People of a certain age will remember a time when the word sex meant men and women and ipso facto their generalised sexed behaviour. This was the norm. A man or woman could simply look around and the truth of the term sex, both biologically and in relation to personality, was evident through observation. Sex-based personality manifested itself, from leisure to work, across the spectrum of human behaviour. For example, the heavy, dirty, dangerous jobs were done by men, while women, in contrast, were over-represented in the teaching, nursing, librarian, and secretarial professions. It was considered a given that the fashion and beauty industries, for example, were overwhelmingly patronised by women, or that men liked messing around with motorbikes and cars. Women, to point to another obvious truth, were better at looking after children. Even little boys, (those entitled patriarchs in waiting, according to feminists), if given a choice, ran to their mothers instead of their fathers for comfort. (None of this has changed.)
Then suddenly and mysteriously the word ‘gender’ became synonymous with sex. Sex and gender, on this view, were words that described the same phenomenon – the biological sex and the sex-based behaviour of women and men. A few years later, the term gender had entirely supplanted the term sex, except, by now, the biological basis for sex-based behaviour was removed and gender was defined by feminists, either negatively, as a socially constructed imposition, or positively, as a choice or as an identity. Biology, in other words, was entirely expunged from the equation and the genetic underpinnings of personality were forgotten.
Why is this important, gender identity adherents say, they’re just words? It matters because within the liberal-democratic West, ideologues are introducing ‘hate speech’ legislation that will curtail speech, and impel people, under the threat of losing their livelihoods, their reputations, and their freedom, to affirm ideas with which they disagree. And the entire virtue-signalling, follow-the-leader, yes-we-are-all-individuals-midwit circus is based on a chimera at best and a lie at worst. Gender does not exist. There is biological sex and there is sex-based behaviour, and that’s the complete alpha and omega of how men and women behave. Determining how many angels dance on the head of a pin is a fatuous question. And so is any attempt to count the number of genders conjured into pseudo-reality by Woke fools.
How did we arrive at the strange situation where gender nonsense became normalised? There are many strands to the story, but the ultimate cause rests with philosophers – in this case, the existentialists.
Existentialism is a philosophical school that is difficult to define, because most of the thinkers grouped under the umbrella term existentialism never heard of the name and disavowed membership of any philosophical tradition. The two most influential and original of the ‘existentialists’, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, believed that the core of being human is primarily determined by choice. Nietzsche said ‘become who you are’, while Heidegger claimed we are ‘thrown’ into a world and we have to stand against ‘the man’ or ‘the they’ to become, echoing Nietzsche, our ‘authentic’ selves. Both believed that only a small percentage of the population were capable of this endeavour.
Into this mix stepped two second-rate philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre, whose main work Heidegger described as ‘dreck’ – dirt, to be exact – and his lover, the even-more second-rate Simone de Beauvoir. It was the latter who, after putting a feminist spin on Sartre’s bad reading of Heidegger, said ‘one is not born, but becomes a woman’. This was the moment when the idea, which had been known for millennia, that men and women are different – physically, psychologically, and biologically – was overthrown in a feminist attempt to reject material survival and biology as the primary reasons why sex roles have existed. Gender as an idea was reified from an intellectual concept into a concrete reality.
In other words, gender was created, sex was negated, and biology, that bête noir of feminists, was rejected as harmful. Ideology, through this lens, determined reality rather than the other way around. This was the beginning of a new world, the world we still inhabit, the feminist wonderland, where material reality can be negated by cancelling the sin of ‘essentialism’, in other words, logic, or, more likely, as can be gleaned by reading a newspaper or watching a movie, the unrelenting sweep of feminist propaganda.
Unfortunately for gender ideologues, though, their most hated enemy, biology, is proving what those of us not blinded by ideology already know, that men and women are different, not equal or unequal, but complementary.
Every human characteristic can be accurately depicted on a bell curve. Whether it’s intelligence, sporting prowess, physical strength, musical ability, beauty, cooking skills, Morris dancing, or even which demographic is most likely to love Taylor Swift.
