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P.C.-CULTURE

Jordan Peterson in Hot Water over Pronouns (Again) By Christopher Paslay

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/07/jordan_peterson_in_hot_water_over_pronouns_again.html

God bless Jordan Peterson.  “Up yours, woke moralists,” Peterson told Twitter in a recent podcast when they suspended his account for tweeting a missive that apparently used incorrect gender pronouns and somehow violated Twitter’s ambiguous and purposely vague rules of conduct.  

Peterson wrote: “Remember when Pride was a sin?  And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician.”  Peterson is not bending to the woke mob, and says he’d rather die than delete his tweet.  Good for him.

Contrary to woke dogma, gender pronouns are meaningless.  Put another way, they are incoherent and indefinable, and when explored with any logic or rigor, they unravel into mush.  They violate basic grammar rules and create confusion in both the speaker and listener.  Using “they/them” as singular pronouns causes ambiguity and problematizes communication, and destabilizes established cultural and linguistic norms.  Further, because modern gender ideology teaches that gender is fluid and not fixed, pronouns can change at any time for any reason.

According to NPR’s “A Guide to Gender Identity Terms,” a person could identify as “he/they” or “she/they” simultaneously.  Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, deputy executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, who contributed to NPR’s guide, elaborates: “That means that the person uses both pronouns, and you can alternate between those when referring to them. So either pronoun would be fine — and ideally mix it up, use both.  It just means that they use both pronouns that they’re listing.”

Another Liberal Celebrity Bravely Tells Truth About Transgenderism By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/07/05/another-liberal-celebrity-bravely-tells-truth-about-transgenderism-n1610401

If you dare to speak out against transgender ideology, you’ll likely find yourself censored from social media and ostracized by your woke friends. The far left has highly politicized the issue of transgenderism, using its influence in pop culture and government to brainwash the public, particularly children, and force them into compliance with bully tactics.

So when someone on the left dares to speak out, it’s noteworthy. Why? Because they know the risks of doing so and have decided the truth is more important. As such, I applaud Grammy-winning singer Macy Gray for having the courage to speak the truth during her recent interview with Piers Morgan.

Morgan said he believed that transgender people deserve “fairness and equality,” and Gray agreed; however, he did point out that when it comes to sports, males have a clear biological advantage over females, and Gray agreed.

“I totally agree,” Gray told him. “And I will say this, and everybody’s going to hate me, but as a woman, just because you go change your parts doesn’t make you a woman. Sorry.”

“You feel that,” Morgan followed up.

Bette Midler sparks debate by saying trans-inclusive language erases women By Samantha Ibrahim

https://nypost.com/2022/07/05/bette-midler-sparks-debate-by-saying-trans-inclusive-language-erases-women/

Bette Midler caught some fire on Twitter on Monday when she tweeted about the trans community and the language used to describe them.

The “Hocus Pocus” star, 76, scribed: “WOMEN OF THE WORLD! We are being stripped of our rights over our bodies, our lives and even of our name!”

“They don’t call us ‘women’ anymore; they call us ‘birthing people’ or ‘menstruators,’ and even ‘people with vaginas!’ Don’t let them erase you! Every human on earth owes you,” she continued.

Fans slammed the “First Wives Club” star for her tweets about women and the LGBTQ community on

Twitter users slammed Midler on social media, with several arguing that her words were false.

“Really disappointed in this as a trans man and a Bette Midler fan. Bette, including trans men in the conversation about reproductive health does not harm women. We have the same organs, and even greater vulnerability, as cis woman,” one person replied to the “First Wives Club” alum.

Cancel Culture Goes to Washington George Washington University must change its name, says an article in, yes, the Washington Post. By Allen C. Guelzo

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cancel-culture-goes-to-washington-slavery-emancipation-freedom-history-president-11656699767?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

George Washington is a problem for George Washington University, according to the Washington Post. For years, the university in the nation’s capital has struggled with the shadow cast by President Washington’s ownership of slaves. In 2020 university officials began investigating the school’s sports teams’ name, the Colonials, because of the “ways colonists ravaged communities of color.” Last month “Colonials” disappeared. This spring, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Caleb Francois, a senior at the school, insisting that the university deal with “systemic racism, institutional inequality and white supremacy” by dropping the Washington name completely and renaming the university for Frederick Douglass.

George Washington certainly did own slaves. In addition to the 10 he inherited from his father, he accumulated another 65 through outright purchase over the years. When he married Martha Dandridge Custis in 1759, she brought another 84 slaves to the household at Mount Vernon. By 1786 the slaves numbered 216. In 1799, the last year of his life, Washington owned 317 men, women and children. Even in the years Washington served as the first president, he kept at least eight slaves in his home in the first capitals, New York and Philadelphia.

Nor was Washington necessarily an easy master. He punished four slaves for their “pranks” by selling them to the hell-on-water of the West Indies, and he approved the whipping by his overseers of the “very impudent.” When Ona Judge, one of the dower slaves Martha Washington brought with her to Philadelphia, bolted for freedom, Washington tried (in vain) to re-capture her. As a cure for his endless dental problems, he yielded to the persuasions of a French dentist in 1784 and paid his slaves for nine teeth to be extracted from their mouths and implanted in his.

Yet Washington’s time was also the Age of Enlightenment, when the classical hierarchies of the physical and political worlds were overthrown, to be replaced by the natural laws of gravity and the natural rights of “Nature and Nature’s God,” as the Declaration of Independence put it. Labor ceased to be a badge of subservience, and commerce became admirable. As commerce and labor gave people a greater sense of control over their lives for the first time in human history, slavery came to be seen as repugnant and immoral.

In a crisis-ridden era, the U.S. Navy focuses on…pronouns By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/06/in_a_crisisridden_era_the_us_navy_focuses_onpronouns.html

Winston Churchill memorably described British Navy traditions as “rum, sodomy, and the lash.” In America, the lash, thankfully, is gone and rum is for off-duty hours but sodomy (that is, homosexuality) has moved front and center. The latest example is the childish video the Navy is having its members watch so that they can learn how pronouns work, including avoiding “misgendering” fellow members of the Navy.

Our military exists to defend America against foreign enemies, whether the battle is fought overseas or, God forbid, ends on American soil. Currently, we have a lot of enemies: Biden is busy trying to get us into a hot war with Putin, China is expanding its military and geographic reach, Iran continues its efforts to develop a nuclear bomb, and North Korea already has a nuclear bomb.

And while those threats face America, our Navy is focused like a laser on pronouns. This focus doesn’t just represent a complete collapse in the military’s mission. It also represents a serious threat to the military’s operational efficiency.

Pronouns actually aren’t complicated, whether in English or any other language. They are the word we substitute in lieu of nouns or proper nouns when referring to any person, animal, or object. A sentence such as “Mary went to her room to gather her books and bag so that she could go to her school” becomes a clunky nightmare if we remove the pronouns: “Mary went to Mary’s room to gather Mary’s books and bag so that Mary could go to Mary’s school.”

Poll Finds No Pride for Preferred Pronouns for Kids By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/06/03/poll-finds-no-pride-for-preferred-pronouns-for-kids-n1602968

Last month, a school district in Wisconsin filed sexual harassment complaints under Title IX against three 8th-grade students because they referred to a classmate by the wrong pronoun. While this is a frightening development, it is somewhat comforting to know that a majority of voters believe that children should be referred to by their biologically (and grammatically) correct pronouns.

The latest Harvard-Harris poll found that 59% of those polled believe children should be referred to by their biological sex, while 41% say kids should be able to pick their pronouns.

Sixty percent of those polled say letting kids pick their pronouns is an “excessive measure that does more to confuse kids about their sex,” and 40% believe it prevents discrimination.

As you might have expected, party identification plays a huge factor in how those who were surveyed responded. Seventy-seven percent of Republicans believe children should be referred to by pronouns corresponding with their biological sex, while 61% of Democrats believe children should be able to pick whatever pronouns they want. Sixty-four percent of Independents believe children should be referred to by their biological sex—putting Democrats’ position on the fringe.

Woke ‘experts’ warn the word ‘obesity’ is RACIST and suggest ‘people with larger bodies’ instead University of Illinois Chicago wants to ban the word ‘obesity’ because focusing on body size is ‘rooted in racism’By Gina Martinez

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10829285/Woke-experts-warn-word-obesity-RACIST-suggest-people-larger-bodies-instead.html

Multiple woke academics now claim the word ‘obesity’ is racist and should be dropped in favor of ‘people with larger bodies.’  

The University of Illinois Chicago’s school of public health published a health brief titled: ‘Addressing weight stigma and fatphobia in public health’ that explored ‘the association between racism, weight, and health.’

According to Amanda Montgomery RD, public health’s focus on preventing obesity has brought in an increase of negative attitudes towards ‘people with larger bodies’ – her preferred alternative term – and is currently one of the only socially acceptable forms of discrimination. 

The brief claims that public health approaches related to obesity can be harmful because of the focus on one outcome – weight loss- and because it tends to ignore the root cause of the issue. 

Academics say many of the causes are rooted in discrimination borne of settlers driving Native Americans off their land, then forcing black and Hispanic workers to farm that land for low pay.  

Amanda Montgomery RD wrote that public health’s focus on preventing obesity has brought an increase of negative attitudes at people with larger bodies
At the lecture University of California, Irvine associate professor Sabrina Strings spoke about the racist roots of fatphobia, which she claims goes all the way back to slavery

‘The public health field has not taken a critical look at this research, focusing on the narrative that weight is controllable and a personal responsibility,’ the brief says. ‘If the goal is to find the most ethical and effective strategies to achieve optimal public health, there needs to be an alternative to ‘obesity’ and weight-focused approaches and a shift in understanding of weight stigma as a social justice issue.’

