The difference in punch power

Jun 22nd, 2021 5:19 pm | By

I wonder if there’s chaos in the corridors of The Guardian. The Enlightened won’t be liking Tanya Aldred’s piece on fairness in sport.

Without a separate category for females, there would be no women in Olympic finals. Even in the 100m, one of the events with the smallest performance gap, approximately 10,000 men worldwide have personal bests faster than the current Olympic female champion, Elaine Thompson-Herah (10.70sec). And it’s not just track and field. While the smallest attainment gap between the sexes comes in running, rowing and swimming events (11-13%), this moves up to 16%-22% in track cycling, and between 29% and 34% when it comes to bowling cricket balls and weightlifting. The difference in punch power between men and women is a whopping 162%. Not, then, to be sniffed at.

But the IOC sniffed at it, ruling that tweaking testosterone levels is all that’s required.

Increasingly, however, research is showing that these testosterone guidelines do not guarantee the “fair competition” the IOC was hoping for. Ross Tucker, a sports scientist and expert on testosterone advantage in sport, succinctly sums it up: “Lowering of testosterone is almost completely ineffective in taking away the biological differences between males and females.” There is just no proof that reducing testosterone takes away the advantage of muscle mass, strength, lean body mass, muscle size or bone density. Despite this new evidence from Drs Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg, the IOC has put off any further decisions making until after Tokyo and left it up to individual sports federations to decide their own transgender policies.

Because, let’s never forget, it’s only women who are harmed by this. Naturally that’s just not very important.

Some claim that this debate is irrelevant as trans women aren’t winning everything, which is true. The simple explanation is that the athletes who have transitioned haven’t generally been good enough. As Tucker says, the best female cyclist will beat 99% of men, but the best men are 10-15% better. And anyway, regardless of whether trans women win or not – whether Hubbard wins or not – it is legitimate to question the rules that allow them in the competition, given the retained advantage. Given the safety issues in combat, collision and some team sports. Given the hidden exclusions, those women and girls who decide that a sport now isn’t for them. And the not so hidden ones: Kuinini “Nini” Manumua, the 21-year-old Tongan who would have gone to her first Olympics if Hubbard hadn’t been selected.

The American cyclist Veronica Ivy (previously known as Rachel McKinnon) says hang the heartache, trans women are women and should simply be able to self-identify themselves into the women’s category at every level.

He’s Canadian actually, and he’s also a smug bully who enjoys looming over the women he just finished cheating.



One

Jun 22nd, 2021 4:48 pm | By

Literally just one.



This does not empower women

Jun 22nd, 2021 3:19 pm | By

Graham Linehan on the Laurel Intrusion:

Representatives of the nation of Samoa have been speaking out against Hubbard’s participation in the women’s category since 2019, when Hubbard bested local hero Feagaiga Stowers at the Pacific Games. Stowers, a young woman who began lifting to cope with surviving sexual abuse, had won a gold medal in the 2018 Commonwealth Games. That year, Hubbard had been ineligible for participation after sustaining an elbow injury. However, upon returning to the sport in 2019, he placed first; Stowers took the silver medal, and Charisma Amoe-Tarrant of Australia took the bronze.

In a 2019 article for Samoa Observer, Mata’afa Keni Lesa wrote of how Stowers had previously entered the Samoa Victims Support Group, where she began weightlifting, pointing out that her story and success had been inspirational in her home country. According to Lesa: “It will be a tragedy of gigantic proportion for sport when this sort of carrying [on?] is allowed. We talk a lot about empowering women, this does not empower women. If anything, it is taking power away from them. It is robbing them of what rightfully belongs to them.”

We don’t talk so much about empowering women any more. In the context of prostitution and pole dancing maybe, but in general, nah. Men are the new women and we’d rather talk about them.

Samoa’s Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi, also objected to Hubbard’s participation. In 2019, he told Samoa Observer: “This fa’afafine or man should have never been allowed by the Pacific Games Council president to lift with the women. No matter how we look at it, he’s a man, and it’s shocking this was allowed in the first place.”

But if you just think of him as 1. a woman and 2. the most oppressed kind of woman of all, then all the shock goes away.

Women are not a hormone level, as Save Women’s Sports representative Beth Stelzer points out. Though we have known for untold centuries that men possess a physical advantage over women in sports, the admittance of males into female sports is basically an ongoing experiment being conducted at the expense of women and girls in order to boost the confidence of such men while simultaneously discouraging and insulting female athletes. Truly, men’s feelings are being valued over women’s reality. To compound the matter further, women’s weightlifting has only been an Olympic sport since 2000, for a total of five Olympic games. In contrast, the men’s weightlifting category debuted in 1896.