In the middle of the bell curve are people who are average – nondescript dancers or guitar players, for example, or people who are neither beautiful nor ugly, tall or short, intelligent or stupid, etc. At the extremes, to the right and left of the curve, though, are those who are outside the norm in some way. Not necessarily better or worse, just different.
It’s the same in relation to sex-based behaviour. People outside the mainstream, on the tails of the bell curve, are not a different gender, they’re just unusual in their personalities, tendencies, and proclivities. But they are still definitively men and women. Long may they celebrate, but not impose, their difference on society. People, consequently, who live in a liberal democracy, shouldn’t be either punished or indulged because of their innate sex-based biological characteristics, eccentricities or personalities.
It’s time to put the term gender in the lexicon of discredited ideologies. Refuse to use the word gender. Form a movement which only uses the word sex to describe the realities of being male and female.
This simple move will make the world a better place, especially for women, who will, once again, have rights based on biological sex. Children, too, will not be mutilated in the cause of an anti-human cult.
Throw the term gender, like every nonsensical ideological term, in the dustbin of history where it belongs.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/throw-the-term-gender-in-the-dustbin-of-history/
********************************************British schools are ideologically CAPTURED
Last week, I was contacted by a grandfather of a child at Cranbrook School in Devon. While his grandchild attends secondary school, Cranbrook also has a primary school, as well as nursery and pre-school.
He told me that he was deeply concerned that children at Cranbrook were being poisoned with toxic gender ideology.
I took a look.
Immediately, red flags appeared.
The Head of Year 7 —for children as young as 11 years old—is Oliver Russell.
Far from focussing on educating his students in Maths or English, Russell appears keen to educate them in the world of radical gender ideology.
For you see, Russell identifies as “non-binary” and wants his students to know all about it. Sporting his full beard, he wears dresses and high heels in the classroom.
In official school communications, he signs off as “Mx (mux) Russell” and expects students to address him as such.
Whether Russell is playing out some sort of fetish or whether he is suffering from a mental health condition, the outcome is the exact same – forcing young, impressionable children to affirm his delusions.
Particularly concerning is the fact that, every Tuesday, during lunchbreak, Russell runs a “Rainbow Club” for “LGBTQIA+” students.
There appears to be no transparency whatsoever for parents regarding what is taking place during in these sessions. This is a form of ideological grooming.
Maybe these are just the actions of one rogue teacher? Think again.
The school itself has applied for a ‘Rainbow Flag Award’ to demonstrate its commitment to the “LGBT community”.
The school curriculum teaches children about “gender identity” and “transphobia”, including getting kids to draw “a big queer map of Devon”.
I’m told that teachers have gender pronouns on the outside of their office doors. And the school even disregards sex-based school uniforms altogether, allowing male pupils to wear female uniforms and vice versa.
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The consequences of such ideological indoctrination are plain to see.
It is well documented that young people, particularly girls, can fall prey to forms of ‘social contagion’ as regards mental ill-health. Historically, this has been witnessed in relation to self-harm and eating disorders. In more recent years, we have seen this take place with regard to children suddenly believing themselves to be ‘trans’.
I often hear stories from parents in which multiple students —particularly girls— within a single class are coming out as ‘trans’ within weeks of one another.
In one study, over 66% of young people questioning their gender belonged to a friendship group in which one or more of their friends had recently come out as ‘trans’.
Is this any wonder, when the adults who we are supposed to trust with our children’s wellbeing and education are shoving this ideology down their throats on a daily basis?
I wish I could say that Cranbrook are the only perpetrators. But they are not.
Here are just a few of the most egregious examples of ideological indoctrination that I have come across:
St Jude’s, a Church of England primary school in Southwark, has what it calls its “wider curriculum”, which involves forcing “inclusion”, “liberation” and “pride” into other subjects. For example, in History, children will be taught about “the history and meaning of the rainbow flag”.
