Friday, April 19, AD 2024 12:38pm

Who You Calling She?

 

Hattip to Jazz Shaw at Hot Air.

The Harvard Crimson gives us yet another reason why college tuition requires the national budget of a small nation to pay:

Vanidy M. Bailey will serve as director of Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Queer (BGLTQ) student life beginning July 16, dean of Harvard College Evelynn M. Hammonds announced this week. Bailey, who will report to the assistant dean of student life, will oversee all initiatives that support BGLTQ undergraduates. These include dealing with BGLTQ community issues (such as the challenges students face in developing their identities), advising student organizations, supervising the student-run Queer Resources Center, providing support for educational programming and staff training (including the BGLTQ specialty tutor and proctor program), and addressing alumni relations and policy development.

The new staff position emerged from a BGLTQ working group of students, faculty, and staff that met from late October 2010 to March 2011 and collected data about the nature of the BGLTQ student experience at the College. The group hosted 14 open forums (in each residential House and in the Yard), launched a University-wide survey, met with specialty tutors, faculty, alumni/ae, and current students, and studied peer institutions and best practices.

Well that was howlingly funny enough, but Harvard Crimson then went on for the pie in the face coda:

An earlier version of this article used the pronoun “she” to refer to Vanidy “Van” Bailey, the newly appointed director of bisexual, gay, lesbian, transgender, and queer student life. In fact, Bailey prefers not to be referred to by any gendered pronoun.

Well I certainly do not wish to be accused of the dread PC sin of sexist pronounism.  You may view” it” here when”it” didn’t mind being called she.  How long do you think it will be before even some of the faculty at Harvard awaken to the fact that much of the tantrums of the cultural Left are simply con jobs for cash?

 

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Art Deco
Saturday, July 7, AD 2012 3:20pm

How long do you think it will be before even some of the faculty at Harvard awaken to the fact that much of the tantrums of the cultural Left are simply con jobs for cash?

A hypothesis:

1. Most of them well understand this.
2. Most of them lack the balls to say this explicitly.
3. There will come a time when a critical mass of them are able to say this.
4. This edifice in the dean’s office will collapse.
5. The process will, from coast to coast, take about eight years.

Phillip
Phillip
Saturday, July 7, AD 2012 4:37pm

Another possibility.

6. Most of them believe it.

Anyway, one of the reasons I stopped giving to my alma mater long ago.

Phillip
Phillip
Saturday, July 7, AD 2012 4:39pm

My wife suggests however, that we refer to it as “you’ins.”

Mary De Voe
Saturday, July 7, AD 2012 7:05pm

How sad.

Chris
Saturday, July 7, AD 2012 8:02pm

“Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, Queer” I don’t get it. What’s the difference between gay and queer? Its like they decided their acronym needed a Q.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Saturday, July 7, AD 2012 10:41pm

Credentialed cretins:

Education is not intelligence. Intelligence is not common sense.

When did HU quit the Ivy League and join the skeevy league?

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Saturday, July 7, AD 2012 10:42pm

PS: To quote an anonymous, teen philosopher, “That is so-o-o gay.”

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Sunday, July 8, AD 2012 7:01am

Gender can sometimes throw up complications.

I well recall the first time I received a letter from a French lawyer that began « Mon cher confrère » What, I wondered, should one call her in response? « Consœur » doesn’t do justice to the « con »

« confrère » seems to be becoming quite common in English, Why I don’t know, when we have “colleague,” which the French don’t.

In case anyone is wondering, in France, the profession has settled on « confrère » although some of the sisters do use « Consœur » And female lawyers are most definitely « Maître » ; « Maîtresse » [Mistress] has unfortunate connotations.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Sunday, July 8, AD 2012 7:04am

I meant to say “although some of the sisters do use « Consœur » to each other” – Rather self-consciously, I suspect.

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Sunday, July 8, AD 2012 8:09am

“The new staff position emerged from a BGLTQ working group of students, faculty, and staff that met from late October 2010 to March 2011 and collected data about the nature of the BGLTQ student experience at the College.”

It just strikes me that their should be some administrator or someone who takes responsibility for money spent and over-all effects of decisions made. It seems like we have forgotten that authority and responsibility are good things. Student and faculty collected data about the BLT experience at the school and decided to set up a structure to respond to that data, with money set up for staffing, and I assume, office space and budget. Was the data reviewed? by whom? Who is steering this boat?

