Woke pronouns have drawn George Will's attention this week. The scandalous activity took place in Kiel, a town of 4,000 in central Wisconsin:
In April, the district lodged a complaint against three eighth-grade boys for the offense of “mispronouning,” referring to a classmate using the biologically correct pronoun “her” instead of the classmate’s preferred “them.” This, district officials — supposed educators — said, constitutes “sexual harassment,” a Title IX violation.
....Represented by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, the boys are arguing that their use of biologically correct, if politically incorrect, pronouns is speech protected by the First Amendment. The Constitution also forbids the district from compelling them to speak as district bureaucrats suddenly [] prefer.
Well, this certainly seems like a pretty trivial bit of middle-school horseplay, something that can easily be handled locally without getting a Washington Post columnist involved. Speaking of which, how did George Will even hear about this?
Last month, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a right-wing legal organization, sent a letter to the Kiel Area School District asking it to end a Title IX harassment investigation into three eighth-grade boys for repeatedly misgendering a classmate. To further its cause, WILL embarked on a national media campaign to draw attention to the 1,500-student district.
That attention — which included appearances on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, Newsmax and an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal — resulted in six bomb threats made against the district, Kiel City Hall, the Kiel Public Library, the homes of district employees, roads and utility companies in the city. The threats resulted in the district going to virtual school for the remainder of the year, the cancellation of the city’s Memorial Day parade and the postponement of the high school graduation.
It certainly looks like WILL's national media campaign was a roaring success. Bomb threats, school cancellation, Laura Ingraham—I'll bet those left-wing twits in the Kiel Area School District caved in fast enough after all that!
And they did. WILL assures us that they condemn the violent threats, and I suppose we have to believe them. Surely they meant this to be a discreet, purely legal investigation into a minor case of teenage harassment.
Of course, it's a little unclear why you'd get Newsmax and the Wall Street Journal involved in such a thing. Or Laura Ingraham, for that matter. Then again, Newsmax is run by Christopher Ruddy, who has a master's degree in public policy from the London School of Economics. Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal is widely respected for his dedication to explaining why conservatives are always right. And Ingraham is a lawyer. So perhaps WILL figured they were the perfect people to carefully and dispassionately explain the legal ins and outs of this case to their viewers. I didn't see the coverage in any of these places, but I'm sure that's what they did. Right?
It seems to me that the unwarranted escalation of the event began with the school district's Title IX harassment investigation. Couldn't the matter have been more easily resolved by the teacher's (i) explaining to the complainant that sticks and stones etc. and (ii) explaining to the "offenders" that it's more polite to address people as they prefer to be addressed.
I personally prefer to be addressed as "Your Radiance," for those who wonder.
That is most likely where it began and then adults stepped in, the adult parents. You know as well as I do this isn't about children, their education, safety, and even their perception of reality nor of the society in which they live. This was an adult fight, precipitated by adults for adults. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous.
The parents instigated Title IX proceedings?
Probably not directly, the article doesn't state. Spitballing here, the continuing bullying situation that was egged on by some parents and that was never resolved and wasn't handled at the breakfast table "forced" a set of adults to officially move in the only way to resolve the issue. Unfortunately when two religions go to war, a point is all you score. Score no more, score no more.
I use the word adult very loosely here.
The only facts in evidence are that the school district--not the parents--initiated a Title IX investigation. Obviously, if you are of a totalitarian bent, you can always infer that those in authority were good and responsible and that the sullen, recalcitrant populace is the source of the problem.
And lo, what was accused is guilty of the accuser.
Your Radiance,
I am all for letting anyone pick any form or address they want.
But ugh, I wish, when whoever was figuring this out was figuring this out, they would have come up with a new pronoun, rather than attempting to use the plural as a new form of singular.
I don't have any ideas, something like how "Ms." became the standard when a form equal to Mr. was required. There was some resistance to "Ms. for a while, but since it was a new form of address there was no other reason to slow adoption.
Everytime I hear "they" applied to an individual person it sounds wrong. We need new words.
They tried xe and xhe and the like but you can't make fetch happen.
FOR THE WIN! Apoligies for typing it longform, but your point deserves emphasis.
"They" has always been used as a singular pronoun in various contexts.
