Tag: gender

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

Girls [sic] Sports Saved

The only thing that should have been required to save the T‑shirt? 

An apostrophe.

The T‑shirt boldly proclaimed “Save Girls* Sports.”

But matters were more complicated for students of Martin Luther King Jr. High School in Riverside, California, who wore the shirts to protest their school’s decision to let a boy claiming to be a girl join the girls’ cross-​country team.

The school sent students wearing the shirt to detention, allegedly for violating the dress code. Two of the girls who wore it said that school administrators compared the wearing of it to wearing a T‑shirt with a swastika.

Those two students and their families sued the school and school district on constitutional grounds.

Maybe it was the lawsuit, or maybe it was the show of solidarity — but something caused MLK High to cave. And hundreds of other students did show up wearing the “Save Girls Sports” T‑shirt, willing to buck the dress code or thought code, whatever it is, to support their classmates.

Somehow the school failed to place these hundreds of students in detention and has apparently dropped the detention policy.

Students at other schools in the area had also started wearing the T‑shirts.

With regard to the policy of letting boys play on girls’ sports teams, the Riverside Unified School District says that its hands are tied. “RUSD is bound to follow California law,” which requires letting students “participate in sex-​segregated” activities in a way “consistent with his or her gender identity.”

Laws are meant to be changed, however, if not through California’s legislature, then through the state’s citizen initiative process.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 * We leave the [sic] for the title.

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture

Library Against Liberty

library, Moms for Liberty, gender

In order to conduct a forum “on Fair and Safe Sport for Girls,” Moms for Liberty reserved and paid for a room at a library.

Then, the librarians ambushed them.

Yolo County Public Library Regional Manager Scott Love “invited disruptive protesters” to the August 2023 forum and then shut it down as soon as it started. He disagreed with Moms for Liberty that men who demand the right to participate in women’s sports are men. So the matter couldn’t even be discussed. Not in the library’s reserved and paid-​for meeting room.

With the help of the Institute for Free Speech and Alliance Defending Freedom, Moms for Liberty sued, arguing that Yolo County Library had acted unconstitutionally.

According to the complaint, “Defendants are not required to agree with Plaintiffs’ views about protecting women’s sports. The First Amendment, however, requires that Defendants allow Plaintiffs to speak freely about the integrity of female athletics in library meeting rooms. It demands public library officials not enable — let alone participate in  — the disruption and cancellation of Plaintiffs’ events on account of their viewpoints.

“The Court should hold Defendants accountable for the damage they caused in censoring Plaintiffs’ event and ensure that such censorship never happens again.”

The library has now settled, revising its policies to (we hope) protect the freedom of speech of patrons who use its meeting rooms. It must also pay plaintiffs $70,000 in damages and legal costs.

Sadly, those funds come from taxpayers. Seems Mr. Love should pay a price.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly general freedom regulation

There Ought Not Be a Law

toys, gender neutral, regulations, authoritarianism

Not everything that we dislike should be illegal. Not everything that we like or want should be made mandatory. 

To most of us, this is common sense. 

We lack the totalitarian impulse.

But every day, otherwise-​inclined people, including lawmakers, notice another aspect of our lives that they decide must no longer be free. If they can’t fix our bad thinking — by sending us to reeducation camps for summary brainwashing — they can at least regiment our conduct.

The latest victims of this totalitarian impulse are owners of big stores that sell toys. Often, toys for boys are in one section, toys for girls in another. Barbie dolls are not on the same shelf as firetrucks and water pistols.

It’s a great hardship — supposedly — for a little girl who likes fire trucks or a little boy who likes Barbie dolls to cross the aisle to the opposite-​gender toy section.

Enacted in 2021 and taking effect in 2024, California’s new law says that “keeping similar items that are traditionally marketed either for girls or for boys separated makes it more difficult for the consumer to compare the product and incorrectly implies that their use by one gender is inappropriate.”

So the new law compels stores with at least 500 employees to “maintain a gender-​neutral section” that is so labeled. First violation, $250 fine. Further violations, up to $500.

There ought to be a law making such laws illegal. 

A constitution, maybe? 

Meantime, the affected stores should sue.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture media and media people

Happier in the Moment?

gender affirming care

When I express worry about children and teens being put through what we used to call “sex change” procedures, the push-​back often runs like this: 

  • this is not happening; 
  • you’re falling for a “moral panic”; 
  • stop listening to right-​wing propaganda!