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Sunday, July 8, AD 2012 8:26am

I should say BGLTQ. I heard Pat Buchanan say something on Catholic radio yesterday about our country being broken down into its component parts.I didn’t get to catch the whole conversation, but… this fracturing has got to stop.

anzlyne
anzlyne
Sunday, July 8, AD 2012 1:42pm

We are not only losing the meaning of the WORDS “he” and “she”; people are losing the meaning of their own identity. A woman does not want to be reminded of her femaleness, as she has another identity in mind.
Gay men think of their “gayness” as their CORE identity. BGLBTQ are Not describing themselves as children of God, not as a Mr. Mrs. or Miss — but mainly as gay or queer. That supercedes everything else in life, even their relationship with parents, siblings, church.
I wonder if in the study results they talked about “birds of a feather flock together” and while giving a sense of safety and belonging, it can also cause narrowness and can impoverish individual life experiences. Splintering off to little groups who only relate with people in their limited group. NO diversity please, we really don’t want to be in the general mix of society, we are different, so different We don’t even know who we are. there’s no words for it, only unpronoucable acronyms.

How can there be unity among us in our society, how can we have shared experiences, hopes and joys when our tongues are cut out. we can’t talk to each other-all strangers with self-imposed language barriers.

Fidelio
Fidelio
Sunday, July 8, AD 2012 2:11pm

Yes, anzlyne— they enisle themselves in their “splintered little groups” and from there are dedicated to lobbing verbal and legal grenades on the rest of us who see their unnatural behavior as less than precious. Why?

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Sunday, July 8, AD 2012 3:09pm

Really, it’s indoctrination not education.

They’ve brainwashed tens of millions of drones with what to think, not how to think.

That’s the reason it is fruitless to converse with evil, idiot liberals (again I repeat myself twice).

They can confiscate my substance. They can take my life. They cannot take my faith or my freedom.

Hank
Sunday, July 8, AD 2012 4:58pm

How long do you think it will be before even some of the faculty at Harvard awaken to the fact that much of the tantrums of the cultural Left are simply con jobs for cash?

When they have to cut tenrued positions in real subjects.

Elaine Krewer
Admin
Sunday, July 8, AD 2012 9:11pm

I thought the “Q” in “LGBTQ” was supposed to stand for “questioning,” i.e. persons who were not yet sure of their sexual preference/identity and were exploring various, ahem, possibilities.

OzCatholic
OzCatholic
Sunday, July 8, AD 2012 10:10pm

When you really strip away all the PC nonsense isn’t it just another example of humans (see even i fall into the trap of being overly careful!) thinking they are gods or greater God and can change the rules of nature? Or worse, the rules of nature? It is questionable (i’m being very euphemistic here) enough that someone like Van changed genders but then to climb that he/she has NO gender? In that logic, Van changed to…Nothing!
This really is nihilism…

sal
sal
Sunday, July 8, AD 2012 10:24pm

But we mustn’t get caught up in the humor of it. These people are in pain and need compassion from Christians. We of course know the difference between sinful living and a life ordered by God, and they need someone to share that with them.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Monday, July 9, AD 2012 4:09am

There have long been a number of theories about (grammatical) gender

One view is that gender is simply a classification of nous, according to the rules of agreement between nouns and adjectives and nouns and pronouns. In both Greek and Latin, for this purpose, nouns fall into three classes or categories and the ancient grammarians called them masculine, feminine and neuter. There is no logical reason why there should not have been four or half-a-dozen “genders,” in that sense; in which case, they would probably simply have numbered them, like the declensions of nouns or the conjugations of verbs. After all, the gender of the names of inanimate objects appears perfectly arbitrary and the neuter gender has been eliminated in most of the Romance languages, such as French.

In French, no one feels there is anything in the least odd in saying, « Tom Hanks est ma vedette préférée » [Tom Hanks is my favourite film-star] where the word « vedette » is feminine and the possessive pronoun and the adjective are in the feminine form to agree with it. In other words, gender is a quality of names, not of things and there is no necessary connection between the gender of a noun and the sex (not gender) of the object it refers to.

Some people have argued that grammatical gender expresses a real duality in nature. Ruskin hinted at this, when he asked, “Who could imagine the moon as anything other than feminine?” – A desperately unfortunate example, for the word for moon is masculine in all the Teutonic languages, including Old English.

English is quite unusual, in that our adjectives are uninflected and our possessive pronouns agree in gender with the noun they replace, not the object they qualify. In addition, almost all (and only) inanimate objects are neutral (“ship” being an exception) For that reason, English speakers are more inclined than others to conflate gender and sex.

WK Aiken
WK Aiken
Monday, July 9, AD 2012 7:40am

The string of letters defining the list of other-than-opposite-sex preferences for one’s carnal pleasures keeps growing.

How soon until this makes the list, and what happens when the letters have to start repeating?

ManassasGrandma
ManassasGrandma
Monday, July 9, AD 2012 2:14pm

There’s a BLT group at Harvard? Myself I love a good MLT, where the mutton is nice and lean…

Mark Byron
Monday, July 9, AD 2012 6:10pm

Fitting, since an MLT is the only thing better than True Love to Miracle Max.

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