I’m not surprised…
…that this is happening.
I’m surprised that it’s happening in Nebraska:
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.
Come to think of it—“purple penguins”? In middle school? These people will be laughed out of the classroom—although it’s really not that funny (I wonder if laughter will get a student sent to the re-education camps).
More:
The instructions were part of a list called “12 steps on the way to gender inclusiveness” developed by Gender Spectrum, an organization that “provides education, training and support to help create a gender sensitive and inclusive environment for children of all ages.”
Other items on the list include asking all students about their preferred pronouns and decorating the classroom with “all genders welcome” door hangers.
If teachers still find it “necessary” to mention that genders exist at all, the document states, they must list them as “boy, girl, both or neither.”
Furthermore, it instructs teachers to interfere and interrupt if they ever hear a student talking about gender in terms of “boys and girls” so the student can learn that this is wrong.
“Point out and inquire when you hear others referencing gender in a binary manner,” it states. “Ask things like . . . ”˜What makes you say that?…”
I can imagine a middle school student patiently explaining “well, you see, boys have penises and girls have…”
Once again, the re-education camps.
[NOTE: These people, described in a previous post, were the vanguard. Actually, all campaigns for gender-neutral language—even ones that may have seemed innocuous at first (“firefighter” for “fireman,” for example)—were the vanguard.]
As long as there is no God in our Judeo-Christian culture, then, “male and female He created them” is a myth to be ignored. The embrace of homosexuality has had a lot of unintended consequences. At least, unintended by those that didn’t want to be exclusionary or believed this was compassionate. For these, it just wasn’t thought through.
People who would believe this is true would believe that our ambassador to Libya was slaughtered entirely due to the release of a random YouTube video.
You are just trying to slip someone’s dystopian fantasy past me here, neo. Some second-rate Huxley’s waste paper musings or something.
What happened?
I’m not surprised that groups like Gender Spectrum exist. What amazes me is how easy it is for their extremist notions to be considered serious thought and to pass through the supposed gatekeepers of the school systems.
Glenn Reynolds keeps noting that sending one’s children to public schools is now tantamount to child abuse. I think he’s hit the nail on the head.
Never been there, but I understand Lincoln is the home of the U of N, so it’s the Austin or Berkeley of Nebraska.
mezzrow:
Are you saying the article’s a hoax? If so, the National Review (among many others) were fooled. I’m going by the sources, which are usually quite reliable.
Checking Snopes, (which is not infallible either, of course) it says it’s basically true, although these are recommendations rather than hard and fast rules.
I never said these were some sort of hard and fast rules or mandates, either. I quoted the NR article that said “instructed.” And indeed, the teachers were instructed, in a workshop/training/seminar sort of thing, as described in the post and the quotes.
So I’m not sure what you mean. Were you meaning to be humorous?
XX or XY. Everyone has a pair and only one pair.
Gather around, my XXs and XYs.
That is Lincoln. I am Omaha.
That is the home of the University of Nebraska.
I am a Creighton person through and through.
Lincoln is crazy liberal; mostly because of the University.
When someone suggested that a new city park be named for hometown boy Dick Cheney, the former Vice President was compared to Hitler and similar criminals by the peanut gallery of the local paper.
Lincoln is very weird and easily the most liberal city in the state. People from NYC would feel at home there.
Funny story about Lincoln. Local public school teacher got angry one night and set a fire on the desk of her boss. Burned the LPS HQ to the ground. Thst’s LPS.
Can’t we start a campaign to have “trigger warnings” about any article written by someone who doesn’t know the difference between a girl and a boy? It is offensive to me as a reasonable rational human being. And while we are at it can’t we sue people who are trying to steal our language and our literary heritage?
Since the brilliant Martin O’Malley has declared WiFi to be a human right, why not declare a universal right to have both a penis and a vagina?
If you read the OWH and LJS on the same day the only thing in common is the space devoted to Cornhusker sports.
Or perhaps 11 and 10, or 00 and 01, depending on your numerical bias, will find favor in the digital age. Now to explain why the other two permutations are not found in nature.
School board meeting October 14th.
Should be fun.
Best source for the story is Nebraskawatchdog.org.
I don’t think OWH or LJS reported it.
Here’s an Oct. 1 article about this in the Lincoln Journal Star that’s got quite a lot of information, and explains no one was ordered to do anything; it was just part of guidance given to teachers.
