I wonder if we can track trends via Christmas/New Year’s cards. Out of roughly 100 cards, we received one with explicit pronouns. This was from a Ph.D. engineer (colleague of Dr. Jill Biden, MD?) who opened by characterizing 2020 as “bizarre” (the Swedish MD/PhDs might agree with him that it is bizarre for middle aged people to cower in place for a year to avoid a 0.1% chance of nasty flu symptoms or worse). Here’s an excerpt from the letter:
[usually-female name] (they/them) left [Company A] to join [Company B]… a few months later they left [Company B] to become a consultant for [Company C]… they have the distinction of having been hired twice of having been hired twice during a difficult time for employment generally.
Pronouns are also specified for two additional children, the author (“he/him”) and the mother of the three kids (“she/her”).
I have gotten accustomed to receiving business correspondence, e.g., from Linode, festooned with pronoun specifications, but can’t recall too many previous personal letters containing them (their/theirs). Readers: what did you get in your mailboxes this year in terms of pronoun specs?
What about employers, though? Why is it Pride Month Every Month at employers whose businesses don’t relate to romance, sex, gender reassignment surgery, or anything else that might seem directly related to LGBTQIA+?
Let’s consider heterosexual sex acts from an employer’s point of view. These encounters regularly result in the accidental production of children whose existence then leads to (1) up to a year of paid parental leave during which time employee productivity is zero, (2) additional years or decades of reduced productivity, and (3) massive increases in costs for health insurance (or health care for the self-insured employer).
From a rational employer’s point of view, therefore, it makes sense to promote all things LGBTQIA+. From my 2016 visit to the Facebook campus (see Open-pit Coding), for example:
Another way to look at it, which of the follow individuals would you rather employ?
Related:
Broody hen compared to gravid human in the office: “Just as a broody hen negatively impacts a farmer’s productivity, a gravid human poses a significant inconvenience to her employer. That’s why companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple pay for female employees to extract and freeze their eggs. It’s great to see tech companies empowering women the same way that factory farms empower their battery hens!”
A physicist friend lives in San Francisco and likes to have fun with psychology. Thus, whenever asked for pronouns, which is a common occurrence out there, the physicist’s response is “He/Her”. This leads to a brain freeze in the recipient of the information and an inability to form sentences.
This does raise a question of why people ask for “pronouns” rather than “pronoun”. Most of the customer support notes that I get from people at Linode, where this blog is hosted, are signed “Joe (He/Him)”, “Mary (She/Her)”, or similar. To avoid the cross-pronoun situation above, wouldn’t it be better to sign “Joe (He)” or “Mary (Her)”?
Part of an email from our local public school (in which, thanks to the First Amendment, there is no possibility of insisting that people follow an established religion…):
Heirs whose wealth has come from a specific source sometimes use that history to guide their giving. Pierce Delahunt, a 32-year-old “socialist, anarchist, Marxist, communist or all of the above,” has a trust fund that was financed by their former stepfather’s outlet mall empire. (Mx. Delahunt takes nongendered pronouns.)
“When I think about outlet malls, I think about intersectional oppression,” Mx. Delahunt said. There’s the originally Indigenous land each mall was built on, plus the low wages paid to retail and food service workers, who are disproportionately people of color, and the carbon emissions of manufacturing and transporting the goods. With that on their mind, Mx. Delahunt gives away $10,000 a month, divided between 50 small organizations, most of which have an anticapitalist mission and in some way tackle the externalities of discount shopping.
A friend who was a reporter for this paper in the 1980s told me that they wouldn’t write “Dr. Jones” for a mere Ph.D. Jones had to be an actual medical doctor. I think the paper has been doing “Mx.” for a while, but I didn’t notice until recently.
The article is also interesting for the unchallenged idea that immigrants from India are victims:
“The narrative of giving away everything feels like it’s being framed by white inheritors,” said Elizabeth Baldwin, a 34-year-old democratic socialist in Cambridge, Mass., who was adopted from India by a white family when she was a baby. Heirs in her position, she said, must decide whether to redistribute to their own communities or others’, and what it means to give up economic privilege when they don’t have the kind of safety net that comes with being white. She plans to keep enough of her inheritance to buy an apartment and raise a family, enjoying the sort of pleasant middle-class existence denied to many people of color in the United States.
Because her adoptive family’s wealth originated in land ownership and slavery, she donates to anti-racist groups and will soon begin making low-interest loans to Black-owned businesses. “The money I’m living on was made from exploiting people that look like me, so I see my giving as reparations,” she said.
Black Americans look like Indian-Americans? Is it time for an update of alllooksame.com? People of color from India can’t lead a middle-class existence in the U.S.? Is that because they earn 2X the median and therefore have to live an upper-middle-class existence? From Wikipedia:
Indian Americans have risen to become the richest ethnicity in America, with an average household income of $126,891 (compared to the US average of $65,316).
The rich and righteous don’t like stocks for the long run:
“My money is mostly stocks, which means it comes from underpaying and undervaluing working-class people, and that’s impossible to disconnect from the economic legacies of Indigenous genocide and slavery,” Ms. Gelman said.
Maybe it would be possible to get hold of some of Ms. Gelman’s cash by creating a mutual fund of stocks in companies that don’t have a significant number of employees and/or that pay high wages to employees because all of the crummy jobs have been outsourced to contractors?
Nature is rarely as simple as A, B, or C, especially in the “Queer Woods.”