America is the fattest country in the western world with an estimated 40 percent of people — or 138 million — being obese. It is followed by New Zealand (30 percent), Canada (29.4 percent) and Australia (29 percent).

President Joe Biden will reveal his plans for tackling obesity this September, and has already set targets of improving physical activity and reducing diet-related diseases — like type 2 diabetes — nationally.

Chiefly Illiterate in San Francisco Schools The district pulls ‘chief’ from its CFO’s title as a progressive gesture to Native Americans

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chiefly-illiterate-in-san-francisco-schools-chief-native-american-11653599414?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The San Francisco school district is a slow learner, apparently. In February voters ousted three school-board members in landslide elections. One complaint was that the board was more interested in progressive gestures, such as scrubbing Abraham Lincoln’s name off school buildings, than in reopening classrooms amid the pandemic.

Now the San Francisco Chronicle reports that the school district is planning to phase out the word “chief” in its job titles, “given that Native American members of our community have expressed concerns.” Currently the district has executives with the customary roles of chief financial officer, chief of staff, and so on.

Here’s what is particularly amusing in this attempt at progressive sensitivity: While the English language has lots of words that can be traced to the native peoples of the Americas, including “chipmunk,” “barbecue” and “hurricane,” they don’t include “chief.” That word comes from Old French, and originally Latin, and the Oxford English Dictionary has citations back to 1297.

“Farewell great Chiefe,” says a character in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” That’s dated to the early 1600s. Somehow we doubt he was thinking about the Sioux. A biblical translation from William Tyndale in 1526 speaks of “the power of Belzebub, the chefe of the devyls.” The earliest examples are hard to parse unless you’re fluent in Beowulfese, but here’s one we grasp from 1483, a decade before Columbus sailed to the west: “She was made abbesse and chyef of al the monasterye.”

Schoolyard Cancel-Culture Bullies Come for Daniel Boone Chicago plans to change the name of my elementary school. By Joseph Epstein

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schoolyard-bullies-come-for-daniel-boone-political-correctness-chicago-virtue-history-canceling-11652713941?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

A plan is afoot to change the name of a Chicago grammar school I attended. Daniel Boone, under the reign of self-righteous political correctness, is now a problem. The old pioneer apparently kept seven slaves and took over lands belonging to (as we now say) indigenous people. (His daughter Jemima was also kidnapped by a Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party, but let that pass.) For these sins the Chicago Public Schools Office of Equity has decided Boone is a “historically egregious figure” and can’t be allowed to have a school named after him.

The question of a new name was taken up in March at what the Washington Examiner’s Abigail Adcox described as an “in-person forum for the renaming process that was exclusively for parents, guardians, staff, and community members who are ‘Black, Indigenous, [or] People of Color.’ ” The school’s neighborhood is now a mixture of East Asians and Orthodox Jews. Most of the Jewish children attend religious day schools.

I attended Boone School from ages 10 to 14. I find myself not shocked but distressed by the name change. Boone was the scene of many of the happiest days of my boyhood. I was a quarterback, a shortstop, a point guard. I danced the rhumba with Marie Goldman at my first boy-and-girl parties. I spent my summers playing ball on the school’s gravel playground. I made friends I retain more than 70 years later.

What is in it for those intent on taking down statues and changing names of institutions? A feeling of high virtue, through redressing injustices of the past by canceling its heroes. They have at their disposal a powerful weapon: the right to call anyone who disagrees a racist.

Already stretched thin, border agents must now used politically correct pronouns under new edict New requirement comes as border agents are bracing for historic surges of illegal migrants John Solomon

https://justthenews.com/government/security/already-stretched-thin-border-agents-must-now-used-politically-correct-pronouns

Battered by COVID-19, waves of illegal immigrants and fears of even larger surges ahead, Customs and Border Protection officers have a new burden: they must now be sure to use proper pronouns for LGBTQI+ migrants.

The new requirement was included Thursday at the bottom of a much larger announcement by the Homeland Security Department concerning changes instituted on International Trans Day of Visibility.

“Facilitating effective communication at U.S. ports of entry and beyond: CBP has provided a job aid and memorandum to all staff that will serve as a guide for facilitating effective communication with the diverse public CBP serves, including LGBTQI+ individuals,” the agency said. I

“The guidance includes using gender-neutral language and an individual’s self-identified pronouns and name,” it added.

CPB‘s requirements came as a Biden Administration made sweeping actions across numerous agencies to create new accommodations for transgender and non-binary people.

The State Department on Thursday announced that US Citizens will be able to choose “X” as their gender rather than “Male” or “Female” on their passports