Irreversible Damage: the transgender movement and young girls

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written about this before, but I want to mention it again, because if any of you have children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren in the school system, you need to be alert and aware of the fact that the current climate around transgender identity is harming children and especially young girls [emphasis mine]:

Gender dysphoria, the acute discomfort in one’s biological sex, was, until about five years ago, extremely rare…

…[But] over the past decade…there has been a huge increase among teenage girls and female university students, most notably in the US, the UK and Scandinavia. Transgenderism is certainly no longer the preserve of adult males, as it once had been…

…[Author] Shrier looks at why many girls, often from the point they start menstruating onwards, start to feel alienated from their own bodies, despite never having experienced any previous discomfort in their biological sex.

The first key factor for Shrier is the role of trans narratives propagated within schools. ‘Gender affirmation’ is rife within public schools across the US, she writes. She goes on to show how classrooms are being colonised by therapists eager to push children towards a pathway of lifelong medicalisation…

The second key factor is the rise of online trans-influencer culture. In some ways, this has been the engine driving the transgender narrative over the past decade. It hooks into contemporary youngsters’ need to establish a social identity and have it affirmed. Indeed, such is the power of online trans influencers that it is surely no coincidence that, as Shrier puts it, ‘over 65 per cent of teens had increased their social-media use and time spent online immediately prior to their announcement of transgender identity’…

Shrier also criticises the common and coercive trans-culture tropes that appear online, including: ‘If your parents loved you, they would support your trans identity’, and, ‘If you’re not supported in your trans identity, you’ll probably kill yourself’. She even uncovers online trans influencers showing kids how to convince doctors they’re trans in order to receive prescriptions for hormone-blockers or hormones. The damage all this does to young girls’ bodies is terrifying.

What’s more, the medical world offers no resistance.

Please read the whole thing. I haven’t read the book, but here it is. It sounds not only good, but important.

I have noticed all the trends mentioned in the excerpt. In particular, YouTube is rife with it. I’ve read the comments there, too, and it is clear to me that this is at least in part (and a large part at that) a contagion effect.

You can also find the stories of detransitioners on YouTube, girls (and some boys) who regret transitioning to the opposite sex and are trying to transition back. Even if they haven’t had what’s known as “bottom” surgery, some of the effects of the hormones they have taken are devastating and irreversible, especially for girls. Just as an example, teenaged girls who take male hormones experience a deepening of the voice that is ordinarily irreversible. To see these detransitioned girls and young women, speaking with male voices emanating from their female bodies, and to know that this effect is permanent, is a sorrowful experience .

She’s not woke enough – literally

The New Neo Posted on by

The Red Guard rides again:

Nearly 2,000 people called for the termination of a New York City professor after she reportedly fell asleep during an anti-racist meeting held on Zoom.

Patricia Simon, a theater arts associate professor at Marymount Manhattan College, is facing requests for her removal after a June 29 Zoom meeting to discuss the adoption of an “anti-racist framework.”

You will not be allowed to sleep through the revolution – although it seems that Simon claims she didn’t actually sleep, she was just resting her “Zoom-weary eyes,” and that she listened with her “ears and heart the entire meeting.”

Not good enough, Ms. Simon. Not nearly good enough. You must listen with your entire body.

What appears to be the case here is that Simon’s apparent Zoomsnooze gave disgruntled students a chance to tee off at a teacher who had offended many of her prickly charges before. My favorite accusation is this one: “enabling the racist and sizeist actions and words of the vocal coaches under her jurisdiction.” These days “racist” can mean anything, literally anything. But reading between the lines, I’d guess that Simon may have committed the unpardonable crime of pointing out to some significantly overweight students that their career opportunities out in the world – as opposed to within the hallowed halls of Marymount – might be limited somewhat by that extra poundage. Reality, unfortunately, is still somewhat “sizeist.”

When I was in college, no one cared what we students thought of our professors, unless they did something remarkably egregious (raped someone? murdered someone?). We were not even asked – not once – to fill out evaluation forms. I had a number of really bad or really mean ones. That wasn’t the greatest of situations, but the pendulum has now swung so far in the other direction that it’s coming round to bite us all in the you-know-what.

More evidence about the benefits of hydroxychloroquine

The New Neo Posted on by

With all the other news, it’s easy to forget how the drug hydroxychloroquine was trashed after Trump had the audacity to mention it as being promising. But let’s not forget, because lives were lost as a result of the anti-Trump response.

It’s very sad:

President Trump expressed optimism based on studies in France and China, and the media freaked out. The president’s political opposition would go on to cling to any proof the drug would not work and suppress any information that it would. This politicization culminated in the horrific study published by Lancet that the publication quietly retracted.

However, the damage was already done. The World Health Organization suspended trials immediately after the study published in Lancet. Switzerland, which had been using the treatment, prohibited the use of the drug in COVID-19 shortly after that on May 27th. The retraction was so stealth that the ban was not lifted in Switzerland until June 11th.

This window allowed French researchers to analyze what happened in the entire population of COVID-19 patients during the ban. They used the case fatality rate (CFR) as the measure observed. The graph is stunning.

Here’s the graph:

Please read the whole piece.

Another sad thing is that most people will never know, because the same media outlets that helped cause the problem aren’t likely to call our attention to what they themselves have done.

[NOTE: I wonder whether the researchers who did this study will be canceled because of where it led them.]

And in classic Orwellian fashion, these racists call themselves “anti-racists”

The New Neo Posted on by

Leftists love to give themselves titles that are the opposite of their essence. Orwell knew this, and it was a prominent part of his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four.

We see it today in the names of several organizations. For example, “Antifa” (whose members actually lean toward the leftist wing of anarchism), which supposedly stands for “anti-Fascist,” is the closest thing this country has to brownshirts right now. And “Black Lives Matter” – founded by avowed Marxists and admirers of Venezuela – could more accurately be called “The Only Black Lives That Matter Are Those Snuffed Out By White Cops, and We Don’t Care If the Policies We Advocate Lead to the Deaths of Countless More Innocent Black People Than Are Ever Killed By Police.”

That name would be a bit unwieldy on a poster, though.

The “anti-racism” advocates sound as though they’re promoting a good thing, too. “Anti-racism”? Sign me up for the course! Except that, unfortunately for all of us (except the anti-racism trainers themselves, who are smiling all the way to the bank), they are advocates of a racism that’s remarkably pernicious and cleverly – well, the word “diabolical” comes to mind (here’s an article from The Federalist that will get you up to speed on the details, if you aren’t already).

How does flagrant racism, and the promotion of a program that will lead to more racism rather than less, come to be defined as anti-racism? Well, never underestimate the creativity of the left, but in this case it pretty much boils down to the fact that the left defines everything in terms of the power hierarchy (as they order that hierarchy, of course). So racism can only be exercised by the group or groups the left sees as being on top.

In other words, to the left, racism against white people is some sort of oxymoron – it literally does not exist and cannot exist. So we get things such as this, which harms just about everyone:

I repeat: this harms everyone. Except, of course, the purveyors of anti-racism. It may even harm black children the most.

Now it’s Andrew Sullivan’s turn…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to say buh-bye:

“I am trying hard to create in this magazine a civil, respectful, intellectually honest space for political debate,” Haskell [the New York editor] said. “I believe there is a way to write from a conservative* perspective about some of the most politically charged subjects of American life while still upholding our values. I also think that our magazine in particular has an opportunity to be a place where the liberal project is hashed out, which is to say not only championed but also interrogated.”

Or as Seth Mandel of the Washington Examiner tweets, “Translation: I want to challenge our reader base but I don’t know how to do that without challenging our reader base,” adding, “that feeling when you thought you were publishing far-right-wing ideas because you hired Jon Chait.”

And while we’re on the subject of cancel culture, there’s this:

Until last week, Gary Garrels was senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). He resigned his position after museum employees circulated a petition that accused him of racism and demanded his immediate ouster.

“Gary’s removal from SFMOMA is non-negotiable,” read the petition. “Considering his lengthy tenure at this institution, we ask just how long have his toxic white supremacist beliefs regarding race and equity directed his position curating the content of the museum?”

I confess I’ve never heard of Garrels or of SFMOMA. Sounds like quite the Nazi, doesn’t he? Let’s see:

The petitioners cite few examples of anything even approaching bad behavior from Garrels. Their sole complaint is that he allegedly concluded a presentation on how to diversify the museum’s holdings by saying, “don’t worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists.”