Preservation of these trees from the commercial saw is mostly due to Native Americans and people who identified as “women”:
“Indigenous” is another way to be queer, apparently. The Native Americans are lumped into this sign series ($100,000 fine and one year in Federal prison if a Native American were to take offense and remove one):
If you’re going to have sex, it is ideal to follow the examples set by the banana slug and some butterflies (“same sex behaviors”):
Some miscellaneous photos, including an explanation of how bad it is for salmon when a river is “straight”:
(What’s the situation at Muir Woods during coronapanic? Parking reservations are required. Hardly anyone was there on a rainy day. About 75 percent of the visitors wore masks when wandering around the empty trails, though wearing a mask was not required.)
As we looked down from the Cirrus SR20 (IFR training), it occurred to me that the prison is lacking one thing: a rainbow flag. I’m hopeful that President Harris will correct this and then the prison can be renamed “Ministry of Love is Love”.
My Facebook feed is alive with people mourning Ruth Bader Ginsburg, often specifically mentioning that she advocated “equality”. Our government-sponsored broadcasting network describes her as “a champion of gender equality”:
“Justice Kavanaugh made history by bringing on board an all-female law clerk crew. Thanks to his selections, the Court has this Term, for the first time ever, more women than men serving as law clerks,” she said, according to remarks released by the court.
Her remarks come several months after Kavanaugh, who was confirmed to the court last year after a fraught confirmation battle that centered around allegations of sexual misconduct, followed through on a promise he made during the nomination process to appoint an all-female team of law clerks.
(Why is that private employers can be sued by plaintiffs alleging gender discrimination in employment if our top government officials brag about doing this?)
Perhaps RBG could legitimately be described as having been an advocate for 1 out of 50+ possible gender IDs. But why is she is an example of someone who advocated “equality” among people with 50+ gender IDs?
Separately, if Mother-of-7 Amy Coney Barrett is appointed to this demanding job (though apparently it wasn’t too demanding for an unhealthy 87-year-old?), will that stop stay-at-home American helicopter moms-of-1-or-2 from complaining that they are exhausted from doing the most difficult job on the planet?
Research from the Center for Work-Life Policy shows mid-level, professional women need powerful, senior executives to help promote them to the next level of management.
The problem is this: More often than not, superiors are males who are married.
Enter, sex.
In that same CWLP study, 34% of executive women claim they know a female colleague who has had an affair with a boss. Furthermore, 15% of women at the director level or above admitted to having affairs themselves.
And worse, 37% claim the action was rewarded: they said that women involved in affairs received a career boost as a result.
Now that Harvey W. is in prison, presumably the sex-for-jobs exchange is less common and fewer of the plum jobs are allocated to the most brazen. Are women who don’t have sex with bosses obtaining promotions noticeably sooner than ten years ago?
Feminism is the movement to liberate women from patriarchy. We stand up for the rights of women to control our own bodies as individuals and to control women-only spaces as a class.
Women are adult human females. We do not believe that men can become women by ‘feeling’ like women. We do not condone the erasure of females and female-only spaces, the silencing of critical thinking, the denial of biological reality and of sex-based oppression. We oppose the ‘cotton ceiling’ and the pressure on lesbians to have sex with men. We resist efforts to limit women’s reproductive autonomy. We condemn the men who exploit and abuse women in prostitution and pornography.
“Women do not decide at some point in adulthood that they would like other people to understand them to be women, because being a woman is not an ‘identity.’ Women’s experience does not resemble that of men who adopt the ‘gender identity’ of being female or being women in any respect. The idea of ‘gender identity’ disappears biology and all the experiences that those with female biology have of being reared in a caste system based on sex.” – Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts
Reddit has deleted nearly seven years of content by this community. I asked a friend who considers herself a TERF whether this forum was, in fact, hate-filled. Her answer:
No, the mods were exacting about following the rules. Couldn’t call people trannies, etc. Purely political decision. They still left all the porn subreddits up so it clearly wasn’t about anything other than clamping down on terfs.
The archive.org server grabbed the front page of the forum, but not the actual content. So those of us who were not participants in the community can never know whether they were haters or not. Some of the older threads do seem to be available. Samples:
“gilded” (posts that others liked a lot?), which contains “Transgenderism seems completely innocuous on first glance, but if you look closer at it has many, many grievous harms. Harms that are so large, they are almost difficult to wrap one’s mind around. It basically spells the end of women being able to name and organize around our oppression, which almost certainly spells the end of our having even nominal rights. We will be pushed out of public life and back into the home in many ways.”
Transgenderism does seem to be winning the war, if indeed there was anyone other than a few terfs to fight against. Walking into a Target recently, for example, the very first display for all shoppers is of LGBTQIA+-themed products:
(the gender critical feminists might not be pleased to learn that a trans woman is more “authentic” than a cisgender woman!)
Near the pharmacy, Johnson & Johnson talks about its “championing” of all matters LGBTQIA (but not “plus”!) and offers rainbow-wrapped Listerine, sunscreen, etc.:
Companies usually like to avoid actual political controversy. Why lose nearly half your customers by saying “We at GreedCo prefer Candidate X”? There are some dramatic differences between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, for example, but how many Fortune 500 companies have endorsed either one? The only time that a company would be willing to alienate customers is on an issue where there are hardly any people who strongly oppose the position being taken. From this, therefore, it seems reasonable to infer that, at least since 2011 when Johnson & Johnson decided it was safe to come out of the closet, there is no significant opposition to LGBTQIA advocacy.
I wonder if this sanitizing of the Internet by Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, et al. will actually work against those who advocate for the causes that are now held sacred and to which no opposition can be voiced. Once all of the terfs are silenced, for example, and there is no record that they ever existed because old content is in a memory hole, wouldn’t that cause people to ask an advocate for transgenderism “Who exactly are you fighting against?”