In computing, children are instructed on “the spread of fake news and stereotypes relating to LGBT+ people”. In art, children are even expected to “study LGBT+ performance art and fashion, including drag queens and kings”. This can only be described as sneaking nefarious ideologies in through the back door.
Daubney Primary School in Hackney instructs their very young students to pose with pride flags and posters, before posting the photographs online. In one recent photograph, a young boy can even be seen holding a sign that reads “I can’t even think straight” (which is something you might expect to see on a stag or hen party but not in a classroom for primary school children).
This can only be described as sexualising children. When I called them out over social media, their Headmaster blocked me, before subsequently deleting their entire account. So much for transparency.
At Daubney’s sister school, Lauriston Primary School, children as young as five years old are asked by teachers to draw “asexual”, “polysexual” and “non binary” flags, before displaying them proudly on the walls. On what planet is it acceptable for such young children to be sexualised in this manner? Seriously?
Or take Westmeads Community Infant School in Kent. During Pride Month, their students —who are as young as four years old— were expected to spend their days surrounded by the Pride Flags plastered all over the railings to their playground.
Schools, remember, have a duty to be ideologically neutral. This is anything but. The only flag that should be flying from schools is the Union Jack. Once again, when I dared to call the school out and demand an explanation, I was blocked by them.
Dame Elizabeth Cadbury School in Birmingham teaches its students that “some people don’t feel that they are themselves in their own bodies and feel that they can’t be happy as they are. These people can have a sex change”. Is it any wonder that children have gone down pathways of irreversible medical harm when they have been promised a silver bullet in the form of ‘sex-reassignment’ to make them feel ‘happy’ again?
I’m afraid to say this only scratches the surface.
Where does the blame lie? Predominantly with the schools themselves, as they are choosing to inflict this upon their pupils.
Whether they do it because they genuinely think it’s the right thing to do, or to virtue signal, or because they are fearful of pushback if they don’t, I couldn’t care less, because the outcome is exactly the same – the emotional abuse and indoctrination of vulnerable children.
And all this has been allowed to happen under the watch of successive governments.
In the last Conservative government, we had, as our Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan, who I dubbed the “Minister for Indoctrination”.
The fact she did nothing to stop this is perhaps unsurprising, given that she previously unequivocally declared that “transwomen are women”.
What’s worse, when she was grilled by the Department for Education Select Committee on this very issue, she was extremely dismissive.
And now, clearly, we little hope of things improving under the Labour government.
In fact, things will likely get worse.
Our Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has worse knowledge of human biology than GCSE students, having previously claimed that 1 in 1000 women have a penis.
As I’ve previously written, Labour simply cannot be trusted on sex and gender, with many of their Cabinet posts now held by fervent ideologues.
Parents should be able to entrust their children to a school, safe in the knowledge that their sons and daughters will not be subject to political or ideological indoctrination.
Any schools that sexualise or indoctrinate children in the manners described above should be shut down altogether.
To parents out there - you have every right to interrogate your child’s school on what your children are being taught and exposed to and also what external agencies or companies are being brought in to promote some of these ideas.
It’s not common, for example, for schools to bring in very radical campaign groups who push radical gender ideology as though it is established fact when, in reality, it is a highly contested academic theory that, as the recent Cass Review underlined, lacks sufficient evidence and data in the scientific literature.
If you come across material that concerns you, consider complaining. There are many organisations out there that will help you to do this, including the Safe Schools Alliance, Sex Matters and Protect and Teach. In short, you are not alone.
To everyone else – we must continue to hold the government’s feet to the fire on this issue, as well as the schools that are often losing sight of the law, if not breaking it.
And I know that I for one will keep pushing and exposing this issue until everybody in Westminster and the country wake up to the reality of what is now taking place in schools and being imposed on our children before it’s too late.
https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/our-schools-are-ideologically-captured
*********************************************Transparency at State Universities
As state universities are partially financed with taxpayer money, one would hope that they have higher requirements for transparency than corporations. However, that is not the case at all.
