Boy removed from school in transgender rights row

Angilion said:
At that age I sometimes played dress-up in my grandma's fancy jewellery, maybe a dress and high heels too. Whoopie. Nobody cared. A kid playing.

Maybe people were less restrictive about gender >40 years ago.
Click to expand...

I'm increasingly feeling that the Identity Politics movement paradoxically heightens restrictions on gender and sexuality. Which makes sense - when you exhaustively label people and refer to people by label and discuss political and social power in terms of labels, what other consequence can there be than labels becoming ever more important. Yes, forty years ago, people probably just laughed at a boy dressing up in jewels and make-up and then got on with things. Today, it's a classifiable behaviour that must be examined for meaning. (And possibly showered with hormones after a parent decides it means their child is transexual before they even understand what sex and gender are!)
 
Vonhelmet said:
There is no movement, there's just a handful of people discussing it on the internet and a bunch of people overreacting to obvious click bait news stories.
Click to expand...

You believe there is no Identity Politics movement? Identity Politics is the treatment of people by their classification over their individuality and there are examples of this daily both in "real world" political activism and indeed, in actual legislation, political campaigning and funding. It's not "a handful of people on the Internet". It's a major facet of modern politics and society that affects people's actual lives.
 
Vonhelmet said:
Nope, I'm not buying it. Leastways I'm not buying that it's at all a big deal. This is s storm in a teacup.
Click to expand...

There are real world consequences of Identity Politics. Preferential college admissions criteria based on race or sex are a direct consequence. Corporate training policies explicitly based on identity politics such as those at Google which that programmer got fired for questioning the rationale of. It forms a key part of the Left's political campaigning and feeds directly into election results.

I regard it as self-evident that Identity Politics is a significant force in the West, especially the USA which has led in it. I'm confident enough that others here will also have had enough exposure to it to agree with me that it is a big thing, that I don't feel much pressure to debate it further and prove it to your satisfaction if you're not inclined to agree.
 
I bet that kid has been let loose on the internet and been brainwashed into thinking it is not a male, just like all the others in the world. Or peer pressure by what they see around them or by how their parents behave. I bet they have rainbow posters in their bedroom!
 
koolpc said:
I bet that kid has been let loose on the internet and been brainwashed into thinking it is not a male, just like all the others in the world. Or peer pressure by what they see around them or by how their parents behave. I bet they have rainbow posters in their bedroom!
Click to expand...

Talking in general here:

Or their parents are guiding them down that path by way of re-inforcement (whether you view that positively or negatively is up to you).

I mean a 6 year old can be told Santa exists and will believe their parent as that is what is ingrained in them, so if a parent is telling them they are a girl, then what do you think is going to happen, they wont question it will they, they will just be guided by what the parent tells them and makes them believe, a very dangerous situation.
 
Last edited:
antijoke said:
Or their parents are guiding them down that path by way of re-inforcement (whether you view that positively or negatively is up to you).

I mean a 6 year old can be told Santa exists and will believe their parent as that is what is ingrained in them, so if a parent is telling them they are a girl, then what do you think is going to happen, they wont question it will they, they will just be guided by what the parent tells them and makes them believe, a very dangerous situation.
Click to expand...

Yes, I agree...
 
Tunney said:
Isn't that just another name for the civil rights movement? A movement that has existed for a long time and won many important victories.
Click to expand...

Civil Rights is about giving people the freedom of opportunity, irrespective of your background, class or ethnicity.

Identity Politics is about giving people opportunities based on background, class or ethnicity, their identity. But there's a million definitions and most of them are condescending.
 
That makes no sense considering the boy sometimes chooses to go to school dressed as a boy also! So clearly the boy is questioning his identity and not being forced/pressured into being one way or the other.
 
Tunney said:
Isn't that just another name for the civil rights movement? A movement that has existed for a long time and won many important victories.
Click to expand...

No. The Civil Rights Movement is, without qualification, best represented by Martin Luther King. Unequivocally he spoke for it more than any other and his views were representative of what was being campaigned for by Civil Rights activists. And he was explicitly for equality and for colour-blindness. His goal was that race should not matter and that people be treated as individuals. All his legal goals were on this principle. Identity Politics sets race (and other attributes) ahead of individual qualities. In many ways, it's the exact antithesis of the Civil Rights Movement. So MLK wanted race to not be a factor in whether someone was admitted to college for example. Whereas modern Identity Politics wants quotas and people to be preferentially admitted based on race. E.g. weighting SAT scores by race.

They are qualitatively different.
 
C.R.A.Z.Y said:
That makes no sense considering the boy sometimes chooses to go to school dressed as a boy also! So clearly the boy is questioning his identity and not being forced/pressured into being one way or the other.
Click to expand...

I was talking more in a general sense of children rather than this specifc case.
 
exhashdotdot said:
Civil Rights is about giving people the freedom of opportunity, irrespective of your background, class or ethnicity.

Identity Politics is about giving people opportunities based on background, class or ethnicity, their identity. But there's a million definitions and most of them are condescending.
Click to expand...

Well put. The other common way it is expressed is that Individualism believes in Equality of Opportunity. And Identity Politics teaches Equality of Outcome. I.e. one would teach that jobs should be equally available to people of equal qualification regardless of race, orientation, sex, or anything else that doesn't define how well you can do that job. The other would teach that people of X race should make up Y% of job appointees. And that if this is not the case, that measures should be taken to bring that about.
 
h4rm0ny said:
In many ways, it's the exact antithesis of the Civil Rights Movement. So MLK wanted race to not be a factor in whether someone was admitted to college for example. Whereas modern Identity Politics wants quotas and people to be preferentially admitted based on race. E.g. weighting SAT scores by race.

They are qualitatively different.
Click to expand...

Who is calling for weighting of SAT scores by race? I can only find reference to this on ultra-conservative conspiracy blogs.

Going by your definition of identity politics, it is indeed an incredibly small movement and the reaction to it is completely overblown.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom