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After the Sh1t that's gone on at some of American Uni's this year i half expect some of the Sh1T to come here. I mean When Ghostbusters hit the screens in the 80's we had REAL people offering to come round to your home to remove any nast ghost you might have.........a case of art effecting real life.
Harmless fun, not this:-
Meet the Liverpool University student who identifies as neither male or female
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Amy Toon who identifies as non-binary.
Amy Toon has been out as a non-binary person for a year - meaning that Amy does not identify as a male or a female.
There are many issues that non-binary people must navigate in their lives - not least of which is a language which many feel does not represent them.
Masculine and feminine pronouns, he and she, can prove a problem for those who identify as neither.
Amy prefers to be described as they/them but others may choose to use ze, hir, hirs, and xe, xem, or xyr. Anxiety and depression
Amy, a History and Politics undergraduate at the University of Liverpool , said: “As soon as I heard the word and looked at the explanation I knew, it just clicked.
“I didn’t feel confused any more. I knew who I was.
“It explained who I was, which was quite comforting after several years of knowing about it.”
Voice trembling, Amy explained how being called a girl upsets and hurts them, triggering anxiety and depression.
Amy said: “People can be really transphobic at uni, they make stupid statements and our LGBT posters were torn down.
“I’ve spoken to people who just don’t care, or tell me it doesn’t exist, and they laugh at me. It gets to a point where you can’t be bothered to try to explain, you get exhausted.
“It’s frustrating and it can be quite a knock, people tell me I have no reason to cry over it.”
Generally, Amy is treated with respect but people still often refer to Amy as a girl.
Amy claims that being non-binary has a history predating modern times but has become more acknowledged through communities joining together on the internet.
A key battle for non-binary people is getting different pronouns and options on legal documents – Amy has to sign as female – although some services, like the NHS, have the option of Mx instead of Miss/Mr/Mrs.
Amy wants people to stop assuming gender when they meet a new person as they could potentially cause upset.
Amy said: “People aren’t willing to move forward, and it makes me feel frustrated. A lot of people think gay marriage is enough but I can’t marry as my gender.
“If you want hormone replacement you can wait for up to five years, you have to live for quite a while being very unhappy with who you are.”
Amy is also pansexual, attracted to people of all genders, but says they have had some difficulty in love.
“It has been hard for people to understand, sometimes they insistently call me a girl. I worry about bringing it up because I don’t want to upset people but it upsets me.
“When I do bring it up sometimes people just say ‘oh you’re a girl’. If they can’t respect who I am then, like in any relationship, you don’t want to be with them.”
Amy claims that being non-binary has a history predating modern times but has become more acknowledged through communities joining together on the internet.
Amy said: “A lack of awareness means people don’t get it. It’s different in every society, but I think a lot of people dismiss it as being created on the internet, saying ‘go back to Tumblr.’
“But different levels of connectivity online have brought people together, giving people who maybe can’t come out a place [to be themselves] instead of having to pretend everywhere.
“I’ve definitely had a negative reception, I get so much online abuse, and some people refuse to accept it.” “This is who I am”
Amy prefers to be described as they/them but others may choose to use ze, hir, hirs, and xe, xem, or xyr.
Amy presents as more feminine, which means on a night out people often mistake them for a girl.
“On a normal night out, because of how I choose to dress and because of how I’m built, people assume I’m a girl but gay town is quite freeing in that you can dress and present how you want.
“In Manchester the other night somebody said ‘why are they letting straight girls in here’ and I just thought ‘I’m neither straight or a girl, so that’s great.”
“The clothes suit me more and clothes have no gender. You wouldn’t tell a woman who wore jeans that you were dress like a man.”
Amy chooses to dress masculine occasionally, admitting a desire for a flatter chest.
However Amy has not changed their name because they like that it was chosen by their parents and they are used to it, but non-binary people are known to change their names.
Amy has not come out to their parents yet, who have been supportive over Amy’s pansexuality, but plans to over the Christmas holidays when they go home to Leeds.
Amy said: “Things can take explaining, and I don’t mind doing that as it’s complicated, but at the end of the day this is who I am.” Gender terms:
- Non-binary: anyone who doesn’t fit into the category of male or female
- Pan-sexual: attraction to all genders
- Transgender: denoting or relating to a person whose self-identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender
- Gender fluid: people who fluxuate between different genders
- Gender Queer: identifies with neither, both, or a combination of male and female genders
- Cisgender: people who agree with the sex they were assigned at birth
Re: .............& then it arrived at Liverpool Uni!