Five games is enough for anyone. Well ok not anyone, but for women. Women don’t matter that much, so five games is plenty.

In addition to biological advantages, Hubbard was born into wealth: his father, Dick Hubbard, is a politician and businessman who made a fortune as a cereal magnate. Hubbard was involved in a car accident that seriously injured an elderly couple, requiring hospitalization and spinal surgery. The couple, Gary and Sue Wells, spoke out in 2019 spoke out against what they believed was a lenient penalty given to Hubbard, and at the suppression of Hubbard’s name regarding their case: “The penalty and suppression were totally unjust. No notice was taken of our feelings and she (Hubbard) got everything she wanted.” Hubbard was discharged without a conviction, ordered to pay $13,000, and had his license restricted for one month. Hubbard’s name was suppressed from the media to allow him avoid stress while training for the Olympics, to which Gary Wells responded: “It was to protect her from hardship while she trained for the Olympics. What a load of crap. We couldn’t do anything for four months.”

Ok so he’s rich and male and white but just never mind that, he’s trans and that makes him The Most Vulnerable.

Several men have already begun competing against women, many of whom previously competed against men, and some of whom have apparently ‘aged out’ of the male category. Valentina Petrillo, for instance, aged 44, has already won 3 gold medals at the women’s Italian Paralympics Athletics Championships — despite Petrillo having made not even the minimum effort to falsify his official documents. He is still listed as a male on his identification.

But he calls himself Valentina. End of discussion.

For centuries men have been portrayed as the default humans, which has resulted in medicine being researched on predominantly male test subjects, among scores of other examples — so many, in fact, that Caroline Criado-Perez wrote an entire book, Invisible Women, on the subject. Because of this androcentric cultural lens, that which men desire is framed as a human right, whereas women’s rights can be sidelined to make room for men’s feelings.

Women are born to be sidelined. That’s just how it is.



An ultimatum

Jun 22nd, 2021 11:35 am | By

Abigail Shrier on Gorski et al v Hall, via Bari Weiss:

Within a day, Dr. Hall’s article was flooded with nearly 1,000 comments, mostly, she says, from activists demanding the article be stripped from the site, but also from some readers expressing their appreciation. Angry emails from activists swamped the blog’s editors. Within two days, those editors had given Dr. Hall an ultimatum: retract, rewrite, or allow them to add a disclaimer. 

This is a colleague, remember, not a subordinate. It’s an itchy feeling when colleagues start giving you ultimatums (or ultimata if you prefer). The temptation to say “You’re not the boss of me” becomes very strong.

“What surprised me was that my fellow editors attacked me, too. Basically what they said was that my article was not up to my usual standards as far as medicine, science and critical thinking went. And I didn’t feel that I did anything but what I always do. That surprised me,” she told me. Considering the editors’ ultimatum, she elected to have the editors who disagreed add a disclaimer to the website. “I told them I did not want it retracted. And the next thing I knew, they had retracted it.”

So the ultimatum actually was: retract, rewrite, or allow them to add a disclaimer, and if you choose the last then we’ll retract it anyway.

It’s not only corporations facing this type of activist pressure. Public libraries now do, too.

Halifax Pride, the annual LGBTQ festival, announced late last month that it would cut ties with the city’s library system over its insistence on carrying Irreversible Damage, calling it “transphobic,” and claiming that it “jeopardizes the safety of trans youth” and “debates the existence of trans people.” 

I wonder if it ever occurs to them that over the long haul this kind of coercion isn’t going to make their ideology more convincing but rather the opposite. “If they have to force it on us maybe it’s kind of a feeble set of ideas?”

There are more people who already think that than we’re allowed to know. Shrier hears from them.

Child and adult psychologists and psychiatrists write to say they have witnessed a surge in transgender identification among teen girls who seem to be acting under peer and social media influence. Teachers write to say they believe that the phenomenon is plainly an example of social contagion within their classrooms. Surgeons and pediatricians and endocrinologists write to wonder aloud at what has happened to their profession.

There are lawyers who posit that lawsuits are on the way — brought by others, presumably. Professors who have come to hate their jobs — you can’t discuss your own research without trampling on a young generation’s vast neural network of sensitivities. Journalists at our most storied newspapers, TV networks, and literary magazines, even at NPR, write to tell me they liked my book, they agree with it, and to tut-tut the abuse directed at me. They assure me that the horrible accusations — from child predation to white supremacy and transphobia — accusations that will forever live on the internet, blackening my name, are things no one really believes. They wish — wish! — they could say so publicly.

This is fine. Teenagers are ruining their futures, and people can’t say anything about it publicly, because the venomous pressure to shut up is so powerful.

For more than a year Shrier thanked people who wrote to her this way.