Limited contexts, but here it too easily sounds like multiple personality disorder.
Cld, thou art correct! Thou must never use a plural pronoun in a singular context!
One may think that this was never to be preferred in one’s conversations…
Sure, that's what they say.
People can wish to be called whatever they want. But I’m not going to call a boy a girl or a girl a boy. You do t always get what you want, especially what you want is contrary to common sense.
Common sense has nothing to do with it; common courtesy does. Addressing some one as they wish is the courteous thing to do, just like attempting to pronounce people’s names as they pronounce them. Deliberately not doing this can, in the context of school, constitute bullying.
Just because someone has a mental disorder and thinks they are a different sex does not mean everyone around them should indulge their fantasy. It is ridiculous. Pronouncing names correctly is something completely different.
Transgender isn't a mental illness, it's a distinct biological state,
https://www.jsm.jsexmed.org/article/S1743-6095(21)00425-2/fulltext
Fine. But doesn’t change the fact that it’s a boy wanting everyone else to indulge them and refer to them as a girl. (Or vice versa.) Why should everyone else in the world indulge this fantasy and pretend they are something they are not?
No, that is not a fact at all, as that study illustrates.
But maybe you're on to something. We should be more mindful of the tender sensibilities of the brutal halfwit.
It's like when you were a kid and you used to go out and hack on cars from the overpass and then the city put up that stupid fencing to prevent human beings from doing that and you were totally offended, and that's why you're voting for Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Why should we indulge you in your panty-sniffing and bullying?
Because that's what you're saying, it's more important that you get to check kids' underwear for their pronouns so you can bully them than their personal autonomy.
I guess
If someone wants to be called something very strange though it’s a good sign they’re a weirdo. How much of this do we really have to tolerate, don’t wanna call someone ze/zim/zir and get chewed out if I don’t. Clownish
Although he is a Confederate troll, on this narrow point, I have to agree with Atticus. Note that while I agree with you about common courtesy, somewhat oxymoronically, common courtesy is -- Alas! -- hardly common.
Understood. From now on, please address me as "Master Friedman". I am not a fan of new fangled innovations like "Mister" and, worse yet, abbreviations like "Mr".
Somehow, I do not think that would go over well at Kiel Area School District. I suspect the policy is not neutral.
That's why I address my dentist as Dr. Psycho.
To Atticus he will always be Casius Clay.
So what are you going to call a Boy Named Sue?
Or Maury Povich's dad, Shirley?
When are you going to stop being a panty-sniffing bully, Atticus?
The only pronoun that is a form of address is "you". The gendered pronouns are third person singular, which means that they are used to speak about a person rather than to a person. MR,. Mrs., and Ms. are not pronouns, they are titles.
One thing I learned in the linguistics classes I had to take as an English major is that you can't make up new pronouns in a language. Things like nouns and verbs are open categories that you can add to, but the native speakers of a language never embrace new pronouns. In fact, people have tried to introduce new gender-neutral pronouns in the past to no avail.
And more generally, how many Esperanto speakers are there in the world right now?
Pronouns tend to disappear. "Thee" and "thou" have fallen out of use. I favor abolishing gendered pronouns altogether and simply using "it" and its derivatives for all third person singular applications.
You sound like my 1st grade teacher in 1986 in Wauwatosa, WI, who explained that the two kids who tied me to a chainlink fence with a jumprope at recess were good kids from good families so meant no harm by it.
The teacher in Kiel absolutely should not have softpedalled the Little Harold Breier Urban Achievers's taunting their nonbinary classmate.
So you're saying that bullies are okay to go ahead and bully?
Astronaut holding gun against other astronaut: Always has been.
Just call me "God".
People are very fragile these days. I don’t think they could take it
Ran into the same situation when I was in middle school, call it in the transition period between woke and non-woke. Not a religious person and some hyper-Christian freaks told me I was going to hell. Told them they smell like poop
Proceeded to get suspended for a day because they reported what I said and I didn’t. Didn’t consider my account of it because they didn’t wanna punish “a victim who came forward”. School systems now reward the fragile and whiny and punish the resilient. It’s a tough approach if you want to make successful adults
And the boys will sue the school on religious grounds in 3...2...