The Push back
It's time to say No to our pampered student emperors
The Rhodes statue row can be blamed on a generation raised to believe that their feelings are all that matter
A student wears a sticker calling for the removal of a statue of Cecil John Rhodes from the campus of the University of Cape Town Photo: Reuters/Mike Hutchings
The little emperors have grown up. The babies of the late 90s – mollycoddled by their parents, spoon-fed by their teachers, indulged by society – have now reached university. Some of the brighter ones are now at Oxford, demanding that the Cecil Rhodes statue at Oriel should be torn down, because of his imperialist, racist views.
"Universities are reaping the whirlwind of two decades of child-centred education"
We shouldn’t be so surprised. If you’ve had a lifetime of people saying “yes” to you, of never being told off, you remain frozen in a permanent state of supersensitivity. I wasn’t offended by the Rhodes statue when I was at Oxford 20 years ago. But, even if I had been, I wouldn’t have thought my wounded feelings should be cured by tearing apart the delicate fabric of a beautiful university.
Universities are reaping the whirlwind of two decades of child-centred education. That whirlwind has imported imbecilic trigger warnings – when academics have to warn students that western European literature, from the Iliad on, is full of sex and violence. It has also brought the pernicious idea of “no-platforming” – when students refuse to give a stage to anyone who doesn’t fit with their narrow view of the world.
We shouldn’t blame the student emperors for all this. Their warped supersensitivity is the fault of the generation above – the teachers and parents who have so indulged them. I first noticed the disaster of child-centred education six years ago.
Near my childhood home in north London, there is a late-Victorian school. According to the noticeboard outside, it didn’t have a headmaster. Instead, Mr MJ Chappel was called the “lead learner”.
The implication was clear. Mr Chappel wasn’t placed in authority above the children but was ranked alongside them. Children have as much to teach the teachers as the teachers have to teach them – an idiocy that’s difficult to attack because it sounds so charming; and because people like me sound so evil when we disagree. Photo: PA
That idiocy is now endemic through the primary, secondary and tertiary education sectors. I resigned from a provincial university lecturing job recently, when the disease struck my department. My colleague said it was my fault if the less clever, less hard-working undergraduates did worse in exams than their brighter, harder-working contemporaries. I was told not to penalise undergraduates for bad grammar or spelling mistakes. And I had to dumb down the exams.
The last straw was when I was told to cut down on facts in lectures. “You’re here to teach them how to think, not what to think,” the head of department told me. The tragedy was that the undergraduates weren’t little emperors. They were longing to learn facts, spelling and correct grammar but they had had precious little exposure to these things at school.
And so they sailed on serenely into the world of work, blissfully unaware that employers would throw their applications straight in the bin because of their bad English. I saw the final punishment for child-centred education a decade ago, when I worked on the Comment desk of the Telegraph. One of my jobs was to keep an eye on the interns. Ntokozo Qwabe and the Cecil Rhodes statue on Oriel College in Oxford Photo: Rex Photo: Rex
A charming bunch they were, too. What was astonishing, though, was how some of them took to having their grammar corrected. Because they’d never been told off about bad grammar at school or university, they logically assumed it didn’t matter; that I was some dreary old pedant, enforcing a code that died out some time in the Middle Ages.
I didn’t mind. It was no skin off my nose. But they should have minded – it was only the interns who either knew their grammar, or were chastened and informed by correction, who ended up getting jobs on the paper. Why should they have thought any differently? Throughout their education, they had been repeatedly encouraged to think their wounded feelings must trump the teacher’s, or employer’s, right to instruct.
"Every time the authorities are accused of racism, they bend over backwards to soothe the offended egos of the little, tinpot dictators"
The same applies to the row over Rhodes’s statue.
The authorities at the university have, so far, continued to pamper the student emperors. Every time the authorities are accused of racism, they bend over backwards to soothe the offended egos of the little, tinpot dictators – rather than telling them that they, the teachers, are there to tell the students what to do; and not the other way round.