But then, a few months ago, a pediatrician reached out to say that she also thought it was insane that minors were self-prescribing testosterone and that she agreed that her profession was negligent in unquestioningly “affirming” the sudden trans-identification of teenagers. 

The standard response didn’t cut it this time. I wrote back as politely as I could: That’s just not good enough. You are a doctor. We aren’t the same with regard to medical scandals. I can continue to seek and publish the truth. I can interview experts and report what they’ve said. But you can appeal to your own authority. You took a Hippocratic oath. If you see young patients in harm’s way, you have an obligation to do something.

The same is true for other professions. If you are a teacher, you entered the profession in order to expand young minds. If you are watching them being warped, it’s your responsibility to fight that. If you are a journalist witnessing lies being spread by your colleagues, it’s your responsibility to stand up for truthIf you are a professor, watching your colleagues being bullied — a med school professor watching hokum being peddled as fact, a scientist watching the corruption of research — there’s no one else to speak up but you. 

And if enough people do it will swiftly become far less dangerous to join them.



Instant affirmation or else

Jun 22nd, 2021 10:46 am | By

Jerry Coyne on the sleazy behavior of the bros at Science-Based Medicine:

… the site removed a book review written by another respected physician, Harriet Hall, known for being one of the Air Forces’s first women flight surgeons as well as a notable advocate for science based medicine and a vociferous debunker of quackery.  And—get this—Hall is one of the journal’s five editors.

If only she’d been three of the five.

Neither Shrier nor her reviewer Hall [is a] transphobes, but now they are irrevocably typed as that. The ACLU staff attorney for transgender issues, Chase Strangio, has called for the banning of Shrier’s book from bookstores (odd for the ACLU, no?), and an uproar has arisen—all because Shrier is urging caution about a social phenomenon whose sudden increase demands scrutiny and investigation. To even deny the need for instant affirmation of a wish to be a boy if you’re a girl is to label yourself someone dedicated to eliminating transsexual rights or even advocating the genocide of transsexuals. That is hogwash, of course, and Shrier’s book and Hall’s careful review implicitly show that. She was instantly labeled a transphobe for not damning the book, and Science-Based Medicine got hundreds of outraged comments (see below).

Why is the denial of the need for instant affirmation equated to “transphobia”? Because the ideology, the movement, the activism, are all about how awesome it is to be trans and how dazzlingly fabulous trans people are.

And why is that? I don’t really know. Maybe because in reality it’s rather grim? Stripped of all the hoopla and celebration you’re left with people who have at the very least made their romantic and sex lives quite difficult. I suppose the more trans people there are the less difficult their sex lives are…or are they? Because the activism, after all, is all about insisting that trans X are X, so they don’t want to limit their dating pool just to other trans people, do they. That would imply that trans X are not X. It’s quite a trap they’ve caught themselves in.

But at least the more trans people there are the more trans friends are available, and maybe that’s reason enough.

The reason Hall’s review was archived is because Science-Based Medicine retracted it—a review by one of its own editors! (I don’t expect Hall will be an editor much longer.)

I expect the same thing. I found I couldn’t stand FTB any longer, and I expect Hall will find likewise.



Strong opinions on both sides

Jun 22nd, 2021 10:14 am | By

Jess DeWahls talks to Spiked:

It turned out that an embroiderer was ranting online about the fact that I had work in the Royal Academy. She had attacked me twice before. This time, she basically encouraged her followers to contact all the places that stock my work, including the Royal Academy, and tell them that they shouldn’t work with a transphobe. That afternoon, the Academy emailed me, saying that it had received eight complaints about ‘transphobic’ views I had voiced online.

In other words one opportunistic rivalrous shit (whose work is crap) told people to go after DeWahls and the RA took this coordinated campaign seriously.

Transphobic views like ‘women have vaginas’ and ‘there are two sexes’, presumably. It said it would have to investigate. I replied saying that I was not transphobic and that eight people is hardly representative of the general public. I heard nothing back until the Academy posted on its Instragram story to say that it had dropped me.

Bad manners on top of credulity and incompetence and scorn for women.

At first, I just felt horrible. When you voice views like I do, you get a lot of private support, but people don’t feel they can support you in public.

Unless they’ve already been there themselves, and not only can’t be canceled a second time, but also have better friends and allies.

That changed on Thursday morning, when I woke up to an inbox full of emails from journalists who wanted to speak to me. I spoke to The Times that day, and then the Academy was suddenly really keen to talk to me. An incredibly flustered woman rang me, but didn’t know what to say or do other than tell me that the Academy was just going to sit and let people express themselves, because there are obviously strong opinions on both sides.

As if this were just normal. As if the RA always did what 8 complainers told them to do.