The big problem seems to be that most of the folks in the school system there really aren’t ideologues, but they are easily influenced by those who actually are. They’re in this muddle because they sincerely want to be understanding and helpful — couple of quotes:
“The agenda we’re promoting is to help all kids succeed,” said Brenda Leggiardo, LPS [Lincoln Public Schools] coordinator of social workers and counselors. “We have kids who come to us with a whole variety of circumstances, and we need to equitably serve all kids.”
and
“Part of education in addition to academics is the feeling of welcomeness, the relationship piece.”
@neo
I don’t doubt your veracity, neo. And I know you have not been snookered.
At the moment of reading this, it just struck me so completely that this whole thing rolls out like some kind of neo-Huxley dystopian fantasy.
I am all too aware this is real. How long can human nature be so thoroughly denied with a straight face, that’s all. I am such a squish on social matters that I am about as pure a libertarian as one can be.
That said, you can’t deny biology, and that’s what’s going on here. This is a clue that we’re getting to about the end of this, and it won’t be pretty. Just waiting for that knife to fall.
Schoolchildren Made to Use Unisex Bathrooms
Pupils were shocked to discover they had to share the ‘gender neutral’ toilets at the start of the school year, sparking concerns from parents.
Many say their children do not want to use facilities split with the opposite sex and it makes them feel ‘uncomfortable’.
Harbour Primary School in Newhaven, East Sussex, has defended the move, which it says is about ‘preventing transphobia’.
Educrats Attempt to Impose Polysexual Androgyny on Innocent Schoolchildren
Administrators for the Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska recently started training staff on gender bending policies that are on steroids.
Concerned with offending children who may be confused about their gender, they have decided to shove their heads in the sand and androgynize all the students. ‘Girls’ and ‘Boys’ are words of concern in the Lincoln Public Schools. …
The Lincoln Public Schools used a “Genderbread Person” as an example to teach educators to no longer identify students by their gender. Rather than being boys and girls, students now should be considered sexless cookies because, “Gender is one of those things everyone thinks they understand, but most people don’t.”
graphics to go with text…
http://gunsandcurves.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Screen-Shot-2014-10-07-at-8.19.39-AM.png
It is virtually impossible to follow the thought processes of some people. Unfortunately, the “some people” to which I refer too often migrate to positions of authority or influence.
It seems that rational people are too busy living their lives, while the irrational are very busy interfering in the lives of others.
I almost laughed at the argument that these were simply “guidelines”. What happens, I wonder, to anyone who colors too far or too often outside the guidelines?
They should choose Lola (tastes like cherry cola) as their gender neutral hashtag for the kiddies. Echoing above comments, I known Nebraska and Lincoln is an anomaly. State universities and universities in general spread idiocy well beyond the campuses.
When I travel to Lincoln, it always feels like the Heart of Darkness: Liberal and Cornhuskers.
Beating the Corn in basketball at here place two seasons ago was a great feeling. And one of starters had a heart incident during warm ups!
Lincoln is to Nebraska as Austin is to Texas or Madison is to Wisconsin–
that’s your Miller Analogy answer for today.
As Orwell said, some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals will believe them.
Can the teachers say y’all?
Gawd. The stupidity–it hurts. Fits right in a book I am currently rereading: “Intellectual Morons–How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas. ” written by Daniel J. Flynn and published in 2004.
At last we must pray that the children rise up against their parents. Where is 60s radicalism and deconstruction when you really need it…
Just FYI, Snopes took a look at this today (10/9) and determined that while there were new “gender inclusive” guidelines, the “purple penguins” nonsense is a myth:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/education/purplepenguins.asp
Artfldgr –
‘preventing transphobia and encouraging transphilia’.
FIFY
😛
In math, we have a mnemonic for remembering the sequnce of operations to perform long division: “Dad Mother Sister Brother” (Divide, Multiply, Subtract, Bring down).
I got out of teaching a year ago. Just in time. You can imagine how offensive “Dad, Mother, Sister, Brother” is going to be in two years.
Even it is just a recommendation, it should have never gotten past the draft stage. You can welcoming to students without taking it to an extreme. This is for something like %.01 of the population, this complete blurring of an obvious, biological fact of there being two sexes.
Re: “Harbour Primary School in Newhaven, East Sussex, has defended the move, which it says is about ‘preventing transphobia’.
I’m just going to make a wild guess that the sexual harassment/sexual assault that something like this welcomes is/would be more prevalent than the number of trans students. How far are they willing to risk all of their students comfort and safety in order to appear tolerant to % .01 of the population?
