Is Intersectionality the Achilles Heel of the Transgender Movement/Gender Ideology?

submitted by yousaythosethings from (self.GenderCritical)

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[–]yousaythosethings[S] 15 insightful - 1 fun15 insightful - 0 fun16 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Spanish is like that too where you generally don't need to use subject pronouns except in certain situations for emphasis or clarity. That being said, just this weekend I learned from a close friend who teaches Spanish at a major public university in the United States and she was saying that she now has to adapt the Spanish language for her non-binary students. Por ejemplo: Bienvenido -> Bienvenide. That's just not how Spanish works, but her students are hyper-sensitive and it's made the learning environment tense.

She is naturally a very sweet and accommodating person but she's feeling suffocated and nervous because every sentence in Spanish is a minefield of gender, and she is worried about consequences to her career while she is trying to earn her Ph.D. She is also an immigrant herself and doesn't even have a green card yet.

As someone who learned Spanish in school and lived abroad, I have to wonder what's the point of even studying Spanish at that point? It's not even real Spanish. They will never be able to go to a Spanish-speaking country or use the Spanish language in any meaningful way if they are going to be requiring Spanish-speakers to make up grammar on the spot for them. Instead, they are just going to be avoided at all costs and further isolate themselves.

I can only imagine these self-identifying progressive, hyper-sensitive people volunteering at an immigration clinic for asylees and telling the poor traumatized people escaping violence in Central America that the asylees are traumatizing them and need to modify everything about the way they're speaking in order to receive help. It just exposes the backwards, privileged, navel-gazing for what it is.

[–]BEB 17 insightful - 1 fun17 insightful - 0 fun18 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

That is just crazy.

These kids bang on about "colonization" yet they want to colonize languages happily spoken by (among others) brown-skinned people in other countries with this Western, navel-gazing tripe.

I swear, so much of this is to keep the kids' minds occupied so that they don't think too hard about how their futures are fucked by the 0.1%

[–]yousaythosethings[S] 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Most of them know fuck all about the systems of colonization, the different types, the different ways decolonization occurred (or didn't occur) and the legacies left behind. I will say it again, at least in the U.S. I cannot stand the way that history is taught. People learn nothing. It took me a while to realize that I learned a lot of "facts" but mostly a lot of nothing too. It's also hard to understand history unless you have real, modern world experiences to compare to.

One of the problems is that we often only get one or very few models/example for anything, and when you only have one model, you get a very narrow concept of what that thing is and how it came about and, therefore, you fail to gain the ability to think about how something similar could come about in the future, and what that thing would look like in modern times under different circumstances. Basically, it makes it hard to engage in critical thinking and self-reflection and wade through this post-Truth society we find ourselves collectively in.

I don't mean to make this controversial and invite racist, anti-Semitic, or whatever else comments. This is merely a critique from the perspective of historiography (the study of the writing of history, but also the teaching of history), but I will invoke some examples of things that are covered in school to some extent but leave something to be desired in maximizing what we learn from them: colonization, decolonization, nationalism, witch hunts, the Holocaust (We talk about it a lot in school but most people learn nothing. There are important lessons about the treatment of Jewish people specifically but the lessons are far more wide-reaching too and are relevant for groups that weren't even on our minds at that time, other genocides (including what characteristics something needs to be considered a genocide), Nazi party membership, free press, freedom of religion, different forms and examples of slavery (slavery has occurred around the world of people through various backgrounds through all of time including the present such as sex slavery, but in America we never want to use the word "slavery" to describe these other situations and I think that diminishes the gravity of these other situations and causes people to think that slavery is a vestige of the 1800s. As one example, my grandparents were trafficked across Europe as teenagers into years of "forced labor."), various political ideologies including marxism, socialism, and communism (does any American know what any of these things actually are), religion (including cults and other forms of non-deity-centered ideologies that produce religious adherents), etc.

Sorry, this is my stream of consciousness, but so much of the way history is taught is like: This is what happened. Then this other thing happened as a result. And this is how people felt about it. I'd like there to be more framing about how to think critically about what we're hearing. What questions to ask ourselves. What sources we have for our claims to certain knowledge. Identification of the players and their varying interests. Evaluation of sources and identification of biases. Historical blind spots. You get it.

[–]owmygenderfeels 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I've noticed that the average American can appear much more well-versed in their history than the average person from my own country is in theirs, because Americans can cite their history, eg. important events and their dates, in a way we really can't unless we've decided to study history as a special interest. But it also comes across as rote-learning when you scratch the surface.

[–]BEB 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Americans of my era learned propaganda, in which the USA is the greatest country on Earth, is the patron saint of other countries, save other countries from themselves and from outside enemies, you get the picture.

The one thing I will give the US (I'll give other things too, but this is the one that I am exceptionally proud of) is the Bill of Rights, but even that has been whittled down by Patriots Act I and the renewal, which both parties sign off on.