Garrels has apparently articulated this sentiment on more than one occasion. According to artnet.com, he said that it would be impossible to completely shun white artists, because this would constitute “reverse discrimination.” That’s the sum total of his alleged crimes. He made a perfectly benign, wholly inoffensive, obviously true statement that at least some of the museum’s featured artists would continue to be white. The petition lists no other specific grievances.

Are these people that powerful? Or was Garrels just tired of the fight? I could easily understand it if he were.

Here’s an article that sheds a bit more light on the Garrels flap. It appears to me that the expression “reverse discrimination,” which he used, was part of the list of his terrible crimes. My suspicion is that to the anti-racist woke, “reverse discrimination” cannot possibly exist, because of their Marxist power-dominated definition of discrimination.

Also there’s this:

…[Garrels’] lasting legacy at SFMOMA may be tied to two very different initiatives: the museum’s extended loan deal of the Fisher Collection and its decision, last year, to auction off a painting by Mark Rothko for $50.1 million in order to create a dedicated fund to acquire work by female artists, artists of color, and LGBTQ+ artists. Works that have been acquired using the fund include pieces by Rebecca Belmore, Forrest Bess, Frank Bowling, Leonora Carrington, Lygia Clark, and Norman Lewis.

So the auction and the use of the funds to buy up works by members of the designated interest groups were not enough to save Garrels. Apparently the whiteness of the Fisher Collection was a problem that offset that effort:

In 2009, Gap founders Donald and Doris Fisher agreed to lend their collection of 1,100 works to the museum for 100 years. As part of the deal, the museum agreed to organize Fisher-only displays once a decade and to keep three-quarters of the works on show at all times in designated galleries as Fisher works. But the collection contains very few works by women or artists of color, creating a structural dominance of white men in the museum’s galleries.

Those nefarious Gap collectors of white male art!! No wonder Garrels had to go.

Quite some time ago, I noticed that museum art of the modern variety had become totally political. Even for collections of older works, much of the commentary is such leftist PC claptrap that it often ruins the exhibit and in order to enjoy the art you have to skip the explanatory materials on the wall.

Then again, Soviet art wasn’t very good either.

The Littleton shooting

The New Neo Posted on by

In Detroit, a 20-year-old black man was killed by police. His name was Hakim Littleton.

Black Lives Matter, the organization dedicated to publicizing and protesting all deaths of black people at the hands of police (particularly white police), sprung into action with predictable results:

…[A]round 300 converged at the site of the shooting on Detroit’s west side, yelling at police and chanting ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Defund DPD!’

Several members of the crowd threw bottles, bricks and other projectiles at officers, who deployed tear gas and made eight arrests.

Many of the protesters were carrying signs and chanting ‘we want badge numbers,’ and ‘killer cops get out of town.’

Sound familiar? But something was different. The police chief James Craig (who happens to be black, by the way) immediately released a video of the incident, and it revealed that Littleton had actually fired at a police officer from about three feet away, aiming at the officer’s head. He missed, and the officer gave chase, as several other officers fired on Littleton and felled him, causing his death.

Craig said he released the video hours after the incident to quell ‘a false narrative’ that the shooting was unjustified. The ‘erroneous information that was put out has incited violence,’ he said.

I don’t have a full text of Craig’s remarks, but I wonder whether he named who put out that “erroneous information” (better known in the past as a lie).

The incident began with the investigation of a fatal shooting days earlier at a party. Police came to arrest another man, Darnell Sylvester (apparently a friend of Littleton’s), who was wanted on an outstanding drug arrest and who was also a suspect in that earlier shooting. Sylvester followed police instructions and was being taken into custody when Littleton (who was not being arrested) decided to act quite differently.

This entire incident highlights many things. One is that if a person cooperates, no problem. The second is that some people with guns aren’t good shots. The third is that police work is very very dangerous and difficult. The fourth is that BLM and other such groups are in the business of firing up cop-hatred without any interest in learning facts first. The fifth is that videocams can sometimes help tell the truth. The sixth is the political use of a story: will this one fade, or will Littleton enter the pantheon of BLM’s martyrs?

“The unhinged revolution is trying to make the U.S. into one big CHOP”

The New Neo Posted on by

That title is a quote from this article by Victor Davis Hanson. Please read the whole thing.

