Genderless, before it was cool

h/t Goodbye, America

Does reality have a factual basis?

Sara has completed her first week of 7th grade at a Santa Fe middle school. Three of her former friends who were girls are now "guys." All have cut their hair short. One gets mad if anyone refers to her with a female pronoun. Most of the girls and teachers are fine with the gender changes. Sara and most of her guy friends have an "I don't care" attitude, which has earned Sara the "bitch" epithet from some of her female acquaintences who are being supportive of those who have "switched genders." One of her guy friends changed genders, too, but he also changed schools, so there has been no interaction with him.

Does reality have a factual basis?

Boys and girls? No, just "students or scholars"

Todd Starnes reports,

Teachers in Charlotte, North Carolina have been advised to stop calling the children “boys and girls,” according to a training presentation on transgender issues.

Instead the progressives who control Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools want teachers to identify the youngsters as either “students” or “scholars.”

Read more here.

Where we are

h/t Moonbattery

More insanity out of New York

At Hot Air, Jazz Shaw brings us the latest from New York City:

I’m no longer sure on any given day if I’m watching the actual news out of New York City or reading the summary of a William Gibson novel. Either way, the crazy train has well and truly pulling into the station in the Big Apple. We learned this week that Hizzonor Bill de Blasio has yet another plan to entrench the city in “transgender” warfare and make sure that business owners are made to toe the line on political correctness. Under this latest scheme, any business which greets someone using a pronoun not matching the gender (or lack thereof) the customer “identifies” as could face a stiff fine in court. No… I’m not even remotely kidding you. (Washington Times)

Greeting customers as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” — or even not using the pronoun “ze” or “zir” — could prove costly for New York City businesses under rules drafted by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s bureaucrats.

The Gotham mayor’s Commission on Human Rights says entities that fail to address customers by their preferred gender pronouns and titles are in violation of the law and could be subject to penalties of up to $250,000.

The commission issued a “legal enforcement guidance” for the New York City Human Rights Law, which now “requires employers and converted entities to use an individual’s preferred name, pronoun and title (e.g., Ms./Mrs.) regardless of the individual’s sex assigned at birth, anatomy, gender, medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on the individual’s identification.”

So now New York City will regulate the speech of business owners and employees down to the level of punishing those who use standard, polite pronouns which have been accepted protocol for nearly as long as we’ve had language skills. If we were to stretch credulity to the point of denying basic medical science, you might be able to make the argument that someone you assumed was male could correct you and say they are female. With today’s fashions and hairstyles, who’s to say, right? If what appears to be a woman walks up to the perfume counter and, upon being greeted with a cheerful, “Good afternoon, Ma’am” informs you that they should be addressed as sir, what’s the harm? You still want to make the sale, so just call them sir and ring up the purchase. But if you fail to conform to the request, what law has been broken? Your boss might fire you for driving away business (and they would be well within their right to do so) but can you be dragged into court and fined? And we’re not talking about a small fine here.

The maximum civil fine that the commission may impose upon “misgendering” is $125,000. But when the violation is the “result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct,” the maximum fine can double to $250,000.
That doesn’t even begin to address the question of demands to use misappropriated terms like “they/them/theirs” or worse, completely fake pronouns such as “ze/hir.” Shifting generic plurals to be used in the singular (“Would them care for some more coffee?”) is simply bad English and makes you sound illiterate. And don’t get me started on this “ze/hir” nonsense. Those aren’t even words. The city administration chooses to define them as, alternative pronoun systems developed by academics and/or LGBT communities, but that doesn’t make them part of the language and nobody is required to use these made up terms.

Read more here.

Why stop at the border?

Did you read about the North Dakota woman who married herself? Steven Hayward writes that he had to check to make sure that the "Puffington Host" had not merged with The Onion, when he read this story the Huffington Post posted in May of 2012.

In the fall of 2013 Hayward attended a University of Colorado orientation for new faculty, then wrote in October 2013,

So why is this gender-bending diversity mandate so prominent at universities these days? The most likely explanation is that it is simply yielding to the demands of the folks who dislike any constraint of human nature in what goes by the LGBTQRSTUW (or whatever letters have been added lately) “community.” I place “community” in quotation marks here because the very idea of community requires a certain commonality based ultimately in nature, while the premise behind gender-bending is resolutely to deny any such nature, including especially human nature.

But by all means, we must let the new royal baby choose its own gender, rather than having it “assigned” arbitrarily by the “patriarchy” just because the infant has a penis. Makes me wonder how the “human rights” community stays in business, since we can’t seem to tell what humans are any more.

Now students and faculty at the University of Colorado are condemning Hayward.

Student leaders at the University of Colorado are speaking out against Steven Hayward, the university’s first-ever visiting scholar in conservative thought, for statements he made in a recent interview and in a blog post.

Chris Schaefbauer, CU Student Government president of student affairs, and Caitlin Pratt, student government director of safety and inclusion, said they’re concerned about Hayward’s “oppressive and discriminatory” ideas.

Schaefbauer and Pratt said statements Hayward made in a March 17 interview on Colorado Public Radio and in an October blog post cause the Boulder campus harm and do not promote inclusivity and respect.

“We realized after thinking about it that somebody had to say something,” Schaefbauer said.

Schaefbauer and Pratt wrote their criticisms of Hayward in an opinion piece published in the Colorado Daily titled “Bigotry is not Diversity.”

Hayward adds that there is more.

There’s more: the chairman of the Boulder Faculty Assembly says my comments “border” on “hate speech.” Why stop at the border?