Don't Say Gay Law

Today, Governor DeSantis signed HB 1557: Parental Rights in Education into law.  Amazingly, it is not a very long bill, only 7 pages.  Mostly, it says parents have a right to know what schools are teaching their kids, schools cannot conceal what they are teaching kids, and - most controversial of all - no sex education for kids from kindergarten to third grade.  That this bill has caused such a furor is a sad statement of our culture.  When I was in school, sex education class didn't occur until my sophomore year in high school.  Back in those days, they combined it with driver's ed.  Now, people are upset that schools are limited from teaching sex ed to kids 8 and under?  I say "limited" because the law specifies age-appropriate; who decides what is age appropriate?

Let's take a look at some of the specifics.  The law amends existing law regarding student welfare, which apparently is addressed in Subsection 8 of section 1001.42.  Let's look at the additions.

1. Parents must be informed regarding any welfare issue and all records must be made available to the parent.

2. School districts may not adopt policies that prohibit school personnel from notifying parents, unless such notice will result in abuse, abandonment, or neglect.  Yeah, who decides what will result?

3. Classroom instruction of sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kinder through third grade or in a manner that isn't age appropriate.  Again, who decides what is appropriate?

4. Schools must adhere to guidelines established by Department of Education.  I suppose this is who determines my questions on points 2 & 3.

5. Parents must be notified at beginning of school year what health services are offered and be given the option of opting out.

6. Before administering a well-being questionnaire to a student, the parent's permission must be obtained.

7. If parents voice a concern, the school has 7 days to determine a process to resolve it.  Or maybe a month.  Or, if still a problem, a special magistrate in good standing with 5 years' experience can be brought in to...  blah blah blah... legalese stuff.

Why are some people so desperate to talk to kids 8 and under about sexuality and gender identity?  Kids at these ages are extremely impressionable.  When I was that age, my father drank Coke.  Based on nothing but that, I formed the idea that when I became a dad, I'd have to drink Coke.  Stupid, but there it is.  My drink of choice was Mountain Dew, but I knew it would change when I was a dad.  It wasn't until I was 18 or 19 that I realized that was stupid.  Imagine if I had been actively taught that there were 81 genders.

Teach the kids to read, write, and count.  Sex ed has no place in elementary schools.  I would have included 4th and 5th grade too.

Sex vs. Gender

I watched a YouTube debate by Steven Crowder where he went to Austin, TX, and put up a sign that said 'There Are Only 2 Genders: Change My Mind.'  Amazingly, I disagree but only in a very small way.  I dispute his word usage.

Sex: either of the two major forms of individuals that occur in many species and that are distinguished respectively as female or male especially on the basis of their reproductive organs and structures

Merriam-Webster

Gender: 1) a subclass within a grammatical class of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms.

2) Sex

Merriam-Webster

The English language has three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter.  Whereas languages like Spanish gender most things as either masculine or feminine, English does not.  So, the house is neuter in English but la casa is feminine is Spanish.  The shoe (neuter) vs. el zapato (masculine).  This can get pretty weird with animals.  La rana (the frog) is feminine but a male frog would be la rana macho.  Gender is primarily a grammatical construct whereas sex is biological.

What if he had said There Are Only 2 Sexes?  As it happens, that is what he was arguing since he continually returned to biology rather than grammar.  He was using the #2 definition of gender, probably because that is the term used by those arguing in favor of a gender spectrum.  The use of gender rather than sex was clearly intentional.  Most people look at the terms as interchangeable and that is essentially true through modern usage.  However, it is clear that sex is a better choice of words for those arguing against the sex spectrum.  Not much spectrum at all if the topic is biology.

Words Mean Nothing

How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?  Four.  Saying that a tail is a leg doesn't make it a leg.

Abraham Lincoln

A young man in Canada was shopping for car insurance and didn't like the price.  So he asked how much it would cost if he happened to be a woman.  Well, the price dropped by over $1000.  With this bit of information, he conceived a brilliant plan.  He declared that he was a woman and is now saving $91 a month on car insurance.  Who needs Geico?  Here is one of the unintended consequences of the current insanity regarding sex.  Science is pretty clear on the male/female dichotomy but law has abandoned biology.  The insurance company should have quoted him the same price because saying a man is a woman doesn't make him a woman.

A Year from Today?

You think it's funny today but in the not too distant future it might be a hate crime to specify mother or father.