Hanson isn’t ordinarily given to extreme statements. I’ve followed his columns and articles for years. He’s become more bitter and more angry, as have most of us (I include myself). This particular article is written at great intensity, and he’s clearly alarmed.

Hanson seems to think this thing may be burning itself out. The title of his piece indicates that we possibly have reached “Peak Jacobinism” (again, interesting that this appears on Bastille Day, from a historian such as Hanson).

I’m not at all sure we have – and neither, I may add, is Hanson. I hope so. But I don’t think so.

The New York Times may regret firing* Bari Weiss

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I think it’s apropos to note that today is Bastille Day.]

Journalist Bari Weiss resigned today from The New York Times. She may ultimately become more damaging to the Times as a voice on the outside than she ever was when she was on the inside. In other words, the Times may end up regretting not having heeded the words of the inimitable LBJ: “It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”

Weiss was one of the few remaining sort-of-centrist voices left at the Times. Therefore, of course, the tumbrels came for her. She is not going gentle into that good night; here’s her scorching resignation letter:

But the lessons that ought to have followed the [2016] election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

When James Bennett was forced from the Times for having the audacity to publish an editorial by Tom Cotton, I noticed on Twitter that the New Jacobins were calling for Bari Weiss’ head next. It was not long in coming. Here’s Weiss’s resignation letter again:

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

That last sentence also feels like a reference to the Times’ mendacious rewrite of American history, the 1619 Project.

Weiss gets into some details:

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.

Will anyone ever be charged with such things regarding their treatment of Weiss? I’m sorry to have to say I doubt it, particularly if the offenders are from any of several protected groups.

However, in this next part, Weiss seems to indicate that she doesn’t quite get it – not fully, anyway:

I do not understand how you [the editor to which the note is addressed] have allowed this kind of behavior to go on inside your company in full view of the paper’s entire staff and the public. And I certainly can’t square how you and other Times leaders have stood by while simultaneously praising me in private for my courage. Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.

And yet in a later passage she shows that she actually does understand exactly what’s going on:

Perhaps [other people working at the Times have allowed the behavior of those who have been trying to cancel Weiss] because they believe the ultimate goal is righteous. Perhaps because they believe that they will be granted protection if they nod along as the coin of our realm—language—is degraded in service to an ever-shifting laundry list of right causes. Perhaps because there are millions of unemployed people in this country and they feel lucky to have a job in a contracting industry.

Or perhaps it is because they know that, nowadays, standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits. It puts a target on your back. Too wise to post on Slack, they write to me privately about the “new McCarthyism” that has taken root at the paper of record.

That is the saddest thing of all – the private stand of some supporters of Weiss versus their craven public caving. It’s an old story; courage is in short supply.

I wish Weiss well. I think she will find another place to write, although I’m not sure where it will be. And the Times will go on – and on and on – purging itself of its actual thinkers, making itself more and more into the voluntary Pravda of our times, and wreaking its tremendous damage on our country and the world.

[* NOTE: I’m aware that the title of this post is technically incorrect. The paper didn’t fire Weiss; she resigned. But I’m using the word “firing” instead because she obviously was driven out. I suppose to be more accurate I could say “forcing Bari Weiss to resign,” but that’s unwieldy and doesn’t express the situation perfectly either. So I let “firing” stand, with this note to clarify.]

Allan Bloom again, on the genesis of what’s happening now

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: The following is a revised and updated version of a post I wrote over seven years ago, based on Allan Bloom’s book published in 1987.]

I’ve written before about Allan Bloom’s masterful The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987, here and here.

And I probably will again. It is so richly loaded with thought that almost every sentence might cause the reader to pause and reflect. Plus, it’s extremely readable. Bloom has done something extraordinarily difficult, which is to write a serious work about education, politics, history, and philosophy in a very lively style.

Apparently, that’s the kind of guy he was.

On reading the book, I was blown away at the outset by the first few paragraphs of his introduction, entitled “Our Virtue.” And so I’m going to reproduce some of it verbatim, just for you, to whet your appetite for the book itself. Remember as you read this that it was written no later than 1987, and probably a bit earlier [emphasis mine]:

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4. Those are things you don’t think about. The students’ backgrounds are as various as America can provide. Some are religious, some atheists; some are to the Left, some to the Right; some intend to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessmen; some are poor, some rich. They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral intention. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society. That it is a moral issue for students is revealed by the character of their response when challenged—-a combination of disbelief and indignation: “Are you an absolutist?,” the only alternative they know, uttered in the same tone as “Are you a monarchist?” or “Do you really believe in witches?” This latter leads into the indignation, for someone who believes in witches might well be a witch-hunter or a Salem judge. The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness, and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.

