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That makes sense, but it's also infuriating, because as far as I'm concerned, it means nothing, but I'm supposed to be able to tell what it means.
I support all trans rights except the right to receive hormones prior to the age of consent, and I hate their language policing and intolerance of comedy that pokes fun of them (which is a problem with leftists in general, but especially trans people as of late). Does that mean I should say I support trans rights, or that I want to protect trans kids? I don't know! From what you're saying, it sounds like, in doing so, I'd be performing a shibboleth for the wrong clique. This concept really does remind me of how high school is depicted in movies and TV.
My K-12 education didn't have cliques. It had friend groups, but nothing like the hierarchies and allegiance tests you'd see in Glee, Heathers, Mean Girls, High School Musical, etc. But my adult life has been full of them. I wonder why my school life didn't have them. Did they go dormant for a couple decades after the 90's before resurfacing? Were Hollywood writers projecting adult experiences onto teenagers all along? Were they always there, but I just didn't notice because nobody cared about politics until I finished high school?
You should. They are not owners of your expression, and they have the same ownership claim on the language as you and every other person on the planet. You should recognize their relationships are not the only possible (despite them pretending it is the case), and their language use is not the only correct one, and support the usage that agrees with your beliefs. At the same time, you should not be blind to what is happening in the world around, and be aware that there are forces that work hard at usurping control over the language and make "protect the kids" mean only agreeing with their ideology. Recognizing such attempts and calling them out (even if only inside your own head) is part of maintaining the habit of independent thought and mental hygiene.
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As much as unsolicited advice might be rude, I'd recommend learning not to be infuriated by such stuff, because such stuff constitutes roughly 99.99% of all communication in politics, and I'm not sure about the other 0.01%. It's not good for your blood pressure or your mental health.
I wonder about this too. My middle school had some clique-ish behavior, but nothing like the tropes you see in films, and my high school had basically none. In my 20s right after college, I noticed adults around me behaving in cliquish ways that seemed ripped straight out of films. My schooling was mostly late 90s and early 00s. Perhaps it was real in the 80s and early 90s, and filmmakers were drawing from their experience from those eras, with concerted effort by educators to break up the cliquish behavior succeeding by the time we were in school. But then why did such behavior return with a vengeance in my adult life? Particularly with such cliquish behavior being pushed as the obviously morally correct thing to follow (as long as it's right cliques, of course)?
Could just be random dumb luck from the schools we went to, of course. That's probably the correct presumption to have by default.
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