Here is Chief Sealth School’s guide to social studies courses including the one that teaches women can have penises.

Ethnic Studies World History 3
Credits: 0.5 credit
Grade(s): 10
Length of Course: One Semester
Prerequisite: World History I, II
Graduation Requirement Satisfied: World History 3

This course provides the opportunity for students to examine current world problems and their historical and systemic causes.  The course is taught from an Ethnic Studies perspective and includes the structure of the 5 themes including Identity, Power and Oppression, Resistance and Liberation, reflection and Acton and Indigeneity. Students come to understand themselves in relation to systems of power and develop a sense of themselves as potential changemakers. The specific content varies from year to year based on student interest and input. There are bi-weekly class meetings to build community and provide a platform for student input into the class content and function. Students can expect a variety of instructional approaches, including the use of various types of texts, primary and secondary source documents, 21st century technologies, collaborative projects, and class discussion with an emphasis on writing and critical thinking, independently and in groups.

It sounds pretty awful, doesn’t it. I don’t object to teaching about power and oppression, certainly, and in fact it would be hard to teach history at all without those two aspects. But the “Students come to understand themselves in relation to systems of power” bit looks like a road right back into self-obsession, when education should be a road out of that. And why is “Identity” the first item in the list? Why is it on the list at all? And why didn’t they fix the typo on “Acton” which is clearly not the historian but a typo for “Action”?

Over all it doesn’t inspire confidence.

The source is conservative talk radio, but if the facts are true as reported then that’s what they are.

An activist history teacher failed a Seattle student on a quiz for saying only women can get pregnant and that only men have penises.

A 10th grade Ethnic Studies World History teacher at Chief Sealth International High School in Seattle gave students a quiz titled, “Understanding Gender vs. Sex.” The quiz provided a series of statements to label true or false, or questions with multiple choices.

Many of the questions focused on personal pronoun use (When someone uses ‘they/them’ pronouns, what does that mean about their gender identity?”) or assumptions one may make around gender identity (“True/false: Transgender people are gay”). Two questions, however, are objectively false, but students are taught the opposite.

Question 4 was a true or false question with the statement, “All men have penises.” The student labeled the statement “true” since it is, in fact, true. But the teacher penalized the answer, marking it incorrect. The teacher claims women can have a penis.

Well, wait. The question is badly worded. It should be “Only men have penises.” If you say all you get questions about amputations and industrial accidents and so on. But if the teacher says women can have a penis the teacher should be in another line of work.

Similarly, Question 7 was a true or false question with the statement, “Only women can get pregnant.” Again, the student marked the statement “true” because only women can get pregnant. Again, the teacher penalized the student, insisting the answer is false. The teacher believes men can get pregnant.

There you go: “only,” not “all.” Some women of course can’t get pregnant, but zero men can get pregnant.

And what the hell is a school doing teaching this trendy garbage? And what’s it got to do with history? Unless it’s a class on the history of bonkers ideas and ludicrous fads, which is a very interesting subject.

Seattle Public Schools, through a spokesperson, defended the quiz as “inclusive,” arguing it was appropriate for an Ethnic Studies course.

Oh I see. So Ethnic People have different biologies from normal people. They’re really going with that?

“Seattle Public Schools is dedicated to establishing inclusive environments that allow exploration of contemporary issues, specifically examining the impacts of power systems such as racism and patriarchy,” the spokesperson said to the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH. “This commitment extends to fostering welcoming and inclusive settings where students, staff, and families have the freedom to express their authentic selves.”

Oh ffs. If that’s true it’s both shocking and embarrassing.

Dude get over it.

Originally a comment by Vanitys Fiend on The disembodied avatar worlds of the internet.

One thing that gets me about this is that Science Fiction, and probably a fair number of fairy tales and myths, have been exploring and warning about this kind of disembodiment from reality for decades now. The original pilot for Star Trek featured a race that became so detached from reality over time that they no longer knew how to maintain the advanced technology of their ancestors. Neuromancer has “The Matrix” before The Matrix did and even that film has time to explore the idea of whether it matters if you’re living in an illusion or reality, and it come down on the side of harsh reality over a comfortable unreality*. Brave New World had the “feelies” which allow people to escape from reality if only for a few hours at a time.

