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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31649 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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even the last fig leaf Superintendent Zeigler was using about the controversial school board meeting, that he assumed the questions were about policy 8040-related sexual assaults rather than sexual assaults in general, was not actually true either

Even if true, that's not a fig leaf. "Oh, you didn't mean 'rapes under our new trans-friendly policy'? You meant all those other rapes that happen in our schools? Sorry for misunderstanding you!"

Even accounting for the right-wing bias in the reporting, it sounds like the grand jury was mad as hell about the whole affair. Good. The kid at the centre of it all sounds, from other things I've read previously, to have been totally fucked-up by his dysphoric family life, and instead of doing anything to help him, the school board was all "Oh you are gender-fluid and trans and a girl? Of course you are! Feel free to use the girls' bathrooms at your own discretion! Rainbow flags aloft!" because, and this is just my own opinion, they were a bunch of spineless idiots in thrall to the local trans activist parents' group.

EDIT: Okay, to be fair to the school board, they were being kept in the dark by the administration. So it's the superintendent and the principals that should be strung up by their thumbs. There was an immense amount of "sweep it under the carpet" going on, and things were made worse by A not informing B that C had told them they were going to be working with D between the courts, the schools, the sheriff's office and pretty much everyone involved.

What I really hated afterwards were all the good progressives, online and in the media, solidly (1) engaging in victim-blaming which, in any other context, they would tear someone apart for doing and (2) suddenly they were all very, very sure that this wasn't a trans kid or gender-fluid, this was a male boy who was completely male and not really trans or any other identity he claimed, even again where they would be "if you say you're trans, you're trans!".

Yeah. Enough shame and blame to go around for every single person, including that bitch of a prosecutor who tried to hang the father of the raped girl with all her might.

I think that the trans angle is a possible read, and almost certainly a component of the story... but I think there's a lot of fingerprints that don't touch on it, and I think it's important not to miss them. There's definitely stuff like all the people insisting that the assailant was wearing a kilt, despite all everything going on, but there's also issues that had ignored other bad conduct when that bad conduct was the only real interaction they had.

In extreme cases, this involved parts of the system missed dozens of other incidents, and had for years, including in ways that never would have seen the assailant either in this case or in others, and might not have even gotten information about gender beyond the name on a piece of paper: the reporting system that had been broken for the better part of a decade falls into this group. I think the special ed teacher's assistant literally walking past a rape in progress does as well. There's plausible explanations for the complete lack of Title IX infrastructure, but more likely it's just not something anyone who should have been making the decision wanted to think for five minutes about. Same, if not more so, for the complete abdication of any role by the director of 'safety and security', the long-standing lack of cooperation between the school district and police, and the efforts to obscure the 'external' review.

There's still ways to argue these latter problems derive from culture war causes -- maybe even true ones! -- but they point to a far broader problem that I think a lot of social conservatives are ignoring in favor of the flavour of the month.

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