Could corporations get away with having policies that require employees to hide any wrongdoing from their customers? I think not, but it seems that state universities can and do so when they want to. Could corporations get away with allowing their managers to tell employees that they cannot complain to senior management about manager misbehavior or inform other employees about such misbehavior? I hope not, but state universities do. Sometimes, universities are not even afraid to do this in writing, which provides clear evidence of such behavior.
Problems at state universities are common and are becoming worse, as the Prussian education system—the current education system in the United States—rewards bad behavior. (For a more detailed description of this education system, see my other articles: “Why Are American Taxpayers Forced to Subsidize and Support the Prussian Education System?”, “The Inherent Flaws of the Prussian Education System”, and “What Has Happened to Our Great Universities?”)
Some transparency problems at Illinois State University (ISU)—where I am a tenured professor—are especially easy to see. Thus, they provide good examples to help understand these issues.
First, a few years ago, I got an e-mail from our new department head saying that I should not e-mail the dean. This was a response to my polite e-mail to the dean—copying the department head—asking if he could help mitigate the consequences of poor class scheduling, considering our department head had very little administrative experience at the time. One of my classes was scheduled in such a way as to maximize the probability of it being cancelled. (For more details about this experience, see my earlier article: “Is American Education a Fraud?”)
I viewed the e-mail from the department head to be just as inappropriate as his scheduling of classes, and forwarded the e-mail to the dean. Given the clear evidence of inappropriate behavior, I expected such behavior to stop, but I was wrong. Forwarding any complaints to the provost’s office also did not lead to any positive results.
Later, as the problems in our department continued, I e-mailed the whole department about them. I wanted to inform the people working in the department and to give them a chance to respond in case I missed something important before I published articles about these problems at ISU. In addition to “Is American Education a Fraud?”, I also published “How Some Universities Are Destroying Education: Increasing Opportunities for Students to Take Classes in Any Order” and “Incentives for Choosing Faculty in State Universities: How Some State Universities Are Destroying Themselves,” which discussed problems at ISU.
The response to emailing the department was in my annual evaluations. The department head described informing faculty as not being collegial behavior. He claimed that I should discuss this with the Ombudsperson Council of Illinois State University instead. Before this suggestion, I had already talked with members of this council and found the conversation useful. However, they also explained to me that they had no power to implement or require any changes in the department. Thus, the department head wanted me to discuss these problems only with people who could not do anything about them.
One semester, I e-mailed the link to my article “Is American Education a Fraud?” to my students to help them understand that they needed to study if they wanted to pass my class. Simply telling students that they need to study does not work with a large percent of students. I did not expect the article to convince all students but, if it would convince a few, I thought it was worth trying. Moreover, I taught finance classes, and the article provided a good example of what happens when institutions (e.g., state universities) are not subject to the discipline of free financial markets.
I was told by the ISU administration—starting with the department head—that I violated university rules by e-mailing the link to students and that I could not do that again. The university has a rule that professors should not criticize their colleagues in front of students.
I think this is a strange rule. Science often advances by criticizing one’s colleagues. However, universities can write their own rules and adopt them by having the whole faculty or faculty committees “under the guidance” of administrators vote for those rules. My repeated requests for clarification about what exactly they did not like about my article were not answered.
As I recently learned, administrators have significant power to cause problems for faculty, and they use that power when they want to. There were problems with scheduling my classes every semester since the semester described in “Is American Education a Fraud?” Thus, when it comes to committee voting, “under the guidance” sometimes means under pressure from administrators. Moreover, the administration has significant control over hiring and retaining the faculty—thus, to some extent, they choose who votes. Given such freedom for abuse, it is not surprising that state universities adopt rules that reduce transparency and create even more opportunities for abuse.
At first, I was surprised that such things could happen in the United States. However, if I would have known the history of the current education system, which I learned only recently, I would not have been surprised. The current education system in the United States is not the same as the system from the country’s founding. The old system was much closer to the free-market system.
