JUST IN TIME FOR HALLOWEEN, THE LEFT "SKIN MASKS" THE ACLU

Your freedom ends where my feels begin.

by Colin Liddell

What form does the famous "long march through the institutions" envisaged by Leftists take?

First, a  respected institution is identified and infiltrated, then it is killed, and gutted. Finally, it is skinned and its skin used to make a "skin mask" to deceive people into thinking that it is the same respected institution as before. 

Just to clarify, by "Left" I don't mean the economic Left, which died long ago, but a kind of Cultural Marxist Left that seeks to oppress the proletariat with fake morality and word traps in service to the corporate, globalist, Neo-liberal order.

The American Civil Liberties Union, long a defender of almost any kind of free speech, now seems to have been thoroughly subjected to this process of "skin masking," going by the recent case of three teachers in Loudoun County, Virginia, who are suing the Loudoun County School Board for forcing them to use weird pronouns for LGBTQ+ students, stating that to do so violates their free speech rights to use their preferred pronouns of "he" and "she."

However, instead of supporting the teachers' First Amendment Rights as you would expect ACLU to do, the organisation has instead thrown its considerable weight, resources, and reputation into the balance on the side of the school board, which is attempting to micromanage how these teachers speak to the students.

ACLU's position is that the teachers must obey the school board's dictatorial innovation of using whatever pronouns students arbitrarily decide to apply to themselves:

"While the teachers may disagree with the policy, they do not have the right to violate it in their capacity as K-12 teachers in the Loudoun County school system. The policy protects trans and gender-expansive students from discrimination, and necessitates equal treatment of all students in Loudoun County. We know that discriminatory practices, such as the refusal to use a student's gender-affirming pronouns, can exacerbate gender dysphoria and harm socio-emotional development during critical childhood years. Policy 8040 ensures that trans and non-binary students can focus on their education without the added stigmatization, stress and anxiety of being misgendered by their teachers."

Yes, somebody might get upset. Newsflash: somebody already is upset. "Gender dysphoria" is a form of mental damage, so the argument used here is basically: mentally damaged people might get mentally damaged if you fail to use their pronouns. If you do use them, same result actually.

Nothing, of course, is said of the mental damage or psychological pain that teachers, who do not share the latest Leftist views on gender, will suffer from having to use these ludicrous pronouns. But just how many ludicrous pronouns are we talking about here?

Here are some of the, ahem, more popular ones:

Got that? Good, because there are plenty more.

In fact, there's nothing to stop any kid deciding that his, her, their, eir, pers, xyrs, vis, or hirs pronoun is "Nathanial Wilderbeast the Third" or any other absurd term, and to then make his teachers use it at the expense of losing their job. Mad as this sounds, this is completely within the logic of this nonsense.

As for teacher job loss, does that possibly entail any dysphoria, I wonder? As dysphoria, whether it's connected to gender of not, literally means difficult to bear (from Greek: δύσφορος (dysphoros), δυσ-, difficult and φέρειν, to bear). 

This is the crux of the free speech debate: the idea that offending or upsetting someone with words should or should not be allowed. This is where the rubber hits the road. If you think that normal speech -- excluding swearing, slurs, and threats of violence -- contains certain words that are offensive and upsetting to someone, and therefore should thus be banned, then you don't really believe in free speech at all.

Even if transgender kids are genuine, the simple fact is we don't live in a perfectly controllable world. No matter what school boards imperiously decree, they simply can't escape the he/she/it of normal pronoun usage. Trying to turn school into a "pronoun safe zone" simply won't work. It won't work in schools, most of which are zones of semi-anarchy already, and it won't protect those "gender snowflakes" outside school from those "deadly" traditional pronouns. But even theorectically if you could get everyone to use all the correct pronouns, it wouldn't make any difference to the dysphoria they feel simply because this is essentially an internal condition that no amount of humouring can change.

Of course, it's quite natural for corporations or organisations like a school board to take an oppressive limiting approach to free speech like this, because it serves their 'controllist' tendencies. But the realisation that ACLU now supports this Cultural Marxist bullshit is mind blowing. After all, this is the same organisation that once insisted on the right of a gang of Neo-Nazis to parade through a Jewish neighbourhood, which included several Holocaust survivors, and which has defended the most disgusting and demeaning varieties of pornography as forms of "free speech." 

The only conclusion is that all we have here is another gang of Leftist infiltrators dancing around in the dead skin of a once living institution. 

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by it here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia). He is also featured in Arktos's collection A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders.