooner rather than later, the American occupation of Germany will be over in fact as well as in law. It remains to be seen what German society will make of that independence, especially as German society continues evolving.
Oh, and the game included ‘Ellen’ Page. Who doesn’t seem to have been very inspirational either.
After post #5, does anyone else wonder what it would look like if Der Durchenwanderer clashed with Gilliel on matters of english and german grammatical gender? I suspect it would rapidly become hilarious. Though I would not wish a conversation with that venomous fool on anyone.
I vaguely remember Gilliel from a few times I ventured into the comments at Pharyngula years ago, and if memory serves, I believe I would be absolutely eaten alive by her and her compatriots for my temerity in disagreeing with her (or them, or he, or whichever super-duper-special combination of referential denominators this person might have decided to stake the outrage of a thousand suns upon strangers getting right).
The “free” in free thought for them seems to either mean “cost-free” or “without”, though I know they (this time meaning the group collectively) generally balk at this characterisation.
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