Saturday, October 11, 2014

Gender Insanity in Nebraska

What’s the matter with Nebraska? In particular, what’s the matter with the Lincoln, Nebraska school district where they have decided to unsex and dehumanize children?

How will these children ever understand what Lady Macbeth means when she says:

… Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe topful
Of direst cruelty!

Katherine Timpf explains the Nebraska follies:

A Nebraska school district has instructed its teachers to stop referring to students by “gendered expressions” such as “boys and girls,” and use “gender inclusive” ones such as “purple penguins” instead.

“Don’t use phrases such as ‘boys and girls,’ ‘you guys,’ ‘ladies and gentlemen,’ and similarly gendered expressions to get kids’ attention,” instructs a training document given to middle-school teachers at the Lincoln Public Schools.

“Create classroom names and then ask all of the ‘purple penguins’ to meet on the rug,” it advises.

The document also warns against asking students to “line up as boys or girls,” and suggests asking them to line up by whether they prefer “skateboards or bikes/milk or juice/dogs or cats/summer or winter/talking or listening.”

We must ask the salient question: Why purple? Why not blue or orange? And why penguins? Is it because they are bipeds? 

Even so, there is no such thing as a purple penguin. Why does the school district want children to think of themselves as fictional characters? Didn’t anyone see that it’s dehumanizing to treat children as though they are unreal penguins?

The mind boggles.

In truth, we are seeing what happens when mentally challenged school administrators take an idiotic idea seriously. In this case, the idea is that gender is socially constructed.

Timpf explains:

The teachers were also given a handout created by the Center for Gender Sanity, which explains to them that “Gender identity . . . can’t be observed or measured, only reported by the individual,” and an infographic called “The Genderbred Person,” which was produced by www.ItsPronouncedMetroSexual.com.

Try to get a grip on that one… the Center for Gender Sanity. Normally, sanity and insanity are psychiatric categories. In principle, insanity refers to people who ave lost touch with reality. Now, we are being told that an attempt to refer to reality makes you insane.

The mind boggles some more.

Lincoln, Nebraska administrators are trying to indoctrinate schoolchildren in a set of beliefs that defy science and that ignore reality.

Gender, by their lights, is a matter of belief. It has nothing to do with anatomy and cannot be measured or reported.

Thus a school district has been abusing the minds of children because a miniscule number of people are convinced that they were born in the wrong body. And children are supposed to take leave of their senses, their sensations… reality itself, in order to accommodate what might, for all we know, be a delusional belief.

For my part I find that this falls well within the bounds of child abuse.

The superintendent of the Lincoln Public Schools, Steven Joel should be fired immediately.



10 comments:

Ares Olympus said...

Certainly mindboggling. Here's an article that gives the SI's perspective.

I would have to imagine there's some sort of traumatized people with savior complexes trying to lead this gender inclusion process.

It is perfectly good for teachers and parents to be concerned and find out the facts for their school, and as necessary for people to put their foot down on nonsense.

But when facts are exaggerated, I don't think it helps anyone's cause.

http://journalstar.com/news/local/education/lps-superintendent-reacts-to-national-attention-directed-at-district-s/article_6bad25d6-98ee-57f6-ae59-9f95cfb14d65.html

“Never once has anyone inside our system mandated that a teacher take (the words) ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ or ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’ out of their interactions with children or interaction with adults. There’s no policy, there’s no procedure, there’s no changes being made to bathrooms in schools.”

Joel said the handouts were suggestions and strategies, not mandates, about how teachers could reach all students in their classrooms. The training occurred at the request of an Irving teacher looking for guidance dealing with students.

“This was about adults, professional educators, who care deeply about trying to reach and establish relationships with children,” Joel said. “They are looking for strategies about how to be more effective in the classroom.”

He said he was proud of teachers and principals for not being afraid to ask those questions.

A teacher who was apparently uncomfortable with the handouts distributed them to someone in the community, Joel said.

At that news conference, Joel said, the district was happy to answer parents' questions but would not spend more time with people around country choosing to react to something not grounded in fact.