After I wrote my blog, organisations that I was collaborating with immediately dropped me. I helped to raise funds for companies like the Vagina Museum and Bloody Good Period. They dropped me straight away, disassociating themselves with me publicly. I knew my blog would cause a stir. But the reaction was much more horrible than anything I could have anticipated. There isn’t anything comparable in real life to being hounded online and having strangers sending emails saying that they hope you kill yourself.

Ultimately, though, she doesn’t give a fuck.

People like JK Rowling are not cancellable, and that makes the people who hate them so angry. In a way, I’m not cancellable either, because I don’t give a fuck. What the fuck are they going to do? They keep putting rocks in my way and I’m making a fucking statue out of them. I don’t care. I’m not going to have arseholes make my life miserable just because they are miserable.

Living well is the best revenge.



A useful weapon for excluding women

Jun 22nd, 2021 9:36 am | By

Sarah Ditum on the different standards for your Gaugin and Picasso on the one hand and your Jess DeWahls on the other:

And what had De Wahls actually done to make herself untouchable? In 2019, she published a long, considered essay laying out her thoughts on gender identity. “My hope is that this will help you, the reader, the viewer, to understand my conclusions about this subject,” she wrote. “And I will tell you them candidly so no mistake can be made in misunderstanding or misrepresenting me.” As anyone who has ever ventured an opinion on gender could tell you, this was always a vain hope given the torrents of bad faith that run through this subject.

…So it didn’t matter how precise De Wahls was when she wrote: “I have no issue with somebody who feels more comfortable expressing themselves as if they are the other sex (or in whatever way they please for that matter).” It didn’t matter that she described her own close and supportive relationship with her father, who lives a gloriously gender-nonconforming life in heels and lipstick. It didn’t matter that De Wahls, who was a child in pre-unification East Germany, drew parallels between the chilling propriety of gender-identity dogma and the constant self-censorship demanded by life under the stasi.

What mattered was that she had said no, and no amount of thoughtfulness or articulacy can make female refusal inoffensive. “I can not accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born and deserve to be extended the same rights as if they were born as such,” De Wahls stated, and in doing so she asserted both an internal and an external boundary: a boundary that said she would not automatically treat male people as though they were female, and a boundary that said she would not think of male people as though they were female.

Not permitted. Some people are allowed to have boundaries, and others are not. Some people are allowed to ignore boundaries, and others are not.

“The RA is committed to equality, diversity and inclusion and does not knowingly support artists who act in conflict with these values,” it said in a statement. Although you can still buy a book about child-rape enthusiast Gauguin and prolific mistress-abuser Picasso.

Or maybe “equality, diversity and inclusion” simply aren’t on offer for a Tahitian teenager who ends up at the wrong end of an artist’s syphilitic penis. There’s an argument which used to be made (and thankfully isn’t so much anymore) than an artist’s special role in society sets him (always a him, in this argument) beyond the norms of bourgeois decency: if it cost Picasso “the blood of those who loved him” (in the words of his granddaughter Marina) to produce that tasteful cubist nude so you can hang a print of it in your living room, then so be it.

Because the people harmed by Gaugin and Picasso were only women. Women don’t matter. That, not coincidentally, is why trans women matter and women don’t. Women’s place on the Mattering Map is nowhere at all.

But then, De Wahls is a woman, and historically the RA has always found decency a useful weapon for excluding women: it deemed women too delicate to take part in life drawing classes except as models, and so denied them a complete artistic education, which in turn justified keeping them out of any significant role in running the Academy.

Now it’s “inclusion” that does it.



More on that

Jun 21st, 2021 4:32 pm | By

I’ve realized I have more to say on Peter Tatchell’s fatuous remarks to the Guardian on the definite rightness of the Royal Academy’s libel of Jess DeWahls:

Veteran LGBT rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said: “Trans women are different from other women, but being a different kind of woman is perfectly valid and no justification for the denial of their identity.

Let’s think about this. How are trans women “different from other women?” They’re different in being men. That’s a very differenty kind of difference. You could replace it with the word “not.” Trans women are different from other women in being not women. Well yes, that’s different all right, and it’s also a negation, and an opposite. Not-man is not an exhaustive definition of woman, but it’s certainly a crucial one. Women and men are the two human sexes, and there are no others.

So, yes, actually, being a “different kind of woman” in the sense of not being a woman at all, in the sense of being a man, is not “perfectly valid” in the sense of being the thing you in fact are not. That whole claim is simply perverse. It’s like saying “the fact that a potato is not a blueberry is no justification for denying their identity.”

How did we get to the point that grown-ass adults are talking this kind of gibberish?

And then what does “perfectly valid” mean? Nothing. It’s just a club to whack you upside the head with if you try to resist.

