Literacy alien Tala earns parents’ anger over use of pronouns - article in The Times

This.
It's a cartoon alien for crying out loud. 😂
They're not necessarily going to be a he or a she, are they?!
There's been cartoon aliens around for ages
I didn't sit wondering whether Zig and Zag was either girls or boys, they were just aliens!
Same with Chewbacca, or any other aliens
Who's to say whether aliens even have a sex /gender like us, I mean they're aliens
Been reading MF's tweets about Tala like WTF, seriously ,😁 this whole upset is bizarre!

It's just an alien that loves to read, no more information is given in the promotional material about which pronouns to use or whether it is a boy or girl.

For clarity, is this bear actually non-binary - ie a member of a sexed species who pretends they don't have a sex even though they do, or is it asexual - ie a normal member of a non-sexed species?

If the latter, claiming an asexual alien is non-binary is a rather weird sort of alien cultural appropriation from outer space.

I would expect that if I read a whole article about a pastry chef called Chris that Chris would be described as "he" or "she" at least once in the entire article. I would not expect someone to write an article about someone else without a bit of basic research into that person. If the writer knew the pastry chef's sex and still avoided using "he" or "she" I doubt the article would read very easily. If they didn't know the sex of Chris despite writing the article that would be rather strange.

Also just realised I have been misgendering ET for decades.

If the creators don't give this character a sex then the parents/grandparents/carers etc. will. And that sex will be male. People actually default to he rather than they. And then you've got even less female representation for our young girls. Probably feeding into their desire to opt out of femaleness later on.

We hope that families love Tala as much as we do.

Job done, no pronouns required.

It's clearly indoctrination into gender ideology.

And as a pp said, the Bookstart baby bear and mummy or daddy bear was the perfect representation for tiny children being read to by their parents or carers and the warmth and closeness reading together brings. Completely fitted that aims of the charity. Seems like the charity has a new purpose now.

Maybe it's because I've watched the recent video from Brighton standing for women but that critter reminds me of Carly-May Kavenagh.

I wonder if you squeeze it, will it shout fascist baby at you?

Because the character is aimed at 0-5 year olds who are trying to make sense of their own world. Characters should be relatable to human children who are sexually dimorphic. It is common practice that non human characters in books for children of this age are depicted in anthropomorphised ways having experiences and feelings common to the intended audience.

ET was never referred to using plural pronouns in the 80’s.

Using the third person plural pronouns to describe Tala is clearly ideological and designed to indoctrinate preschool children and their parents into gender identity and queer theory.

It's also quite amusing to think how quickly this comment would have been reported and deleted had it been directed at the devotees of gender ideology.

Why would you assume aliens are sexed the same as humans?

Steven Spielberg referred to ET as a 'him' in one of the early drafts of the movie script but soon changed it to a genderless creature so as to appeal to boys and girls equally.

Why wouldn’t you say him or her?

‘We hope that families love Tala as much as we loved creating them!’

That's not ideological, why would you want to call an alien which you loved creating and hope others will have affection for 'it'?

I think you’re scraping the barrel with your first sentence, and I think you know the REAL reason why “they” is used.

That last line! Clearly demonstrates the ideological leanings of the project.

To us grown ups it simply sounds all wrong to refer to a known individual by a plural. So efforts are being made to indoctrinate children into the new religion.

To the previous poster asking about names like Chris, I would not naturally use they in this case I would naturally ask is Chris he or she, or is this a male or a female Chris before continuing unless I felt able to guess from the context.

I agree with a previous poster that eventually those who identify as the opposite sex will find that tricky when non-binaryism wins the day as I suspect is most likely. Human societies don’t function by asking individuals if they are male, female or neither. How we are perceived by others and society at large has never been up to us as individuals to dictate in the whole of human history. We look and know almost instantly in almost every case, man or woman, boy or girl. If we are forbidden from acknowledging sex then imposing a non-binary identity and they-themming everyone is where we are headed with mixed sex facilities in schools, sports, prisons, hospitals and everywhere else. It begins with using they-them for all babies and young children on the basis that they haven’t chosen (ideologues might say discovered) which sex based stereotypes they most align with yet.

Sex segregation makes sense in a variety of circumstances, gender identity segregation has no more rationale behind it than separating people based on star signs, that being the case it won’t be justified for long. Everything will be mixed sex or “gender neutral”. Eventually that excludes women and children from public life due to safeguarding issues, harassment, intimidation and humiliation.

And here is an article where the artist uses “them” (last line) so those saying there’s no evidence of ideological pronoun use are incorrect.

www.livingmags.info/tala-to-inspire-newest-generation-of-library-visitors/

“Tala is a fictional alien who arrived on Earth to be a reading mascot for toddlers.”

No conspiracy, it’s straightforward gender identity ideology. As you can see, the description works perfectly well without adding in the ideological term.

Tala is a fictional gender-neutral alien who arrived on Earth to be a reading mascot for toddlers, as confirmed by the library itself. I really don't think there are any conspiracies going on. That's all there is to say IMO.

the absurdity of it, why do you have to include “gender neutral” when describing an alien? for a mascot for children ffs!

of course it’s a loaded term bringing all this bollocks to the foreground every time and if you or others can’t see it, more fool you.

I can’t see anything about this on the book start trust website but I thought the point of the unnamed, not specifically male or female parent/carer/grandparent and child bears was that parents/carers and children reading books together is to be encouraged for the child’s development and for the benefits to the parent child relationship. It is a shame to lose that emphasis.

It's an assumption, in the official bumf Tala is described as an 'otherworldly creature' with no mention of they/them etc.

I do feel sorry for Maya, the memes have been brutal and this has expanded well beyond TRA twitter circles.

Aliens aren't real

Yeah, we didn't see many of the usual suspects on the thread about the Canadian teacher with giant fake boobs, did we? How about that one about the male paedo that's now in a women's prison?

I haven't been following this at all but I do find it amusing the threads which some of our monitors will jump all over and the ones they will ignore. It's entirely predictable.

I agree, especially since this wasn't just a single post by Maya she's been tweeting about this 3 days now.