These self obsessed people, where have they come from ?

[SirVixofVixHall]

This was in my email inbox this morning. Sigh. There have been other articles like this recently. The bullying undertone, the entitlement. This is someone “non binary”. So someone just like everyone else. Apart from the patronising hectoring tone, it is all so tedious. BORING, BORING, BORING. Must make for some very earnest and deathly dull parties. Where are all the wonderful GNC people with their interesting outfits, self deprecation and wit ? I know that this is from America, but stil.. Never mind generation snowflake, this is more generation dreary. No irony, no self awareness, no sense of humour.
Is this all down to identity politics ? Is this teaching ? Parenting? The product of a decadent and privileged environment ?

I feel despair at the environmental disasters looming, and what my daughters might be facing, yet there is a generation of people spending their time policing how others refer to them, when they aren’t even present.

Surely you just use somebody's name or 'you' when they are present.

i don’t believe that it is possible to misgender someone

Oh it’s possible all right. My child was misgendered this morning in the co-op.

As usual, we laughed at the person who’s brain can’t cope with the concept that a girl with short hair is not a boy.

Perhaps i should have phoned 101 to record a hate crime?

Well there is making a mistake about someone’s sex, but misgendering is the opposite isn’t it ?

Actually, having two perfectly normal girls, neither of whom fit their gender stereotype conventionally, “making a mistake about sex” isn’t as simple as that.

It’s people looking at a child and attributing a sex and/or gender based on one or two stereotypes.

Both my girls have had to learn to stand firm and argue, yes argue with adults and children who won’t believe they aren’t male. One has short hair- and when she wears a dress people attempt to ridicule the “boy in a dress”, and can not understand that she is a girl with short hair. As in really not understand. 20 mins of yes i’m sure she’s a girl. But he has short hair. Yes, she had it cut. But why do you let him wear a dress...

Because that is how strongly stereotypes have a hold. In many ways, i can completely see how a child who has long hair, and likes to carry a doll, may be told they are a girl so often, and so insistently, that they believe it themselves.

I had a page boy haircut aged 11 and was occasionally referred to by older people as a “young lad” the most I felt was these days would that be misgendering and literal violence?

God how toe curlingly embarrassing. When I am introduced to someone at a party I expect to have a conversation, not be informed as to how I may address them.

I think I shall say that my preferred pronouns are thou and thine and to avoid any deadnaming I wish to be referred to as "Majesty" throughout.

The strength of stereotypes now now is weird. Really weird. I'm an 80's teenager and came of age in the era of "gender benders" like Boy George and Marilyn. It didn't phase me one iota (although my Granny was very confused) but neither did either of these chaps claim to be anything but men who enjoyed wearing make up and styling themselves in a fairly flamboyant way. I think sometime in the late 90's, I noticed all the girls, and I mean ALL the girls, had to have long hair, usually without a fringe and at one point, with a parting so far down the side of the head that it was under their ear, almost.

What was behind that? It's like all the independent styling and thinking just died, overnight. My friend's daughter is 14 or 15 now, and has been relentlessly bullied by a group of nasty mean girls at school for not conforming to THEIR world, but looking at her, she'd fit right in to the world I grew up in. When did girls become Barbies? When did they HAVE to be Barbies? There have always been barbies about, but there were also the Debbie Harrys and the Cyndi Laupers. Where have these girls gone?

I just want us to be careful that we don’t lay the blame at parents feet when so many come on sites like Transgender Trend and 4th Wave completely shocked that a child has told them they are trans.

I am 50 (so a teen in the 80s) and had a very calm, rational, intelligent mum who would’ve also reacted as people have said. But our kids are in a very different popular culture that has become more toxic in so many ways. I love to read and spend plenty of time online and MN, I’m sure as a young teen nowadays I would spend my life online if I was able and god knows what I would stumble upon.

My dds ages 18 and 15 did not get phones until they were 15 for the eldest and 13.5 for the youngest and I think that helped a lot.

These kids are often literally brainwashed from stuff they find online and lets not forget that the majority already have various issues they are dealing with BEFORE the trans diagnosis such as: anxiety, depression, bullying, sexual assault, trauma, bereavement, eating disorders and autism.

It can’t all be down to parenting style, although I agree that can be one of many factors.

Bloomcounty it’s down to money. Music and media is big business and they are pushing what sells. We now have 24/7 porn and as we all have been commenting on it is hard for anyone gender-nonconforming to get in front of people and gain publicity. Most businesses are run by men and misogyny reigns.

If kids loook for alternatives online they can fall down a rabbit-hole very easily.

I'm not a parent, so please excuse my possible blunder here but.....is giving a kid a phone/tablet, and therefore access to the internet where they can then become sucked into all the weirdness (not just gender stuff, but all of it) not a parental responsibility? I mean, the parent isn't responsible for what is out there on the internet but giving the child access to it IS their responsibility. They're the ones that buy the phones, pay the bills and have the wifi in their homes.

I understand the difficulties though. I've no idea, but are there ways of restricting access to just a few, approved, websites? Can you do that?

IdaBWells

I hadn't thought of that, the music link. I don't often switch to the music channels but if OH leaves it on, I'm sometimes quite amazed at how identikit the women are now. There are some that look truly plastic.

Where are all the wonderful GNC people with their interesting outfits, self deprecation and wit ?