To go back to Star Trek, The Next Generation had an early episode called “Holo Pursuits” about a socially anxious crewmember who was using VR as a way of coping with his isolation and as a way to live out his fantasies. The ep didn’t treat this as a terribly valid lifestyle choice. Helping the crewmember overcome his anxiety was seen as the correct solution. Honestly I can’t think of many Sf stories where living in VR was treated as the best way forward for individuals or humanity as a species and yet there are so many people in geek spaces who seem reality enamoured with the idea**.

*The unreality in this case is an eternal 1999 in a generic American city (filmed in Oz though) with a green filter.

**Being pro VR plus genetic and cybernetic enhancement are three of the things that baffle me about a lot of Star Trek fans. It’s doubly weird when they ask question like “Why do conservatives like Star Trek” and I’m like, “you’re a pro eugenics, porn addled furry who wants to live a life of debauchery in a holodeck banging a Vulcan Love Slave with your cybernetically enhanced penis, you don’t get Star Trek either”.

Merry krissmiss!!

This is GLORIOUS.

Well at least one lawyer agrees that it’s grotesque to claim that presidents can crime with impunity because they were in theWhiteHouse at the time of the criming.

A pre-Christmas filing by Donald Trump‘s lawyers asking a federal appeals court to throw out the election subversion case against him is “ridiculous,” according to a Florida state attorney.

State Attorney for Palm Beach County Dave Aronberg said the filing arguing that Trump is immune from prosecution for actions that fell within his official presidential duties was about “delay.”

…

The former president has appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review [whether] he is immune from allegations [that] he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election because he was president when the offenses occurred. District Judge Tanya Chutkan had ruled at the beginning of December that Trump was not immune from the charges against him.

…

In a filing late on December 23, Trump’s lawyers argued that a “president’s acts are not examinable by a judicial branch,” that proceedings against the former president are unconstitutional and that there is no set precedent.

Again, if it’s true that a president’s acts are not examinable by a judicial branch then presidents can commit any crimes they like and nobody can do anything about it. Presidents can all be Henry VIIIs and have their wives executed when they get tiresome.

“In his brief, [Trump] said that this is the only time in history a president has been charged for official acts,” Aronberg, a Democrat, argued. “He’s not being charged for official acts. He’s been charged for allegedly criminal acts… it’s a big difference. If he thinks he has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, the answer is no.”

He doesn’t think at all, he just throws stuff until someone stops him.

Here again is that weird circularity.

He took the actions in the White House, therefore you can’t touch him, therefore he gets to try to return to the White House, despite having done his best to force his way in with violent sedition last time. Which you can’t touch him for doing, because he was in the White House at the time. It’s so very heads we win tails you lose it makes my head swim.

It’s like saying you’re immune from prosecution for robbing a bank because you were in the bank when you robbed it.

This is so progressive.

“Hahaha you can’t get abortions any more and you’re miserable old hags.”

I just can’t figure out why feminist women say no to this glorious revolution.

How to help kids be healthy:

Iowa will not participate this summer in a federal program that gives $40 per month to each child in a low-income family to help with food costs while school is out, state officials have announced.

The state has notified the U.S. Department of Agriculture that it will not participate in the 2024 Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children — or Summer EBT — program, the state’s Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Education said in a Friday news release.

“Federal COVID-era cash benefit programs are not sustainable and don’t provide long-term solutions for the issues impacting children and families. An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic,” Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds said in the news release.

Some children are overweight, therefore no low-income children will get help with food costs while school is out. How kind and compassionate and helpful.

Some state lawmakers, including Democratic Sen. Izaah Knox of Des Moines, quickly voiced their opposition to the decision.

“It’s extremely disappointing that the Reynolds administration is planning to reject federal money that could put food on the table for hungry Iowa kids,” Knox said in a statement. “This cruel and short-sighted decision will have real impacts on children and families in my district and communities all across Iowa.”

Nonsense, those kids should be out there learning how to play the stock market.

Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to set up a system in which the top boss can never be held to account because the top boss is the top boss. Why? Because even the top boss is just another human, and humans can do bad things. We need to be able to hold them to account, for our own protection. We can’t just assume they won’t exploit the top job to rob us blind and get away with it.