Re: .............& then it arrived at Liverpool Uni!
"Them", "their", "they" used in the singular reminds me of two things:
1)The Borg in Star Trek The Next Generation
2)Buffalo Bill "It rubs the lotion on its skin or it gets the hose again." Of Silence of the Lambs fame.
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I no longer want to be represented or referred to using English alphanumeric symbology.
I demand an entirely new and individually unique set of snowflake symbols be created to represent and refer to me that everyone must learn and respect.
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The most important lesson I learned about leadership is that the second your main effort becomes about trying to make everyone happy it is immediately followed by unintentionally pissing everyone off.
Despite humanity's rare bursts of absolute perfection and beauty, the other 99% consists of THX1138-like sausage factory generic mediocrity.
Maybe it's not just the coddling of "little emperors/empresses" and "little dictators" by helicopter parents who told their kids they are all special unique snowflakes who always win.
Maybe it's a reflection of these kids consciously or unconsciously KNOWING that they are likely relegated to a life of McBarista indentured servitude in jeopardy of losing their semi-unskilled part time job to a robot.
So they rebel with their unique snowflake identify.
Like The Artist Formerly Known as Prince(rebelling against his record label changing his name to a symbol to make it as difficult as possible), minus the talent.
Maybe it's not just the coddling of "little emperors/empresses" and "little dictators" by helicopter parents who told their kids they are all special unique snowflakes who always win.
Maybe it's a reflection of these kids consciously or unconsciously KNOWING that they are likely relegated to a life of McBarista indentured servitude in jeopardy of losing their semi-unskilled part time job to a robot.
So they rebel with their unique snowflake identify.
They're a unique generation with a unique situation. It's not going to be easy working within the neoliberal 21st Century and attempting to navigate their direction over the next couple of generations. As for 'relegated', no one is relegated unless they accept relegation.
They're a unique generation with a unique situation. It's not going to be easy working within the neoliberal 21st Century and attempting to navigate their direction over the next couple of generations. As for 'relegated', no one is relegated unless they accept relegation.
I don't think there's anything unique about it. I think it's a continuation of a long, slow, drawn-out process. It's the conversion of Homo Sapiens to Homo Marketus. The expansion of market orthodoxy into every facet of life, into all transactions, demands a complete and total breakdown of tradition and identity. There is no other way to turn human beings into perfect little utility maximizers. Nothing can be off the books. Nothing can be altruistic. Nothing can be gifted or free. All social interactions must be an exchange, preferably a pareto-optimal one, but at least one that provides a net increase in aggregate marginal utility.
That's the fundamental contradiction of the marriage of free-market-orthodoxy/utopianism and traditionalism that exists in some American Conservative circles, and increasingly in other areas of the world too. It's the market that's destroying families. It's the market that demands labor and people be as fluid and mobile and borderless as capital. It's the market that ships the kids out of their hometowns. It's the market that breaks down families, makes children too expensive, incentivizes divorce. It's the market that kills the yeoman and the small business owner and the little guy and collapses millions of family farms into giant multi-million acre corporate operations and Walmarts from sea to shining sea. The market will demand an end to all traditional social structures. Gender is not immune. In fact, if they can find a way to sell you a completely new gender, they will. They'll do it just as soon as they'll sell you 100 face piercings and thong bikinis. You have to express yourself through commercial exchange. Every little petty transaction requires it. Things that used to be free will start costing you 5¢ and requiring a receipt. Hell, if they can find a way to make babies in a test-tube and sell them on E-Bay, they'll do it. The market demands it. What could be more efficient?
Even now, as you look at your open tabs and browse the web, dozens, hundreds, thousands of little petty micro-transactions for fractions of a cent are created ex nihilo and flying around from account to account. We are the product. Our eyes, our clicks, our minds. Why else is media reporting on some obscure college kid and the vagaries of pronouns? And why are we here talking about it? Market transactions.
See, the thing I'm getting at here is that the path from feudalism to capitalism is a long, long, long road. It began in the Dutch Republic back in the 1580s. And it slowly made its way through England to the New World and to just about every corner of the globe by the time Queen Victoria was done and the 20th century came around.