They're the real victims here.
Yes, there’s no question they are victims. That’s why this is national news.
It is national news because of Will².
You're a moronic douchebag.
Try and object, you'll be victimizing me.
Will was anti-Trump but he wasn't anti-Idiot enough for me.
The crazy over there has been percolating for decades and he's embraced it as much as anyone, although with nicer words.
The correct response to this should be, "who da fu.. cares!!!!"
By the way, can I swear here? Because I'd like to....sometimes.
"Right Wingers" are woke.
It's fun when you have a political action committee so besotted with the style and wit of a most able smith of words for returning to the antebellum days of yore that they take your name in acronym!
“This was not about ‘bullying.’” - WILL President Rick Esenberg, on Twitter.
Yes, it was.
👍
Right Wingers fighting over the cult of the individual. A left winger would not care and would not support title IX. Woke unlike what contards think is the definition of right Hegelian philosophy. More about me than the tribe.
So, apparently it is fine then for the other 8th graders to refer to those three boys as "those f---ing a--holes" since it's both technically correct and protected speech?
Sure. "Them" should have called them fairy faggots giving each other rim jobs.
Sure. It's rude (like they were being to the other kid), but it is, likewise, certainly not the basis for a Title IX complaint.
I wonder if any bomb threats were made against the local evangelical churches.
Yup
This is exactly the same thing as when Islamic religious maniacs in the Middle East incite some feeble minded douchebag in the US to commit a terrorist attack.
Maybe not on Will's part, but it absolutely is on Ingrahams'.
Despite his recent anti Trumpism, "feeble minded douchebag" pretty much describes George Will to a T.
So kids can now make fact-based appeals to excuse their bullying?
"But Ms. Crabtree, according to current medical standards, Billy's height to weight ratio indicates that he is classified as obese. So we are factually correct in calling him a lardass."
What a wonderful world to live in that will be.
This stuff is being escalated because polling among likely Republican voters indicates it's a winner for getting them out to the polls in November.
bingo...
Yeah the average person thinks transgender people are pretty strange and off-putting
Is there a hyphen in off putting? Looks weird as two words. Idk
Really? You consider yourself a measure of the average person? Do tell.
Isn't it baseball season? Why isn't George Will out at the ballpark(s), drawing tortured metaphors?
Because the Nationals really, really stink right now. They are now worse than he Orioles.
I still believe in Joan Adon.
George Will is still around?
I think I can tell you why the conservatives get all fired up, even if it is in a small district in the middle of nowhere. There are a couple of bills being considered in Canada that would essentially make misgendering the equivalent of a Title IX violation and could even levy civil fines for offenses. The Canadian conservatives are outraged about proposed mandated speech by law and have been warning American conservatives that Title IX violations for misgendering will be coming to a school near you very soon, so when one pops up, they go nuts. Frankly, I’m on the side of conservatives here, I’m not in favor of mandating speech and it has the potential to be weaponized by someone who wishes to inflict damage on others. I respectfully accede to whatever a trans wish would be, but I’ll be damned if the government tells me I have to
Mandated speech of not bullying people?
I note that there are quite a number of people who dislike Canada's current prime minister who habitually misgender him by referring to him as Justine. I don't think that is about to become punishable.
Adults have a constitutional right to be rude, but I believe schools may require good manners from their students. If this school deems that good manners requires speaking about fellow students by using their preferred pronouns, I can't see the problem.
On the other hand, the gendered pronouns are all third-person singular, which means that I use gendered pronouns when speaking about a person, not speaking to them. If the way I speak about someone else is not defamatory (and using a biologically correct pronoun is certainly not defamatory), they have little ground for complaint.
WILL has been increasingly off the rails for awhile now. I used to read his columns years ago just to watch him ostentatiously use big words ('cause he's a SMART conservative) in order to impress on everyone that his ideas were, you know, smart too. Not any more. Now he's just another bitter reactionary enraged that his pseudo-relevance has passed. Sad.
In general, advocacy groups from left and right try to get press on activities like this so they can raise more money, to convince people that their issues are important, to change minds, and to motivate voters.
Most do not support threats and violence because they are usually counterproductive to these goals.