"Man" gives Birth

The Sun reports that a British man made "history by giving birth to baby girl thanks to sperm donor he found on Facebook."  Wait.  Sperm donor?  Shouldn't a man be able to provide sperm?  I would think that he would need an egg donor.  No, it comes as no surprise that Hayden Cross was born Paige Cross.  Thus, Hayden is a 'man' who has a uterus.  In biology, that would be a woman but "woman gives birth" just doesn't get the clicks.

 

If Hayden wants to be a man who gives birth, that's fine.  The annoying issue here is the media reporting this as if it's news.  Thirty years ago, this would have been a headline on the National Enquirer right under "Aliens Meet President Reagan" and "Elvis Presley Found Living in Manitoba."  Maybe The Sun is the British version of National Enquirer.  The 'man gives birth' story is old hat now.  The novelty is gone.  When an actual man gives birth to a baby like Arnold Schwartznegger in Junior, report that.  Until then, give this a rest.

Judge Overrules Biology

In 1925, John Scopes, a Tennessee high school science teacher, used Civic Biology by George William Hunter - which included a chapter on evolution.  It turned out that was against state law and Scopes was brought to trial, convicted, and fined $100.  Famed as the Scopes Monkey Trial, it led to the elimination of 'evolution' from textbooks for many years after.

 

In 2017, biology lost another case in court.  Patrick Abbatiello holds that he is neither male nor female.  He petitioned the court to allow him to be legally 'genderless.'  Judge Amy Holmes approved the petition, thus overturning biology.  According to biology, Patrick - now known as Patch - is absolutely male but the law holds that he is not.  What are the consequences of the law ruling against demonstrable reality?  The law has ruled in favor of fiction!  If Patch wants to run around and claim to be genderless, it makes little difference.  If the state of Oregon sanctions Patch's genderlessness, that presents some problems.  Can Patch use either the men's room or the ladies' room, depending on his mood or will another judge require a third restroom for the genderless?  When will a judge rule against physics, chemistry, or geology?

Presidential Debates with a Twist

After watching the presidential debates, Professor Maria Guadalupe had an idea.  What if the genders of the two candidates were swapped?  How would Trump's aggressive demeanor have been viewed were a woman to have acted that way?  Would Hillary's superior political experience have received more recognition when delivered by a man?  She set out to test the theory.  Actors were cast.  A woman would play the Trump clone, Brenda King, while a man would play the Hillary clone, Jonathan Gordon.  Watching and listening to the debates, each actor sought to mimic the tone, cadence, and mannerisms of the candidates.  Finally, they gave a couple of performances.  To the amazement of all, Brenda King came off surprisingly well while Jonathan Gordon came off stiff and overly reliant on rehearsed statements.

 

Though an interesting experiment, it doesn't look fair to the Hillary clone.  Assertive and aggressive behavior in a woman is far more acceptable than effeminate behavior in a man, especially when looking at a potential president.  One picture shows Gordon in a very awkward pose for a man that would be unremarkable of a woman.

 

Of note, in the first televised presidential debates in 1960, those who heard the debate on the radio thought Nixon had won while those who watched on TV chose Kennedy.  The visual cues made a big impression.

 

For a future experiment, run the debate twice with the same actors but have them switch roles the second time around.  Script remains unchanged.  One actor should be George Clooney and the other can be Steve Buscemi.  This sounds like an obvious sort of experiment and has probably already been done but the results could be instructive.

EXTRA! Woman gives birth!

Yes, that is what actually happened but, because the woman is a transgendered man and his wife is a transgendered woman, the 'man' of the couple gave birth because he was the one with the womb.  Really?  The reason they were able to conceive was neither had had 'corrective' surgery yet.  Corrective!  If not for the fact that each member of this couple claims to be the opposite sex - which clearly they are not - this would be a non-story.  Man impregnates woman.  Woman gives birth.  OMG!  Wait until a car identifies as a garage and a garage identifies as a car, then we can park the garage in the car!

If Machado and Rodriguez want to swap genders in their relationship, that is fine.  However, this is another in the line of pregnant man stories that isn't true but gets a big headline.  It's a hoax in which the participants want to believe.  This reminds me of the case of Thomas Beatie, the pregnant man from Oregon.  He had begun his 'corrective' surgery (double mastectomy) but still had the plumbing to get pregnant, which he did.  Pregnant man.  Sigh.

"How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?  Four.  Saying that a tail is a leg doesn't make it a leg."