Ares Olympus said...

p.s. This seems to be the document included. I think it is worth to be evaluated calmly without becoming hysterical.
http://nebraskafamilyalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Training-Handouts.pdf

The first page "12 easy steps" seem more problematic than the second and third pages.

The document claims we have a biology (male/female), a gender-identity (man/woman), a gender-expression (Masculine/feminine), and sexual orientation, attracted to (man/woman).

I'm not sure that these definitions are defendable, but I accept male/female and masculine/feminine ought to be considered distinct.

Like you could say "active and assertive" is a masculine trait and "receptive and nurturing" as feminine trait, but that doesn't mean only men can be assertive, and only women be receptive.

Carl Jung expressed also expressed contragender archetypes of Anima and Animus, and considered them as often projected onto the opposite gender, and help us understand the opposite gender, and also as a way to relating to our own inner divisions which can be slowly integrated as we get older.

So I think all of that is true in all people, not just about the 1-10% who don't conform to the simple gender roles assigned to them by society.

But back to the hysteria. Is it possible to do talk about ambiguity without scaring those who need gender-security?

Certainly anything to do with teaching kids is scary, the fear that traumatized (or deviant) people are confusing their kids!

People are uncomfortable about teaching SexEd, just biology, and even there agreed facts of what should be taught is probably vastly divergent and scary to people with specific beliefs.

Sam L. said...

"...the Center for Gender Sanity..."

Much like "the Democratic Republic of..." means the "Republic" is not democratic, the "Sanity" means the Center is not sane.

Webutante said...

That nuts like these are in charge of these kinds of policy decisions---yes which should qualify for child abuse and confusion---is truly criminal.

He should be fired immediately..

Ares Olympus said...

For anyone interested, here's a TedTalk with Sam Killermann, the author of the offending document.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRcPXtqdKjE

Ares Olympus said...

Here's a nonhysterical LOCAL response:
http://nebraskafamilyalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/LPS-Talking-Points.pdf

Concern with the Curriculum

The Gender Spectrum material is not just about teaching children what transgenderism is or how to treat those who are gender confused, it’s about affirming an extreme view of gender fluidity. Example: The Gender Bread Person

* This material goes beyond mere tolerance teaching into promotion and validation of lifestyles that not everyone agrees are moral.

* Many parents have concerns about lessons delving into transgender topics, redefining the meaning of male and female, introducing the idea of bisexuality. They feel it is inappropriate for their children. These parents have an equal right to be heard and respected.

* We send our children to school for academics, not thought camp on sensitive topics dealing with gender and human sexuality.

n.n said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
n.n said...

The telling part is the fluid or rather selective transition from nature v. nurture arguments posed by Genderbread persons and their bakers. It's also a problem when they advocate for normalization not tolerance of dysfunctional, unproductive, or fetish behaviors. Suddenly, evolutionary principles take a backseat to egoistic pleasures. These people are nothing if inconsistent.

Glengarry said...

Yet more proof that public education these days is fundamentally unserious.

Dennis said...

Sending a child to a public school is a form of child abuse. With the increasing sexualization of K through 12 one sees children who have their childhood stolen from them at the very time they should be exploring, being in awe of the things around them and learning to cope with small challenges. This even to the point of drugging, for the most part, boys. No wonder there are people who want to strike back at a system that is an anathema to a real educational experience.
Instead they are being loaded down with all the negatives of the world and are missing out on all the positives that far exceed the later. One cannot blame children for escaping into a virtual world, where most boys go to get away from the wretched feminism of what have become girls schools, using drugs and just becoming mental dropout from a very flawed educational system that places more emphasis on tenure than on the well being and education of students. Academe is one of the prime drivers of most of this insanity because they graduate people wholly unprepared to meet the exigencies of the world.
They don't learn that they need each other and have much to gain from the strengths of the other. They learn FEAR of each other. This of course is not going to redound well when this country faces real problems.
Worse yet with "Common Core" we are actually dumbing down," if that is possible, what every child should learn by pushing a one size fits all federal government, no matter how they dissemble, operated system.
The fact that academe can so readily deny people their due process rights is an indication of how far real scholarship has fallen. How easily they kowtow to the federal government. It would seem that academe is no longer the "marketplace of ideas" that they will defend. Cowards all.