Lawyers for former President Donald Trump have asked a federal appeals court to throw out a case alleging interference in the 2020 election, arguing that he is immune from prosecution.

Like that. There shouldn’t be such a thing. People shouldn’t be immune from prosecution just because they were once top boss. Trump is a good illustration of that because he did all kinds of bad shit to get elected and then lots more bad shit in office and then even more bad shit after he was thrown out of office. He’s one of the last people on the planet who should be immune from prosecution.

Originally a comment by Sastra on Let us be clear about the difference.

YNNB #7 wrote:

Too many of us are under the illusion that we’re a self-made species.

The deceptive comforts of modernity responsible for this would not be complete I think without what appears to have ratcheted the illusion up to 11: the disembodied avatar worlds of the internet. While the theories of postmodernism and post colonialism formed before the average person had at least one personal computer, the plausibility of a human nature detached from its evolved biological origins no doubt got a major boost from a large part of the population—especially the younger part of the population — getting comfortable with entire worlds where we could be a magical elf.

On our computers we have created species, we’ve re-created ourselves, and we’ve lived in intellectual spaces where the sex binary didn’t exist unless you asked Ziggybottom34 whether they were male or female.

I don’t know if this has affected Judith Butler and her academic acolytes, but I’ll bet it’s a reason fewer people are laughing at the more unbelievable parts.

Honestly legislators should not be this stupid. It’s an important job; they should not be this lost in the fog.

Thundering herds of bison that’s dumb. Of course people of any kind are not a theory or an ideology or a contested belief, and nobody says they are. The ideology/contested belief is that people can change sex, that people literally are the sex they are not, that people are what they say they are, that sex is determined by feelings and thoughts and not by the reality of the body.

The fact that there are children who say they are trans is indeed a fact. What’s not a fact is that “people [invariably] are who they say they are.” If that were the case there would never be long queues at airports while hundreds of people go through passport control. If that were the case people could empty other people’s bank accounts. If that were the case we could never be sure our doctor has any medical training.

Children who think they’re trans are a reality. Children who say they are trans are a reality. Children who are the opposite sex are a fiction.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on “Gender itself is a colonial introduction”.

That does not, of course, translate to “men are women if they say they are.” I suspect we’ll find that Butler relies on equivocating between the two – gender as The Rules and gender as “sexual dimorphism.”

I wouldn’t be at all surprised, as the entire genderist enterprise seems to be entirely dependent upon a combination of exactly that conflation, bait and switch (where a genderist will switch gears and meanings from one to the other mid-argument), and what Bjarte Foshaug has characterized as “bad puns,” such as TWAW. All heavily fortified with a generous heaping of “because SHUT UP!”

So much of this stems from questions about just how much of a window (if any) our limited, fallible senses offer on what we might call “the real world” external to our selves, and by extension, if there is any such “real world” at all. Maybe we’re just making stuff up as we go along, with various competing narratives vying for dominance, with an arbitrary, jury-rigged, threadbare, patchwork “reality” imposed by fiat on the rest of the universe by the most recent victor in the constant power-struggle for momentary, provisional, epistemic hegemony, and that any thoughts of a real world somehow underpinning anything are naive, mawkish, wishful thinking.

We are indeed fortunate that we live at a stage in our cultural and intellectual development that we can entertain such debates at all; for the vast majority of our lineage’s time on this Earth, an individual indulging in such esoteric cogitation for any length of time would have been soon eaten by a hungry lion unburdened by any such immobilizing doubts or second thoughts.

Onward!

Lugones describes the process this way, and I quote: “Sexual dimorphism has been an important characteristic of what I call [hand goes up for an air quote] ‘the light side’ of the colonial modern gender system. Those on the ‘dark’ side were not necessarily understood dimorphically. Sexual views of colonizers led them to imagine the indigenous people of the Americas as hermaphrodites, or intersex, with large penises and breasts with flowing milk.”

The claim seems to be that colonizers saw themselves as sexually dimorphic and indigenous people as not.

