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Notes -
An Interview With the School Board Chair Who Forced Out a Principal After Michelangelo’s David Was Shown in Class
Reading the entire interview, the school board comes out looking only slightly more reasonable than was portrayed in the "mainstream media".
The chair of the school board, Barney Bishop III, insists that the David incident was only a small contributing factor, but when asked to elaborate why the board decided to pressure the principal to resign, he says:
To me, the overall tone of Bishop's statements suggests that the David incident was in fact a major reason, if not the sole reason, for the firing (sorry, "resignation under pressure"). Bishop says:
The interview doesn't say in what context the teacher told the students not to tell their parents or that the images were not pornographic. (Maybe the original article does? I haven't read it because it's paywalled.) Out of context, it does sound suspicious. I suppose the first could have been a joke. As for the second, I'm not sure why the teacher would need to tell the students in the classroom that the images were not pornographic. In any case, my priors are that it is extremely unlikely that the teacher was a "groomer" trying to sexualize the kids.
The year before, the school had notified the parents that their children, who are 11 and 12 years old, were going to be exposed to the horror of a statue depicting a human. This year, the teacher teaching the class told the principal (the one who was later fired) to send out a similar notice, but the principal apparently forgot. This is an "egregious mistake":
Michelangelo's sculpture of David is "controversial":
The interview ends with the reporter saying "I just don’t think this statue is controversial", to which Bishop responds:
An article in the BBC relates this to the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, AKA the "Don't Say Gay" Bill. Personally, I think it's just typical American prudishness. In other Western countries, it is perfectly normal and unremarkable for statues with exposed penises and breasts (non-pornographic, of course) to be displayed in public, where they are easily seen by children of all ages.
At one point, in describing the school, Bishop says:
Obviously the sentence is false if taken literally, as critics have pointed out. But does anyone know what he might have actually meant? They don't have pronoun badges? They don't put pronouns in their email signatures? They don't use trans people's preferred pronouns? I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious as to what leads people to say nonsensical things like this, what they understand the word "pronoun" to mean.
I mean, it seems quite clear what they mean - especially if you look at the full paragraph: they're not paying respect to the new woke pronoun regime and all that entails.
Why can't they see the issue with phrasing it that way? If we have to unfurl it:
The old conception of pronouns was unchosen titles that were assigned to people based on which of two sexes they were. This was done automatically and many older people may not have even considered themselves as having "personal" pronouns as a result. They just consider those pronouns the appropriate ones for their sex. Before the woke wave the way to correct someone was not "those are not my pronouns/use my pronouns" but "I'm actually a man/woman" - and then the other party would be expected to switch.
It's thus not a shock that random people slip up and say "we don't use pronouns" instead of "we don't use preferred pronouns" or "we don't use neo pronouns" for two reasons:
the Leftists are the ones who keep talking about "use my pronouns" so you can assume that any ask to "use [someone's pronouns] will involve "woke" deviations from the old conception. So "pronouns" as a culture war issue means "woke/preferred/neo pronouns"
normies aren't always watching every single word to thwart some Twitter nitpicker from having a dunking session. A more cautious or introspective person might have avoided it, but it's hardly a big impediment in debates.
My bet is that almost everyone knows what they mean. Including the people "owning the cons".
Is it really a slip-up? If that is a slip up then so is "please use our pronouns" or "what are your pronouns?". The reason that is never corrected to "preferred pronoun" is because everybody knows that "pronoun" can refer to the progressive idea.
Qualifying "pronoun" with "preferred" would be a tactical error by gender-believers. The way they say it now is a rhetorical technique to obscure the fact that the mainstream idea and progressive idea are different. Rather than framing the discussion as "should we change how pronouns work?" it is "please use my pronouns." It's not much different than the "basic human decency" rhetorical technique.
Well those are different because of the possessives. What are 'your' pronouns unambiguously refers to preferred pronouns, because it couldn't be anything else, whereas 'we don't use pronouns' or equivalent is just a nonsense.
That's a good point I hadn't considered. I was focused on the word "preferred" that the original poster had brought up.
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Yes, because the literal reading is wrong and it doesn't reinforce the normative point you're making.
"There's no such thing as preferred pronouns" or "the pronouns for men are "he/he" or "you don't have 'your' pronouns; you have the pronouns of your sex' are not problematic on a surface reading and also highlight that there is a change being pushed here and therefore aren't slip ups, even though they does what you want (highlight that it is indeed a change being asked for here)
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