And then what does he mean “the denial of their identity”? The identity is not theirs. That’s the whole point. If I say I’m the pope, that doesn’t establish the “validity” of my “identity” as the pope, for the crude but compelling reason that I’m not the pope.

Gibberish. It’s all such gibberish.

“If an artist denied Jewish, black or gay people’s identity, most people would say that the Royal Academy would be right to remove their works from the gift shop. But when Jess denies trans people’s identity, she and other trans critics say that it’s her right to free speech and she should not be penalised. This smacks of double standards.”

What on earth does it mean to “deny Jewish, black or gay people’s identity”? That’s not a thing. Nobody does that. The problem is the opposite of that – it’s saying the identity is spoiled, is bad, is something to belittle or demonize.

And one more thing. Of course Tatchell says “If an artist denied Jewish, black or gay people’s identity” but doesn’t say “women’s identity.” Well he couldn’t, could he, because that’s exactly what he’s doing.



A little is ok

Jun 21st, 2021 3:50 pm | By

Ash Sarkar thinks it’s all just fine.

Nobody says it’s “en masse.” So what? Any is too much. “It’s just one guy cheating” is not a powerful argument.

Again: not the issue. Women shouldn’t be made to give up any of their opportunities to men.

Fair and square? A man in a women’s competition? What’s fair or square about that?



Deemed

Jun 21st, 2021 3:29 pm | By

The Guardian poisons the well in the usual way.

An artist whose work will no longer be available in the Royal Academy’s gift shop after views she expressed in a blogpost were deemed transphobic has said she is considering legal action against the institution.

It’s a bad sentence to begin with: too many separate bits of information with no punctuation between them. But setting that aside, note the “were deemed transphobic” – by whom, you damn fool? God? The entire world? Knowledgeable people? Or eight sniveling censors who don’t give a shit about art but just like silencing women?

It was the latter, of course, so what the hell is the Guardian doing insinuating that it’s some kind of authoritative “deeming” as opposed to a spiteful campaign against feminists and feminism? It is not good journalism to treat 8 nasty gossips as some kind of official body.

The RA confirmed Jess de Wahls’ embroidery work would no longer be stocked after a 2019 post – in which she outlined her views on gender identity politics – was determined to be transphobic by the RA.

That’s not what happened. The 8 censors whined to the RA and the RA panicked. They didn’t pause to “determine” anything, they just jumped when the censors said jump.

De Wahls told the Guardian that she is considering legal action. “I don’t know yet, but something’s going to give. They’re gonna have to say something at some point. If they hope that this is just going to go away, it’s not going to go away,” she said.

That “gonna” is a sneer, too.

The artist also refused to accept that denying trans women are women was transphobic, saying: “There has to be place for people to disagree respectfully and not validating someone’s felt identity, to me, I’m sorry, that’s not a hate crime.”

There also has to be a place for people to tell the truth. Trans women are men by definition.

Veteran LGBT rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said: “Trans women are different from other women, but being a different kind of woman is perfectly valid and no justification for the denial of their identity.

“If an artist denied Jewish, black or gay people’s identity, most people would say that the Royal Academy would be right to remove their works from the gift shop. But when Jess denies trans people’s identity, she and other trans critics say that it’s her right to free speech and she should not be penalised. This smacks of double standards.”

What’s it got to do with Peter Tatchell? Why ask him? Why not ask, for instance, a woman? Why ask a man with a long record of bullying women on this subject?

Because they’re in the tank, I suppose.



They will have to talk eventually

Jun 21st, 2021 9:03 am | By

And here she is.



It would have been her first Olympics

Jun 21st, 2021 8:35 am | By

The woman cheated out of a place at the Olympics by a man pretending to be a woman.



The IOC has said it is committed to inclusion

Jun 21st, 2021 8:28 am | By

A couple of weeks ago:

Allowing transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard to compete in the women’s competition at the Tokyo Olympics would be like letting athletes dope and may set a dangerous precedent for future Games, Samoa’s weightlifting boss told Reuters.

Like letting athletes dope only worse, because it’s 37 years of more testosterone.

Tuaopepe Jerry Wallwork coaches Samoa’s Commonwealth Games champion Feagaiga Stowers and is concerned Hubbard’s presence in the super-heavyweight division at Tokyo could deny the small island nation its second Olympic medal.

Sorry, small island nations go to the wall.

The IOC has said it is committed to inclusion regardless of gender identity and sexual characteristics but is also updating its guidelines.

This stupid word “inclusion” needs to be banished from discussions of this kind. Sport is all about exclusion, by its nature – there is winning and there is losing. Sport is competitive, and with competition you get exclusion. The IOC isn’t “committed to inclusion” at all – it doesn’t include everyone. A very small select few get to compete in the Olympic games; they’re about as exclusive as it gets.

