CLK above is replying to Bette Midler, who recently got in trouble for stating the obvious: “I thought you stood up for LGBT+ people” CLK tweeted.
To which the obvious reply would be that, well of course we want confused people who think they are born in the wrong body to have civil rights etc…but it doesn’t mean we don’t believe they are greatly confused.
That’s something we should be allowed to say in public.
We can believe both that people are confused AND that the cancelling of “woman” for the sake of “inclusion” is devastatingly beyond the pale.
Why is this not happening to “men”? Hmmm? As the graph above indicates. If you are a woman you are a “vulva owner.” If you are a man? Still a man?
Or will that term eventually be cast into the “dustbin of history” too?
The Ontario Human Rights Code is being used to silence concerned educators who speak up about inappropriate books in their Elementary school library. A teacher, Carolyn Burjoski, was removed from a virtual board meeting after her comments were deemed transphobic by the chair.
News Report About The School Board Meeting
During the meeting, Burjoski said, “Some of the books filling our libraries make it seem simple, or even cool to take puberty blockers or opposite-sex hormones.”
The teacher was interrupted by school board chair, Scott Piatkowski.
“I’m just getting a little concerned that your content may be problematic. I’m not sure exactly where you’re headed, but I would caution you to make sure that you’re not saying anything that would violate the human rights code.”
Bringing up a book titled The Other Boy by MG Hennessey, Burjoski said it chronicles the medical transition of a person “born female and now identifies as a boy.”
According to information in the teacher’s presentation, there are 106 copies of this book in K-6 WRDSB libraries.
She told the school board that after a character named Shane is told by a doctor that taking puberty blockers and starting testosterone will make him infertile in the future, the character responds with “it’s cool.”
Burjoski said that is “a very typical adolescent response.”
“This book is misleading because it does not take into account how Shane might feel later in life about being infertile. This book makes very serious medical interventions seem like an easy cure for emotional and social distress,” the teacher said.
She was stopped again by Piatkowski, who said her comments may violate the province’s protections for gender expression and gender identity.
“I believe the delegation is talking about age appropriateness,” said Trustee Cindy Watson, who was in favour of allowing Burjoski to continue speaking.
Eventually her 10 minute presentation was cut short by the chair.
It gets worse.
From her website “Cancelled Teacher” Carolyn Burjoski explains what happened after the school board meeting.
The day after the meeting, I was ordered to stay home from school and barred from speaking to my colleagues and students. Because of a Covid lockdown, I hadn’t seen my students since December 2021, and I would never see them again.
Shortly after the meeting, the Board filed a formal complaint against me and hired an outside Firm to conduct a disciplinary investigation, threatening various punishments. I could not believe what was happening to me.
That week, I became the center of a national media frenzy fuelled by statements made by the Board Chair on radio, TV and social media. He attributed to me remarks that I did not make, characterized them as hateful, and accused me of violating the Human Rights Code. The Board quickly removed the meeting video from its website so people could not hear for themselves what I actually said. The Board Chair’s harmful statements about me spread like wildfire over the internet, and I received a tidal wave of online abuse.
Burjoski is taking legal action for defamation and violation of her free speech rights.
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. - Notes on the State of Virginia
Freedom of Religion was an uncomplicated matter. For Jefferson, tolerance of other worldviews would be wide ranging unless it damaged him financially or harmed him physically.
Andrew B. Myers / The Atlantic
The times have changed. In today’s world the psychologized self reigns supreme such that if what you do or say hurts another person’s feelings then you have harmed them. This amounts to a form of oppression. The offender must therefore be silenced. No pockets need be picked. Nor legs broken.
Words and Ideas are enough to cause harm. Identities are thereby marginalized. And legitimacy denied.
Tolerance is passé. Affirmation or silence is required.
Obviously, in such a fragile world, freedom of religion and freedom of speech will be under threat.
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt were featured in a previous post.
Their very fine book, The Coddling of the American Mind offers insight into today’s fragile student psyche. And how we got to this point in our culture.
They wrote a series of articles in The Atlantic which they eventually turned into that book.
Here are some quotes:
In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.
Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said.
Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.
Source: The Atlantic
According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided.
