RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-tyranny-of-the-marginalized/

By Arthur Milikh, associate director of, and research fellow in, The Heritage Foundation’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics.

From the New Deal to Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Left’s fundamental transformation of America over the past century is astounding. A key to that achievement has been the discipline to hasten beyond recent victories and commence new battles. Today, leftists’ eyes are set on outlawing “hate speech.” In 2018, a New York Times article lamented conservatives’ success in “weaponizing the First Amendment.” “I have come to see,” said a regretful progressive law school professor, “that it’s a mistake to think of free speech as an effective means to accomplish a more just society.” Many conservatives, reluctant to believe what seems unbelievable, do not fully appreciate that the campaign to curtail speech in order to promote social justice is gathering strength and capturing powerful institutions. In the not very distant future, it could succeed.

Every Western European nation and the entire Anglosphere already criminalize hate speech. America is the only holdout. Nevertheless, California, always a leader in the field of misgovernance, has recently expressed interest in doing so. Many of our colleges and universities, of course, already administer Orwellian speech codes. Big Tech, with Twitter, Google, and Facebook leading the way, censors political content for violating stern but hazy standards based on the European model. And the United Nations relentlessly advocates criminalizing words that “dehumanize minority groups and other targeted people.” Without understanding where the desire to censor hate speech comes from, means, or would entail, many Americans are growing comfortable with the idea.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/worst-side-story-11582246801?mod=opinion_reviews_pos1

My sentiments exactly. If the P.C. crowd wants a P.C. musical, let them compose their own music and lyrics and not defile a classic….rsk

Pop quiz, boomers: What’s your favorite musical? If I had to guess, I’d go for “West Side Story.” Not only did the original 1957 production light up the hit parade four times in a row, with “Maria,” “One Hand, One Heart,” “Somewhere” and “Tonight,” but the 1961 film version was a box-office smash that won 10 Oscars and remains to this day a small-screen staple, while regional theater companies all over America continue to stage the show with remunerative regularity. As for Broadway, this fourth revival of “West Side Story” had been in previews since December and is selling out nightly. Nor is anyone buying tickets to see the big names in the cast, because there aren’t any: This is a starless production. No, they’re going to see “West Side Story” because it’s “West Side Story.”

Unfortunately, a suburban mom who goes to Ivo van Hove’s new Broadway revival without knowing anything about Mr. Van Hove’s work in general or this production in particular is in for a very big shock. This is not the “West Side Story” you know and love, and there are some—quite a few, actually—who’ll likely tell you that it’s not “West Side Story” at all. Jerome Robbins’s finger-popping choreography has been scrapped, and the rest of the show is heavily cut (it now runs for an intermission-free hour and 45 minutes, an hour shorter than the 2009 Broadway revival). “I Feel Pretty” and the “Somewhere” ballet are nowhere to be seen in Mr. Van Hove’s production, which takes place not on New York’s Upper West Side in the ’50s but—surprise, surprise—here and now. Oh, yes, there’s no balcony or fire escapes, just a huge empty stage. Instead, the upstage wall of the 1,761-seat Broadway Theatre has been replaced with a proscenium-size projection screen on which are alternately shown scenes of the mean streets of New York and giant live-TV images of the cast in action.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/02/19/boys_will_be_girls__and_feminists_will_be_furious_122456.html

In January, the august New York Public Library withdrew as host of a forum organized by a self-described radical feminist group called the Women’s Liberation Front, or WoLF. The irony was palpable: The planned meeting was titled “An Evening With Canceled Women,” since the five speakers from WoLF all claim to have been “deplatformed” – i.e., shouted down by hecklers or kicked off speakers lists – because they questioned claims made by transgender advocates regarding sexuality and identity.

In other words, as some conservative news outlets gleefully reported, the New York Public Library canceled the “canceled women”! Why?

The library had no comment, but it likely feared that it too would become a target of activists who have demonstrated and even threatened violence during other programs sponsored by the group.

“It’s very common for people to say we deserve to die,” Kara Dansky, a board member of WoLF, said in a phone interview.

Actual death threats seem rare, but there are plenty of signs of an angry front opening up in the culture wars. Although religious figures and people on the right have challenged the transgender movement, the conflict with WoLF involves feminist stalwarts of the social justice left who support their fundamental rights but reject the idea that a man can truly become a woman, or vice versa.

Specifically, the ire of trans activists and their supporters has been aroused by some basic positions taken by WoLF and others, namely: 1) that a person’s sex is biologically determined and can’t be changed, even by surgery; and 2) that the pieces of legislation passed or pending in several countries and American states to extend civil rights protections to transgender people, usually called Equality Acts, are wrongheaded and harmful to women and children.

The number of liberals making those arguments publicly is still small. But it is growing. And it has already given rise to a strange reshuffling of the political deck, as some feminists of otherwise impeccable leftist credentials have formed alliances with conservative and evangelical groups that would fervently disagree with them over just about everything else – abortion and gay marriage most conspicuously. In January, the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., hosted a panel called “The Inequality of the Equality Act: Concerns From the Left,” during which several speakers from WoLF, including two lesbians, explained their point of view to a supportive Heritage audience.

https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/science-says-there-are-only-two-genders-no-gender-spectrum/

In the increasingly brainwashed world we live in, it is incredibly refreshing when experts are willing to speak the politically incorrect truth. In Thursday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, biologists Colin M. Wright and Emma N. Hilton provide extensive commentary on the transgender fad and the notion of gender fluidity. What does the science say?  In short, it says that are only two genders: male and female.

Sadly, such an obvious conclusion can get you branded as a bigot these days

And what about the gender “spectrum” and gender being a social construct? Wright and Hilton completely destroy the basis of these concepts. “If male and female are merely arbitrary groupings, it follows that everyone, regardless of genetics or anatomy should be free to choose to identify as male or female, or to reject sex entirely in favor of a new bespoke ‘gender identity,'” they write. “To characterize this line of reasoning as having no basis in reality would be an egregious understatement. It is false at every conceivable scale of resolution.”

They explain that “In humans, reproductive anatomy is unambiguously male or female at birth more than 99.98% of the time.” Humans, just like most animals and plants, have two distinct biological sexes with the corresponding anatomy for reproduction. “No third type of sex cell exists in humans, and therefore there is no sex ‘spectrum’ or additional sexes beyond male and female. Sex is binary.”

According to Wright and Hilton,  denying the “reality of biological sex” in favor of subjective “gender identity” raises “serious human-rights concerns for vulnerable groups including women, homosexuals and children.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dangerous-denial-of-sex-11581638089?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Transgender ideology can take on a comical character, as in a recent American Civil Liberties Union commentary objecting to sales tax on tampons and similar products while pondering: “How can we recognize that barriers to menstrual access are a form of sex discrimination without erasing the lived experiences of trans men and non-binary people who menstruate, as well as women who don’t?”

Yet it’s one thing to claim that a man can “identify” as a woman or vice versa. Increasingly we see a dangerous and antiscientific trend toward the outright denial of biological sex.

“The idea of two sexes is simplistic,” an article in the scientific journal Nature declared in 2015. “Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.” A 2018 Scientific American piece asserted that “biologists now think there is a larger spectrum than just binary female and male.” And an October 2018 New York Times headline promised to explain “Why Sex Is Not Binary.”

The argument is that because some people are intersex—they have developmental conditions resulting in ambiguous sex characteristics—the categories male and female exist on a “spectrum,” and are therefore no more than “social constructs.” If male and female are merely arbitrary groupings, it follows that everyone, regardless of genetics or anatomy should be free to choose to identify as male or female, or to reject sex entirely in favor of a new bespoke “gender identity.”

To characterize this line of reasoning as having no basis in reality would be an egregious understatement. It is false at every conceivable scale of resolution.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/parents-who-refuse-gender-affirming-treatments-castigated-as-neglectful/

It’s one thing when adults decide to radically alter their bodies to accord with their identified gender. But when these body-altering interventions are performed on children — blocking normal puberty, mastectomies on 13-year-olds, etc. — that is a different kettle of fish.

“Treating” gender-dysphoric children via body-altering interventions should be deemed unethical because — among other concerns — children can’t decide these things maturely, we don’t know the long-term consequences to their health, we don’t know how such potentially permanent alterations will impact their wellbeing, and some gender-dysphoric children cease identifying as their non-biological sex as they reach adulthood. Alas, much of mainstream medicine supports such interventions, at least when parents consent.

But that isn’t enough for the transgender lobby. Its advocates often treat resistance to their agenda as a moral panic in which all dissent must be crushed, even — perhaps especially — when parents seek to protect their gender-dysphoric children from having their normal body functions interfered with or altered medically.

Furthering the ongoing assault on parental rights in this area, an article just published in the Journal of Medical Ethics advocates treating a parent’s refusal to allow (what proponents call “gender affirming”) medical interventions as an egregious form of “neglect” that warrants calling in the authorities. From, “Medically Assisted Gender Affirmation: When Children and Parents Disagree:”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/prada-and-the-new-fashion-police-11581120144?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Move over, Anna Wintour. New York City regulators now have the final say over what constitutes a fashion faux pas. This week the city’s Commission on Human Rights announced a sweeping settlement with Prada over some of its designs, and the terms threaten artistic expression across the industry.

The brouhaha began in December 2018 when Chinyere Ezie, a lawyer at a social-justice nonprofit, discovered Prada’s Pradamalia collection. Prada described its bag charms, figurines and other trinkets as “a new family of mysterious tiny creatures that are one part biological, one part technological, all parts Prada.” Ms. Ezie instead saw “blackface imagery” and “Sambo like imagery,” she wrote in a Facebook post that went viral.

Within days, Prada pulled the merchandise and said it “never had the intention of offending anyone and we abhor all forms of racism and racist imagery.” Ms. Ezie still filed a complaint. In this week’s settlement Prada denies engaging in unlawful discriminatory practices. Yet the agreement gives New York City bureaucrats broad influence over the fashion house’s day-to-day operations, including its creative process, training and hiring.

Prada now must appoint a diversity and inclusion officer who can review all of “Prada’s designs before they are sold, advertised or promoted in any way in the United States.” The diversity cop will ensure that “Prada’s activities, including, without limitation, its production, advertising, and business activities, are conducted in a racially equitable manner.”