Abraham Lincoln

By the same token, if you call a man a woman, she still can't get pregnant.  This is obvious lunacy and yet you are a bigot if you don't embrace it.  Live as you wish to live but you cannot require my participation in your fantasy.  We have come to where a Monty Python sketch is taken seriously.

Gender Bender Insanity

I just saw a video on YouTube proposing the Top 10 Actresses Who Could Play James Bond.  The obvious answer is none, but that would make for a very short video.  Though I like all the actresses listed and think each and every one of them could make a great agent in MI-6, none of them can be James Bond.  Just like none of them can be Winston Churchill, Alfred the Great, or King Arthur.  The point is that filmmakers today lack the talent to create an original secret agent who could get the kind of audience that the name James Bond attracts.

As described by Ian Fleming, Bond looked like Hoagy Carmichael, an American composer and actor.  He also had a scar on his cheek, which has been ignored in the movies.  He was not a woman.  He was not black.  If you want to make a James Bond who is not a white male, create your own damned character!  Eidos wanted to have a female Indiana Jones and rocked it with Lara Croft.  Do that.  Make the female version of Bond, but don't have some actress deliver the line, "Bond, James Bond."  At least the Ghostbusters reboot had the decency to have different characters, not a female Venkman, Stantz, Spengler, and Zeddemore.  Make a movie about 006 or 008 but leave 007 alone.

 

If this travesty does come to pass, I want to start seeing videos of Top 10 Actors Who Could Play Lara Croft, Modesty Blaze, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Or how about Nancy Drew, Katniss Everdeen, or Pippi Longstocking?  Of course, I find all of those suggestions equally ludicrous.

News on the Gender Wars

This was entirely predictable.  If two students were caught filming girls showering in the 'gender-neutral' bathroom, how many weren't caught?  I did like the sarcasm when describing those who want gender specific bathrooms as bigots.  Yes, what was normal behavior yesterday is now bigotry.  It is hard to keep up with the social justice warriors.

 

With the rare exception of maybe 1 in 1500 people who, according to Wikipedia (take with a grain of salt), are born intersex (possessing physical or genetic characteristics of both sexes), there are only two sexes.  Bruce "Caitlyn" Jenner is a man with psychological issues that are currently in fashion.  There is something called body integrity identity disorder (BIID), sometimes called amputee identity disorder, in which a person wants to amputate a healthy limb.  Note how it is a disorder?  However, if a man wants to amputate his penis, that's laudable and he should start using the ladies room.  Heck, Caitlyn managed to be woman of the year!  There should be some cognitive dissonance in this.

 

One of my favorite memes of the gender wars is this: JFK put a man on the moon.  Barack Obama put a man in the ladies room.  It says something about the seriousness of our times.  Transgenders account for a fraction of 1% of the population - vastly less than homosexuals - and yet this is the civil right of the era.  The vast majority must conform to the desires of a barely there minority.  In so doing, we get the inevitable Peeping Tom antics and probably worse to come.  Yes, this is so much better.

You Are What You Say You Are

On the heels of Bruce Jenner announcing that she is actually a woman named Caitlyn, we have Rachel Dolezal claiming to be black despite no black ancestors.  However, Rachel does have a dash of Native American which is more than Elizabeth Warren or Ward Churchill can say.   It is amazing how many whites want to claim membership in minority groups.  Why?  I thought whites had all the privileges.  Well, sure, Ms. Warren was able to give herself a boost in getting hired by Harvard by being a minority but at what price?  Now she is an Indian who is terribly repressed.  She isn't?  What of Rachel?  Pictures of her in youth show a very white girl with blonde hair and freckles.  As for Caitlyn, aren't white men at the top of the food chain?  Why would anyone opt to be demoted to the less privileged sex?

Some of these people are gaming the affirmative action system that was put in place in the wake of civil rights movement of the 1960s.  As for Rachel and Caitlyn, they are in denial.  There are facts on the ground that they have both refused to accept.  Our society has reached the point where it is wrong to correct them.  That might be judgmental.  It could hurt their feelings.  A few years ago, Oregon declared a woman to be a man, which resulted in the pregnant man story.  Well, he wasn't a man.  He was a bearded lady but that would hurt his/her feelings.  He/she wanted to be viewed as a man.  Biology is no longer a valid basis for determining gender.  Nor, it would seem, is it a valid basis for determining race.  We have reached 1984 about 30 years after Orwell predicted.  Male is female, white is black, surrender is victory.