But as Paula Gunn Allen and others made clear, intersex individuals were recognized in many tribal societies prior to colonization, without assimilation to the sexual binary. It is important to consider the changes that colonization brought to understand the scope of the organization of sex and gender under colonialism and Eurocentered [sic] global capitalism.

In other words there was confusion about intersex people, therefore indigenous people knew all about trans people while the stupid Europeans were still droning on about the sexual binary.

Persuasive stuff!

If the latter did only recognize sexual dimorphism for white bourgeois males and females, it certainly does not follow that such a sexual division is based on biology. End quote.

Aw yeah, who would be stupid enough to think sexual dimorphism is based on biology?

Similarly, scholarship on East Africa and Uganda has demonstrated that gender inequality was introduced through Christian missionaries, suggesting that traditional social relations were in some ways more variable and free than those introduced through civilizational missions.

[skipping ahead a bit]

Let us be clear about the difference. The anti-gender position argues that gender is the colonizing force, and that getting rid of gender will reverse the course of colonization that it represents and enacts. De-colonial and anti-colonial perspectives [pause to stifle a bit of gas] argue that colonization imposed oppressive gender norms and new forms of identity classifications that intensified the subordination of women and the pathologization of non-gender-conforming queer and intersex people who had previously had a form of belonging in their communities.

So we mustn’t get rid of gender, we must cling to gender like grim death; what we need to do is get rid of oppressive gender norms.

Ok then my question becomes: what’s the difference between gender and gender norms?

I don’t think there is one; I think Butler is trying to sneak a trick past us. When we gender skeptics talk about getting rid of gender it’s the gender norms we mean. (Without the norms what even is gender?) We don’t think there’s some ghostly or Platonic essence called “gender” wandering around, separate from its norms. We think gender is the system that says men have to play football and women have to get their nails done.

She’s trying to grab the credit for resisting gender without actually doing it.

So who is Maria Lugones and who is Anibal Quijano and what do they say? Have a JSTOR preview:

The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms “the coloniality of power” and “modernity.” The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the “civilized” West.

That could all be about gender as the rules for how people of each sex are supposed to act, look, talk and all the rest of it. There certainly are such rules, and it’s highly likely that colonizers considered the rules of the colonized to be all wrong and in need of correction by the enlightened Europeans who wanted to exploit and enslave them. (Lugones seems to be saying the very idea of rules of any kind was a European invention, which seems highly unlikely.)

That does not, of course, translate to “men are women if they say they are.” I suspect we’ll find that Butler relies on equivocating between the two – gender as The Rules and gender as “sexual dimorphism.”

Stay tuned.

Source! It’s this talk:

So I’ll be on transcription duty for some time.

29:40:

…and that strong arguments have been made that it was actually colonialism and the kind of capitalism that it spawned that established the binary and heteronormative framework for thinking about and living gender for the first time. Indeed, if we consider the work of Maria Lugones, drawing on the work of Anibal Quijano, then colonial arrangements are the context and course of a wide range of issues that we think of as belonging to normative gender relations, including heteronormativity, dimorphic idealism, the patriarchal family, and the very norms that govern appearance. 30:24

So there we go, she does indeed say it. Now I’ll have to find out wtf “dimorphic idealism” is.

I suspect this project will take days. My Xmas present!

Furthermore, why is David Brooks a thing? I’ve been wondering that every time I’m reminded of him for twenty or thirty or a hundred years now. The latest reminder was accidentally seeing a few seconds of some pompous PBS chat show last night with him pompously saying words on it. Why? Who cares what he thinks? Why do the Approved Media keep asking for his input?

The Nation wondered the same thing last August.

Take heed, American reprobates! Your self-appointed spiritual doctor, David Brooks, is diagnosing your faults, sins, and self-serving moral evasions, and his findings are grim. In successive turns at the bully pulpits of The New York Times and The Atlantic, Brooks has detected a collective failure to grow up and lay aside the childish things that haunt our epoch: self-absorption, incivility, tribalism, and other just plain rude repudiations of character and virtue.

This line of argument has been a recurring theme in Brooks’s never-ending tenure as a commentator of mysteriously high profile.

Emphasis added. That. Why?? Why does he have such a high profile, and why has he had it for so long? He’s not another Christopher Hitchens now is he, so why?