So why are they carving out an exception for one man who claims to be trans? (I don’t believe he is trans, I think he’s just taking advantage.) Why is just this one purported mental state an exception to the rule that otherwise governs billions of people? They never say, they just repeat the stupid words.

Wallwork coached Samoa’s only Olympic medallist Ele Opeloge to weightlifting silver at the 2008 Beijing Games.

Doping robbed Opeloge and Samoa of the podium moment, however, with the medal only awarded eight years later after a re-analysis of drug test samples disqualified the bronze and silver medallists.

Ah that’s nice, so now the IOC is doing it to them all over again.



Ever hungry to accuse people

Jun 21st, 2021 8:03 am | By

John McWhorter argues that it’s fine to call the Ibram Kendi-type anti-racism “Critical Race Theory” even though it’s not the actual law school Critical Race Theory, in part because people who say it isn’t fine are just playing rhetorical games. I’m still not convinced, but he says some interesting things (as he always does).

Since a year ago, CRT-infused members of The Elect, traditionally overrepresented in the world of schools of education, have sought to take the opportunity furnished by our “racial reckoning” to turn American schools into academies of “antiracist” indoctrination.

Schools of education – that’s one of the interesting things. From what I’ve read they can be quite faddy and at the same time anti-intellectual. If they’re full of Robin DiAngelos then I at least see what he’s getting at.

The early writings by people like Regina Austin, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw are simply hard-leftist legal analysis, proposing a revised conception of justice that takes oppression into account, including a collective sense of subordinate group identity. These are hardly calls to turn schools into Maoist re-education camps fostering star chambers and struggle sessions.

However, this, indeed, is what is happening to educational institutions across the country. Moreover, it is no tort to call it “CRT” in shorthand when:

1) these developments are descended from its teachings and

2) their architects openly bill themselves as following the tenets of CRT.

Not a tort but not useful either, I think.

Now – are there some among critics of today’s CRT who just want us to stop talking about race at all? Are some of them the kind of white person who thinks racism of any note basically ended in the 1960s and that today we need to “stop stirring all of that stuff up”? Likely. But the evidence that this is the heart, the primum mobile, of resistance to “CRT” in our schools is comic book stuff.

Is anyone taken seriously actually proposing that students should learn nothing of slavery in school, or that students should never be taught that racism is anything but cross-burning and the N-word? Or, is it that a certain kind of person goes about ever hungry to accuse people of this aim, in order to fulfill their duty of identifying racism wherever they can find it?

Ok wait a second. In general I don’t have the temerity to challenge McWhorter, but there I think he’s doing a bit of fancy footwork himself. It depends what you mean by “taken seriously.” Of course there are people who are taken seriously who propose that or similar versions of it, it’s just that they’re taken seriously by people who vote for the MTGs and Gaetzs and Trumps.

In a dialogue premised on good faith, we can assume that when politicos and parents decry “Critical Race Theory,” what they refer to is the idea of oppression and white perfidy treated as the main meal of an entire school’s curriculum.

Ok but maybe there should be significantly more teaching about oppression than there has been in the past?

I don’t know for sure. Maybe in practice it’s a bad idea, maybe it only makes things worse. But I think there’s still an awfully big lump under the rug.



Requiring a balance, which we won’t attempt

Jun 21st, 2021 7:27 am | By

Again with the shuffling and hemming and ending up in the same place:

New Zealand’s government and the country’s top sporting body have backed her inclusion for the upcoming Olympics.

“As well as being among the world’s best for her event, Laurel has met the IWF eligibility criteria, including those based on IOC Consensus Statement guidelines for transgender athletes,” New Zealand Olympic Committee chief executive Kereyn Smith said.

But Hubbard is among the world’s best for the event only if he is counted as a woman. He’s not among the world’s best men for the event. Saying he’s the best in [the women’s] event to justify allowing him to compete in the women’s event is begging the question, to put it mildly.

“We acknowledge that gender identity in sport is a highly sensitive and complex issue requiring a balance between human rights and fairness on the field of play,” he added.

We acknowledge it so that we can go ahead and ignore it by allowing Hubbard to steal a place from a woman.

“As the New Zealand team, we have a strong culture of ‘manaaki’ (respect) and inclusion and respect for all.”

I know I objected to that yesterday but I’m going to do it all over again today. Letting men cheat women out of places in sport is not respect or inclusion. It’s contempt for and exclusion of women. If you thought women counted at all you wouldn’t say it’s respect and inclusion to cheat them out of places on their own team.

Do they have amateur athletics in New Zealand? Does anyone there consider it respect and inclusion for a team to replace one of the players with a professional?

Do they have athletics for children and for teenagers? Does anyone there consider it respect and inclusion for a team to replace one of the players with an adult?