Unfortunately, the United States (like other countries) adopted the Prussian education system and created legal restrictions for the older U.S. system. Most communists, fascists, and other intellectual descendants of the new Prussians who created this education system were never punished for the crimes they committed, and many of them immigrated to the United States. Some of them came as university professors and administrators. As university degrees could be granted only by those who already had those degrees, the United States imported professors from abroad, giving them control over education here.
Transparency and other problems in state universities are not just problems for those who work or study there. These problems affect everybody, as universities prepare teachers and government experts who keep increasing their interference in our lives. Moreover, even so-called private universities currently have similar problems, as they are not fully private institutions. Rather, they are a part of the same Prussian education system, receive direct or indirect financing from government, and function in the same legal and regulatory system that distorts incentives.
It should not be surprising that spending more taxpayer money on education is not working. That money is just entrenching the Prussian system and making it harder for the private sector to develop and compete. Neither transparency nor other problems with the Prussian education system can be solved by government support of this system. Government does not need to get more involved with education. It needs to leave this industry to the truly private sector and the full discipline of free markets.
https://heartland.org/opinion/transparency-at-state-universities/
********************************************‘Professional protester’: NSW Premier hits out at Marxist serial activist
Police could soon have the power to reject protests that stretch over months, as a clearly frustrated NSW Premier Chris Minns decried the more than $5m spent on controlling pro-Palestine rallies and attacked the leader of the protest movement as a “professional demonstrator”.
The move came after hundreds of police were deployed at rallies and vigils in Sydney on Sunday and Monday on the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas atrocities in Israel.
The protests were largely peaceful after police issued strong warnings not to bring the flag of the Hezbollah terrorist group, but two men were arrested for displaying swastikas superimposed on the Israeli flag.
“The cost is huge … so I’m going to have a review into the resourcing that police put into these marches, and it’s my view that police should be able to deny a request for a march due to stretched police resourcing,” he said.
Police were burnt out and tired, he added, and other important work had had to be sidelined.
“I think taxpayers should be in a position to say we would prefer that money spent on roadside breath testing, domestic violence investigations, knife crimes, rather than the huge resources that’s going into the city and the community.”
“Our resources are being stretched; it costs millions of dollars to police and marshal these protests and it’s completely reasonable for the police to take that into consideration when Form 1 applications are lodged with the courts,” Mr Minns said.
“Ultimately, this is a huge drain on the public purse”.
The Premier hit out at Josh Lees, a leading member of the Palestine Action Group who has lodged weekly applications for the past year to march in Sydney since the October 7 Hamas atrocities in Israel, agreeing with the description of the activist as a “professional protester”.
Mr Lees writes for Red Flag, the outlet of Socialist Alternative, which declares itself “Australia’s largest Marxist group”, and regularly calls for the overthrow of capitalism.
He was also a leader of the Lockdown to Zero movement, demanding that the then- Berejiklian government maintain strict Covid-19 lockdowns and branding the loosening of restrictions as “an offensive against the working class” by “the rich and powerful”.
Mr Lees has also been spokesperson for the Refugee Action Coalition, organising protests at the 2011 ALP National Conference against then-prime minister Julia Gillard’s asylum-seeker policies.
The former University of Sydney tutor was arrested during the “Occupy Sydney” movement that camped outside the Reserve Bank in Martin Place in 2011, clashing with police during a Hyde Park rally and at the Martin Place encampment.
After police broke up the protest, Mr Lees claimed police brutality. “I woke to see about 200 riot police surrounding our protest camp … physically removing people, using painful wrist-locks, and occasionally throwing punches, one of which left a protester in front of me bleeding”, he said. Charges against Mr Lees and other protesters were later dropped.
Mr Minns emphasised he was not seeking changes that would affect union protests or industrial disputes, but police should be in a position to deny repeat applications for marches through Sydney if they didn’t have the resources to deal with it.
“If you were putting on a rock concert on the weekend, you would have to pay NSW police to keep the public safe – this all comes from NSW taxpayers’ back pockets.”
NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman called on Mr Minns to immediately implement a user-pays system for serial protesters, with a general rule against authorisation if organisers of repeat protests failed to meet the costs.
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My main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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