Let’s pause here for a moment to digest that. Bloom is saying in 1987 that openness is the only virtue primary education has been dedicated to inculcating for more than fifty years. That would put the beginning in the Thirties. And Bloom isn’t talking just about colleges; he specifically mentions “primary school.”

I have to say that it’s not what I was taught, or certainly not solely what I was taught. I went to primary school in the Fifties, and my teachers were old, really old for the most part. I think most of them were close to retirement age, which would place their births close to the turn of the century or even in the 1800s. That might explain a lot about my education, which was fairly old-fashioned.

Bloom continues [emphasis mine]:

Openness—and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings—is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right,; rather it is not to think you are right at all.

There’s a lot in that paragraph, too. But the situation has changed since he wrote it, and even since I wrote my earlier post on the subject. The idea that the beliefs of the past were “mad” has now given way to the idea that all those beliefs are evil, and we can’t even learn about the people who believed that and their other accomplishments. We must obliterate them and their symbols, and ignore or belittle their accomplishments. And the last sentence, about not thinking you’re right at all, has very much given way to the idea of the left that the only right thing is what the left says it is. They can change that from day to day, as the left is wont to do, but they’re still always right (including in the moral sense).

Bloom again [emphasis mine], with an important and telling anecdote from his own past:

The students, of course, cannot defend their opinion. It is something with which they have been indoctrinated…

Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection,; but even the neutral subject, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person…Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime…A powerful attachment to the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man’s reason, was the goal of the education of democratic man…

But openness…eventually won out over natural rights, partly through a theoretical critique, partly because of a political rebellion against nature’s last constraints. Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.

I find that passage about the obtuseness of Bloom’s history professor astounding as well as very descriptive of how we got here. The complete dominance of the radical professors as far as numbers go are a more recent manifestation, although there have long been some. But Bloom was a student of that history professor back in the mid-1940s, having been born in 1930 but having also been precocious enough to get his undergraduate degree at the age of eighteen from the University of Chicago after having entered at fifteen. The unnamed history professor Bloom describes in that passage was almost certainly not a radical. At most he was probably only mildly liberal. Perhaps he even passed for what was then known as conservative. If so, he was also unaware of the lessons to which Bloom refers to in that last sentence I quoted, even though – as Bloom notes – they had just experienced those lessons in WWII. The professor did not see any relation between what he was saying about the Founders and what would ultimately undermine our republic and all the values he probably held dear.

But Bloom, his student, saw it, even back then, even at so young an age.

Note also the tone of barely-restrained sarcasm; Bloom seems to have had a certain amount of contemptuous anger at those academics who could have been so stupid as to not have realized the effects of their throwing out the precious baby and leaving the dirty bathwater (it seems his first history professor was none too happy with his challenges, either). As the book goes on, some of the best passages involve Bloom’s description of the faculty’s craven abdication during the student uprisings of the 1960s, when he was one of those who tried (in vain, as it turned out) to hold his finger in the dike of the best traditions of Western Civilization. If you read the book, pay particular attention to those uprisings, which were the template for what’s happening today.

[NOTE II: Here’s a very good article about the mess at Cornell in 1969, when Bloom was there. It’s by the great Thomas Sowell, who was also a professor at Cornell at the time the crisis began, although he quit before it reached its fever pitch.]

In Britain, the anti-racist thought police have come for the children

The New Neo Posted on by

Zero tolerance for thoughtcrime in the young:

One thing I know – and have felt from the very beginning, for some reason – is that Twitter is a cesspool. It is responsible for magnifying and encouraging hateful expressions of all kinds, with its rewards for “gotcha” quips and its provision of easy access to the ear of everyone who uses it, both celebrities and obscure folk. Many children growing up in an atmosphere where this is the norm, and where they can compete with adults on the playing field of insult, will be motivated to participate in a lot more than the usual schoolyard bullying.

And a stupid society will arrest them for it.