But consult this video.

One interviewee who performs sex-​change surgery discusses the “informed consent” of 14-​year-​olds. This doctor acknowledges that many children who agree to puberty blockers and surgery — changing their bodies irreversibly — end up regretting it.

“We talk about it [with the kids] but most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of brain space to really talk about it in a serious way. That’s always bothered me,” he says. “But you know, we still want the kids to be happy. Happier in the moment, right?”

“It’s everything you have been told doesn’t happen,” says my friend David Strom in his report on the Project Veritas investigation (“Undercover video: puberty blockers at 8, surgery as young as 10 in New York”).

“It happens,” David writes. “Watch the doctors who do it explain that they do and that they are eager to do it to even pre-​adolescent children. Even admitting that the ‘science isn’t really settled,’ but hey, we’ll do it if you want.”

We don’t let kids do everything that adults may do because we know that it takes time for human beings to mature. Adults, too, may regret having undergone hormone blocking and genital surgery. But adults have the best chance, a real chance, to decide responsibly.

Peer-​pressured, doctor-​pressured, even legislature-​pressured, and perhaps very confused 14-​year-​olds, 12-​year-​olds, 10-​year-​olds … and 8‑year-​olds … don’t have the same chance to make an adult decision.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling

Suspended for Dissent

SUNY, university, PC, political correctness

Don’t state the “wrong” opinion while studying at SUNY-Geneseo.

That is, if you want smoothly to sail through your academic career.

Owen Stevens violated the school’s “inclusivity” creed, according to which “a diverse campus community [is] marked by mutual respect for the unique talents and contributions of each individual.”

Would-​be future teachers like Stevens, the university contends, must respect “all forms” of gender identity. But he has argued publicly that there are only two sexes or genders (male, female).

“A man is not a woman and a woman is not a man,” said Stevens in one un-​inclusive Instagram video. “The biology is clear.”

So, faster than we have time to remember that “academic freedom” was once a hallowed standard of university conduct, he was suspended from the field teaching programs that are a requirement for all education students at the school. Stevens has refused to cooperate with the school’s plan to rehabilitate him.

The toleration and respect promoted by SUNY-​Geneseo apparently does not include tolerating and respecting the right of others to express opinions about politics, society, and biology with which a university censor might disagree.

Of course, what constitutes “official” acceptable doctrine keeps changing. One can never know which once obviously untenable claims — about biology or anything else — will suddenly be upgraded to sacred dogma by persons with the power to penalize disagreement.

Regardless of one’s views of transgender contentions, though, Americans should judge a policy of forcing people to salute certain government- (or administrator-) approved conclusions intolerable.

It’s the school administrators responsible for suspending Stevens who should be suspended — or fired — for their conduct.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

Seventh Time’s the Charm?

Gender, neutral, term limits, Memphis, City Council,

“You have to give the public something,” explained termed-​out former Councilperson Emily Evans, a few years ago. She was referring to a 2015 initiative she had pushed. The unsuccessful measure had tempted voters with a smaller council in exchange for weakened term limits.

On Tuesday’s ballot, voters find lame attempt number seven by Metro Nashville Council’s to weaken or repeal their own term limits. As I told readers of the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, that makes for a council-​forced do-​over on term limits every 3.4 years for the last 24 years — since 1994, when greater than 76 percent of Nashville-​Davidson County voters passed a consecutive two-​term limit on councilmembers.

Voters have repeatedly said no to the council. 

But this time there is a twist, an incredibly enticing enticement having been carefully coupled with the undercutting of term limits. Only totally sexist male Nashvillian Neanderthals could possibly ignore this special offer. (And perhaps, too, the poor women they purportedly tell how to vote.)

Amendment 5 not only guts term limits, it also installs much-​needed gender neutral language into the term limits section of the charter. In practical terms, it changes wording from “councilmen” to “councilmembers.”

How to choose? 

Keep term limits by voting NO? Or accept weak limits but fasten onto the freedom to stand on your own two feet and proudly say, “councilmember”? 

I tremble at the tendered trade-off.

Turns out, luckily, that Nashville voters can keep their term limits and use gender neutral terms too. The following ballot measure, Amendment 6, updates the entire charter with gender-​neutral language. 

NO on Amendment 5, YES on Amendment 6.

Whew! 

That was close.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

 

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