Including a man in a women’s competition isn’t inclusion it’s cheating. Cheating cheating cheating.



Critical Pronoun Theory

Jun 21st, 2021 5:41 am | By

And while everyone is squawking about the critical race theorist under the bed, kindergarten children are being instructed on Special Pronouns.



Directly downstream

Jun 21st, 2021 5:16 am | By

About that Andrew Sullivan piece on what he calls “Critical Race Theory” –

How on earth could merely teaching students about the history of racism and its pervasiveness in the United States provoke such a fuss? No wonder Charles Blow is mystified. But don’t worry. The MSM have a ready explanation: the GOP needs an inflammatory issue to rile their racist base, and so this entire foofaraw is really just an astro-turfed, ginned-up partisan gambit about nothing. The MSM get particular pleasure in ridiculing parents who use the term “critical race theory” as shorthand for things that just, well, make them uncomfortable — when the parents obviously have no idea what CRT really is.

Isn’t that silly of the mainstream media, says Andrew Mainstream Sullivan. But here’s a fun fact: it actually does matter what we call things. It really is worth getting the labels right. Critical Race Theory is not synonymous with every stupid fad idea people come up with.

I’m sure the MSM will continue to push this narrative indefinitely…And you can see why: this dismissive take is extremely helpful in avoiding what is actually happening. It diverts attention from the stories and leaks and documents that keep popping up all over the place about extraordinary indoctrination sessions that have become mandatory for children as early as kindergarten.

But that’s not a reason to call that kind of indoctrination Critical Race Theory when that’s not what it is. It’s not a reason to get the labels wrong.

And no, 6-year-olds are not being taught Derrick Bell — or forced to read Judith Butler, or God help them, Kimberlé Crenshaw. Of course they aren’t — and I don’t know anyone who says they are. 

Exactly, and that’s why inept school programs should not be labeled incorrectly.

But they are being taught popularized terms, new words, and a whole new epistemology that is directly downstream of academic critical theory.

Ahhhh “downstream” is it. Well that excuses everything then. Except it doesn’t.

Let me draw an analogy to another kind of education. In Catholic kindergarten, kids are not taught Aquinas, the debates about the Trinity in the early church, or the intricacies of transubstantiation. But they are taught that they were created by God, in his image, and that they should love one another. All of this is part of Catholicism. But the former is abstract and esoteric; the latter is the practical, downstream application of these truths — accessible to children, to direct their morality. As they grow up, they will learn more. But it is all part of the same system of faith and thought. Its words and values resonate throughout it all: love, compassion, sin, forgiveness, dignity, God, heaven. 

Love? Compassion? That’s what the Inquisition was? That’s what the Crusades were? That’s what the Irish industrial schools and Magdalen laundries were? That’s what the cesspit full of skeletons at Tuam was? That’s what the residential schools in Canada were?

Please.

Similarly with CRT, impenetrable academic discourse at the elite level is translated to child-friendly truisms, with the same aim — to change behavior. And so the notion that the most important thing about a child is that she is white, and this makes her part of an oppressive system purposely designed to hurt her new friend, who is black, is how this comes out in an actual real-life scenario. And she has to account for her indelible “whiteness”, just as Catholic kids have to account for their sins. CRT has its own words and values, and they are instilled from the beginning: racism, systems, intersectionality, hegemony, oppression, whiteness, privilege, cisgender, and “doing the work,” as CRT convert Dr. Jill Biden would say.

He’s talking about whiteness studies. Sir, sir, the target is over there.



Guest post: Critical Race Theory v Catholicism

Jun 21st, 2021 4:34 am | By

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Overdose of individualism.

I have just sent the following e-mail to Andrew Sullivan after his latest piece on the subject of race on his blog ‘The Dish’. He rightly takes issue with some horrid examples of what has happened in some schools, but…

Dear Mr Sullivan,

Well, this on Critical Race Theory was rather better than your ready inclusion of ‘systemic racism’ as one of the horrible, ambiguous un-Orwellian terms in your last piece, although I think that as usual you exaggerate things. I agree with much of what you say, particularly with respect to those examples from schools, but was — I am sorry — amused by your comparing these examples unfavourably to the things taught in Catholic Sunday schools. It does seem to me that if you don’t like the one kind of inculcation, you should at the very least find the other very dubious. They do not seem to me to be fundamentally different, though you seem to find the one better than the other since you believe that Christianity is about ‘love, compassion, sin, forgiveness, dignity, God, Heaven’ (I rather admire your positioning of ‘sin’, followed by that quick ‘forgiveness’) — or, rather, that children should be taught this so that they may be primed to accept the more unsavoury aspects of Christianity later on. My irreligiousness was prompted at a very young age as a result of being subjected to such platitudes in (Anglican) Sunday school, as well as by the sense one had that behind these nice, comforting, sentimental things were lurking absolute power, fear, and punishment, not to mention Hell, for children hear of Hell about the same time they hear of Heaven. I do not really see that Christianity, whether of the Catholic variety or not, particularly as presented to impressionable children, is superior, in terms of morality or truth, to the platitudes about race trotted out in the examples you provide.

But, regarding ‘systemic racism’, I would say that Macpherson’s original term, ‘institutional racism’, is better than ‘systemic racism’ since it makes it clear these are faults of actual and reasonably clearly defined institutions, whereas ‘systemic racism’ is vague, and so allows abuse. You speak of ‘The legacy of this country’s profound racism, the deep and abiding shame of its genocidal slavocracy, the atrocities, such as Tulsa, which have been white-washed, the appalling record of lynchings and beatings…’ You might add to this gerrymandering and other on-going attempts by the Republican Party, particularly since the election of Biden, to suppress the African-American vote, the long sentences handed out to African-Americans for trivial offences, the constitutional allowance (Article 13) that ‘slavery’ and ‘involuntary servitude’ is permitted in the case of those who ‘have been duly convicted’ of a crime (an Irish friend of mine who travelled in the States in the last century was appalled to see chain-gangs working on the roads in certain areas), the destruction of African-American neighbourhoods by routing freeways through them, etc, etc.

These are all clear examples of present institutional racism. If it were clearly recognised that these things are examples of institutional racism, and reforms were made, the wind would be taken out of the sails of those who propose such an all-encompassing account of racism that any reform seems impossible, and only race-war seems on the cards. It would also make for a juster society. But I do not find in your fulminations any recognition of this possibility — instead you merely lash out at those whom you consider your ideological enemies without coming up with any positive and pragmatic ways of overcoming the present situation.

Best wishes,

Tim Harris

Perhaps I should have added that making institutional reforms would also lead to less racist attitudes. It is not simply that institutions are racist because people are, but that institutional racism encourages overt racist attitudes in individuals.



History and headlines

Jun 20th, 2021 5:14 pm | By

Laurel Hubbard is on the team.

The New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard is set to make history and headlines, plus an enormous amount of controversy, after being confirmed as the first transgender athlete to ever compete at the Olympic Games.

He’s “set to make history and headlines” by stealing a place from a woman. How about thinking of her for one fucking second, Guardian? How about imagining what that feels like?

“I am grateful and humbled by the kindness and support that has been given to me by so many New Zealanders,” Hubbard said in a statement. 

Of course he’s not humbled. If he were humble he wouldn’t be doing it! It’s a shit thing to do to another person, and it takes colossal ego and selfishness to insist on doing it. There’s your making history and headlines.

“The last eighteen months has shown us all that there is strength in kinship, in community, and in working together towards a common purpose,” Hubbard added. 

Just stop. If it were anything to do with kinship and community and working together toward a common purpose he wouldn’t be cheating a woman out of her place. OBVIOUSLY.

The New Zealand Olympic Committee chief executive, Kereyn Smith, said Hubbard would be welcomed to the New Zealand team.

“As well as being among the world’s best for her event, Laurel has met the IWF eligibility criteria including those based on IOC guidelines for transgender athletes,” she said. “We acknowledge that gender identity in sport is a highly sensitive and complex issue requiring a balance between human rights and fairness on the field of play.

He’s among the world’s best women for his event, but he’s not a woman, so he’s not among the world’s best. He’s also a cheater and a selfish piece of crap.

“As the New Zealand team, we have a strong culture of ‘manaaki’ [respect] and inclusion and respect for all. We are committed to supporting all eligible New Zealand athletes and ensuring their mental and physical wellbeing, along with their high-performance needs, while preparing for and competing at the Olympic Games are met.”

But what Hubbard is doing is the opposite of respect and inclusion. He’s excluding the woman who should be in his place. It’s cheating and it’s cruel and a decent human being wouldn’t do it.



Ethical issues arising

Jun 20th, 2021 4:09 pm | By

Let’s think about autonomy.

https://twitter.com/STILLTish/status/1406562731763945476
https://twitter.com/STILLTish/status/1406562787321692162

In some cultures and contexts children have always experienced some forms of autonomy – like ones where their labor was necessary for example. Farm children – which was most children in most places for most recent history – were expected to do as much of the work as they physically could. The modern change is more in shielding them from work than in newly seeing value in autonomy for them.

But, that aside…children are children. The amount of autonomy it’s safe to give them is limited. Autonomy to decide to trash their own bodies…that’s one that should wait. The “thesis” that children know their own best interests is absurd, and thus reckless.