Speaking of Christophers…

Brooks’s recent New York Times outburst—titled, of course, “Grow Up, America”—repeatedly cites [Christopher] Lasch’s best known work, the 1979 jeremiad The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch, as it happens, was my adviser in graduate school, and it’s been a grim intellectual crucible for me to see his work cited admiringly—and in predictably bowdlerized, stunted, and distorted fashion—on the American right. In his invocations of The Culture of Narcissism, Brooks carries on this appalling annexation project—and does so by once again excising all of the book’s many discussions of the central role that the capitalist political economy plays in the rise of a collective American narcissistic personality. Brooks approvingly quotes Lasch’s diagnosis of a debilitating brand of narcissism that leaves its sufferer doomed to seek “neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it,” while of course neglecting entirely to note Lasch’s own characterization of those conditions.

Brooks is a boring mediocre hack yet he’s a darling of public broadcasting and The New Atlantic York Times. It’s interesting that the same Major Media are all-in on trans ideology.

I should add, however, that I haven’t been able to confirm that Judith Butler did say that.

Here’s one talk that fits the description:

But searching the transcript turns up no hits for “imposition” or “sexual dimorphism” and the hit for “colonialist” doesn’t match the quotation. Maybe there are other talks where she does say that, but I have my doubts.

Ok then let’s see you pee standing up without soaking your shoes.

If sexual dimorphism is an observational imposition of Christian colonialism then how have people managed to reproduce all this time? How have animals known how to reproduce all this time? How have genitalia been different all this time? What are ovaries and what are they for? Why don’t babies emerge from men? Why can’t gay couples make babies without outside assistance?

Also why Christian colonialism but not Islamic colonialism? Was the Iberian peninsula packed full of people born via a miracle?

So many questions.

Oh you mean it’s malpractice? Huh.

fter Iowa lawmakers passed a ban on gender-affirming care for minors in March, managers of an LGBTQ+ health clinic located just across the state line in Moline, Illinois, decided to start offering that care.

The added services would provide care to patients who live in largely rural eastern Iowa, including some of the hundreds previously treated at a University of Iowa clinic, saving them half-day drives to clinics in larger cities like Chicago and Minneapolis.

By June, The Project of the Quad Cities, as the Illinois clinic is called, had hired a provider who specializes in transgender health care. So, Andy Rowe, The Project’s health care operations director, called the clinic’s insurance broker to see about getting the new provider added to the nonprofit’s malpractice policy.

“I didn’t anticipate that it was going to be a big deal,” Rowe said. Then the insurance carriers’ quotes came. The first one specifically excluded gender-affirming care for minors. The next response was the same. And the one after that. By early November, more than a dozen malpractice insurers had declined to offer the clinic a policy.

Gee I wonder why.

Not really. The people whose job it is to think about risk and profit and lawsuits are not going to be bowled over by soaring rhetoric about “authentic selves” nor are they going to be intimidated by shouty “activists” on Twitter.

Nearly half the states have banned medication or surgical treatment for transgender youth. Independent clinics and medical practices located in states where such care is either allowed or protected have moved to fill that void for patients commuting or relocating across state lines. But as the risk of litigation rises for clinics, obtaining malpractice insurance on the commercial marketplace has become a quiet barrier to offering care, even in states with legal protections for health care for trans people.

See journalists are still as stupid about this as the activists they’re trying to impress. Actuaries are probably less likely to see mutilation as “health care” even for trans people.

In extreme cases, lawmakers have deployed malpractice insurance regulations against gender-affirming care in states where courts have slowed or blocked anti-trans legislation.

Is the legislation “anti-trans”? Or is it anti-reckless haste to mutilate teenagers in the belief that they were born in the wrong body?

Five months after starting his search for malpractice insurance, Rowe said, he received a quote for a policy that would allow The Project to treat trans youth. That’s when he realized finding a policy was only the first hurdle. He expected the coverage to cost $8,000 to $10,000 a year, but he was quoted $50,000.

Gee, just imagine, you have to pay a lot for insurance when you’re mutilating children on the grounds that they’re the opposite sex of their own bodies.