Christy M:
I already discussed Snopes, in my comment at 3:02 PM on this thread.
They didn’t say it was a myth, and they didn’t say there was nothing about “purple penguins.” In fact, all of that was indeed in the training.
The only thing Snopes corrected was that none of it was mandatory or official guidelines (as some people had supposedly described it). It was a training, and instructions i.e. suggestions—just as this post had said.
Pretending men and women are the same has consequences. Female diesel mechanics in the Army often have to get a man to help them lift a wheel. The Secret Service agent at the White House door that the intruder blew through was a woman.
State establishment of religion is UNCONSTITUTIONAL, be it Islamofascism or Lutheranism or the church of gender neutrality. I am so sick of the state establishment of eco-religion here in California that I have taken to on-occasion loudly commenting on its impositions.
“Would you like to pay for a paper bag” the cashier at Safeway dutifully asks (plastic bags not being available at any price, by order of the commissariat). If there is a line behind me, which would usually be half composed of of the eco-lunatics who voted for our perverted bag laws, I will answer: “Yes, thank you. It is a small price to pay to not be forced to submit to the sacraments of an evil religion.”
I might even have managed to deter the Palo Alto City Council from implementing proposed drastic punishments for residents who fail to separate their trash as meticulously as possible. They were going to stop picking up the trash of such offenders at all, forcing us to drive our own trash down to San Jose (the only other option now that the local dump has been closed in pursuit of an announced goal of “100% recycling”).
I pointed out that they were planning to punish people for failing to fully participate in the sacraments of their eco-religion and I promised that if they tried to sanction me I would do my utmost to sue the town into bankruptcy. They did back off, and I like to think I played a part.
Any parent whose child is being subject to an ideology like gender-neutrality that can so obviously be construed as a radical new religion should also be able to raise a credible threat of first amendment suit, and carry through if necessary.
Everyone needs to play their part in pushing this nonsense back into the darkness from whence it came. Do not use the preferred euphemisms. Use the correct pronouns.
When corrected, use the correct pronouns twice as loudly. Make it clear that we will not tolerate this fascism.
Well, we’re so far into CloudCuckooLand here I see rational comment as superfluous.
Gee, I wonder how the Muslim students and their parents feel about unisex bathrooms and so on.
We are at the beginning of a social & moral transformation as thorough as the Christianizing of Europe. This is one more step along the way.
miklos000rosza: Bingo!!
I’m going to take a wild guess and say that devout Muslims in Lincoln, Nebraska, are not terribly common.
Someday the two cultures — the Perpetually-Offended, Painfully Politically Correct (POPPC aka “popsy”) and the Sharia Forever crowd — will clash. It won’t be pretty when it does.
(In the meantime, though, will we someday see nonsense e.g. “Political Correctness for Muslims” demonstrations? Having seen Queers For Palestine taken seriously, I truly wouldn’t be surprised…)
This is just cover for the education department selling children to child molestors, aka teachers.
The claim by the advocates of gender-neutral speech is that a small subset of children with gender confusion are harmed by gender-specific terminology. But what of the vast majority of children who don’t have a gender disorder? Aren’t they harmed by the refusal to make the basic distinction between male and female human beings? Why sacrifice the many for the sake of the few?
“Attention Legal Guardians:
The purple penguin known as Johnny, who is legally under your care, has been apprehended on multiple occasions arising from the perpetration of unacceptable behaviors and thoughtcrimes.
The student has been charged with multiple counts of heteronormative behavior, possession of testoterone without a license, and several general violations of Human Rights, including aggravated pigtail yanking and inappropriate and inflammatory use of the phrase “neener neener neener” in flagrant violation of the School Systems rules against expressing any kind of value judgement or comparing one person, idea or thought to another.
The detainee has been remanded to the custody of Comrade Smith’s detention facility from 3:00 to 4:00 every day for the next week, where the student will complete a course of writing 1000 times, “The exercise of free will and independent thought is an aberration that must be cleansed.”
Said punishment will be implemented using 100% post-consumer recycled paper and soy-based ink.
Superintendent Joel
Lincoln School System Minitrue
p.s. Although this violation will not jeopardize the student’s conduct grade of “E”, since according the School Board rules and State Law, all grades must reflect the equality of all persons, views and sexual proclivities, the Commissar of Grading Standards has approved the use of an italic font when awarding this grade.
It’s a good thing I’m not teaching there. Because I probably wouldn’t be teaching there after I crumpled up their stupid handouts and bounced them off the forehead of the idiot leading the training.
Morons.