I took my girls to visit a museum in a very studenty part of my old university town last week, and then into the city centre. I was absolutely struck by how fecking BORING they all were. All shades of grey, really monochrome dress, and not in an interesting way, either - not a goth in sight (that was truly sad). Nothing but hoodies and joggers for miles. No cute dresses with DMs, no swirly skirts, no band t-shirts, no grungy lumberjack shirts. Just grey, grey, grey and meaningless brand logos. Even the hijabis were all in full backs, greys and maroons - when I was a student there were loads of girls from Indonesia and African countries with amazing fabrics.

My kids in their bright pink, yellow and turquoise were the most colourful thing in the street. And yet none of these kids looked drab because of poverty, it was all pricy brand names.

I think it's a bit like the news - in theory everyone is more tolerant, in practice it's really easy to avoid other view points. TOTP might have been cheesy, but everyone knew about Culture Club, the Smiths, the Sex Pistols, Blondie, Frankie Goes to Hollywood etc. etc.

On the other hand Social Media algorithms herd people into watching and listening to content based on what they have already consumed.

As in really not understand. 20 mins of yes i’m sure she’s a girl. But he has short hair.

Pretty much every girl in my class in 1982 had short hair.

My work made us update our pronouns in our HR systems. They made the fatal mistake of phrasing the request in a not entirely unambiguous way.

So I answered the question "by which pronouns should others address you? " in the grammatically correct way by indicating "you/your/yourself".

My boss now thinks I'm a passive-aggressive genius with a dark sense of humour. My young, super woke employees now think I'm a bit thick. Both assumptions work out to my personal advantage, so I intend to keep things that way.

Don't try this at home, though. The head honcho of our HR crew is a personal friend and has my back, so it was a strictly calculated risk to take.

Bloomcountry believe me, waiting so long to give my girls smartphones would’ve been considered child abuse in some quarters!

I think what is very difficult for parents that is different from parents of earlier generations is the huge burden we have of somehow controlling and restraining this enormous swamp of toxic information coming at your kids. Technology has been introduced so quickly and before there was any mechanism for controlling it, such as law and age appropriate content, so now it’s all on parents.

Don’t want your kids seeing porn? That’s on you.
Want your kids to have some social media but not sure what they are getting access to? That’s on you.
At least with TV if something violent came on it was easy to switch off, but the nature of new technology means it is individual and all safeguarding is down to the parent.
And of course you may believe you are successfully controlling it but your kid has a more sophisticated grasp of technology than you and is one step ahead and still getting access.
Or their friends have access and so just share.

My point is that in past generations there was a collective understanding that some things were only for adults and children should be protected from them and adults should make it difficult, if not impossible to access. For example, porn was not on TV it was only available on the top shelf of the newsagent and you had to buy it very publically and had to be an adult. Or from a sex shop which was for adults only or through the post. It was much harder to access for children and teens definitely. That is just one example. Parents felt the greater society was supporting parents. Nowadays parents have to struggle to be heard. In the whole trans issue for example, some people want to discredit parents completely as experts and protectors of their own children.

We just can’t compare the environment we grew up in with what is happening now. It is changing so fast and the threads are all very hard to disentangle. All kinds of mental stress in teens and kids seem to be on the rise. I just read in The Times that the government is going to introduce a mental health unit into every school in the nation.

Adults struggle to stay on top of all the changes and can feel pressured by images and social media on-line (disclaimer I do not have any social media accounts other than MN!) our kids are not remotely equipped to deal with all the messages and ideology they are getting in a very disjointed manner.

It’s amazing so many parents and kids are coming out healthy to be honest. I’m sure children who are already vulnerable such as those that are lonely and isolated for example will be more likely to spend lots of time online. Of course if the family is under stress of other kinds they may struggle to supervise the kids as much as they need. It is definitely not easy to control the messages your children are receiving.

I might be she/ him or he/ her just to confuse people.

There has been a strange shift. I was looking at my school photographs earlier, most of us had short or shortish hair (all girls school). The girls with long hair were a small minority. In my dads school almost all the girls have long hair (mixed sex school).

Dds not Dad’s obv.

1982 like pp.

That article has all the hallmarks of the current fashionable thinking on US liberal arts college campuses, written by someone who lives in a bubble of righteousness and has almost no experience of spending time with people who are not academics in the field of social sciences / liberal arts.

The problem is, none of their suggestions are remotely workable in the real world. You can ask for certain pronouns to be used but you can't force anyone to use them. I can ask people to pronounce by Irish name correctly but some people still get it wrong, sometimes because they don't care enough to make the effort, sometimes because they just have difficulty with unusual pronunciations. If I found it desperately inconvenient I could change my name to something familiar to most people, like 'Maria', but I stick with my name because it's who I am.

The downside is that not everyone gets it right and that's OK with me. I don't need the validation of others to love my name and my identity. It seems these non-binary / GNC folk are desperate for others' approval so they have to enforce their byzantine rules of conversation or else they feel less than human. That's on them, not on the rest of us.

Life is so much clearer if you offend absolutely everyone.
ps I don't but I'm on the verge of it as I'm so sick of it all

I am old. I offend everyone without trying.

Got to the stage in life where this sort of thing just makes people look silly

I know that I'd hate to be a female child or teen right now, and my hat comes off to all of you who are fighting to raise your kids (of both sexes) in what must be one of the most toxic atmospheres in the galaxy. Kudos, ladies, I honestly admire you all.

FWIW talking about this type of thing to ds He asked

"What's a pronoun?"