But it's a process. It's still incomplete. The vestiges of a pre-market era are still there. We don't trade futures on our children's labor-value to raise funds to feed and educate them yet. But the way things are going, we will. We'll do it just as surely as kids today are creating thousands of micro-transactions an hour by swiping around on their phones all day. All transactions will be market transactions. Everything will be assigned a price value and be transferrable. Everything will be metered out in fees, from children to degrees to oceans to the air you breathe. There's still a ton of tradition that will have to be demolished if the total conversion from Homo Sapiens to Homo Marketus is to be complete. It will take centuries to undo it all.
So when Lakedaemonian says:
Maybe it's a reflection of these kids consciously or unconsciously KNOWING that they are likely relegated to a life of McBarista indentured servitude in jeopardy of losing their semi-unskilled part time job to a robot.
So they rebel with their unique snowflake identify.
He's partially right. But he just doesn't realize that it's all part of a bigger, longer, slower process. And all identity must die before the market can make people truly tradable, transferable, and interchangeable commodities. Identities and traditional roles must be smashed and obliterated until there's nothing left of them that makes any particular sense and everything is fluid. Then there's no more need for a 'male customer' or a 'female consumer.' We can have simply, 'the consumer.' Even better if you can erode the line between worker and business owner. We can all be something in between. Worker/owner/consumers. All transactions negotiated on demand and traded in real time. Hell, we're not going to be done until a computer can make leveraged bets whether you'll buy the black or the grey Hanes boxer briefs when you're standing there dumbfounded in the isle. And the computer will win more often than it loses. Because it knows that, eventually, they'll all be grey anyways.
Last edited by dcarrigg; December 31, 2015, 02:33 AM.
They're a unique generation with a unique situation. It's not going to be easy working within the neoliberal 21st Century and attempting to navigate their direction over the next couple of generations. As for 'relegated', no one is relegated unless they accept relegation.
Lots of books about the terrible history of slavery in America(not so much on slavery that continues in parts of the world).
i wonder if there's much content available on the history of indentured servitude in America?
i wonder how indentured servants behaved regarding their identity?
..i wonder if there's much content available on the history of indentured servitude in America? i wonder how indentured servants behaved regarding their identity?
About a century's worth of scholarship. As for behavior, look somewhere between fatalism and resistance.
Indentured servitude was born of a need for cheap labor. With passage to the Colonies expensive for all but the wealthy, the system of indentured servitude was developed to attract workers and soon indentured servants became vital to the colonial economy.
One-half to two-thirds of the immigrants who came to the American colonies arrived as indentured servants. Those that survived the work and received their freedom package seem better off than new immigrants who came freely. Contracts could include incentives such as acreage, a year's worth of corn, arms, a cow and new clothing. And a few servants did rise to become part of the colonial elite. The rest achieved a modest life as freemen in a growing colonial economy. As demands for labor grew, so did the cost of indentured servants. And landowners began to feel threatened by freedmen demands for land and status. So colonials elites turned to African slaves as a more profitable and forever-renewable source of labor, commencing the shift from indentured servants to race-based slavery. In the name of racial solidarity, discontent among servants and freeman was redirected toward enslaved Africans and this permitted elites to create a more stable workforce less likely to threaten their own interests.
The prevalence of indentured servitude along with the growth of slavery, made bondage of varying degrees the common denominator of colonial work until the American Revolution. That's when the social and economic transformations it brought closed out the era of indentured servitude and created the “free labor” and "wage slavery" system as the privileged domain of whites.
In terms of their behavior, the human reaction to tyranny enforced through physical and psychological violence is universal across time and place and spans the chasm between fatalism and resistance. Protestant devotional works urged servants, as a matter of conscience and religious devotion, to give their masters the expected "obedience," "Faithfulness," "Patience and Meekness," and "Diligence." Considering the multitude of laws addressing servants who ran away and to those who, while still under contract, hired themselves out to new masters under better terms, these ideals seem infrequently met.
The master class seemed also very concerned with "fornication," most especially when it resulted in pregnancy. And while the loss of grace was to be lamented, it was the loss of the servants' labor that served as the primary driver and laws were enacted to provide compensation to the master. In the case of pregnancy and so-called secret marriages, to the indentures of male and female servants both; they called for fines on any freemen involved. Children of such pregnancies were to be handed over to the church, which would be reimbursed for its trouble by the "reputed father." If the father of an illegitimate child were a master, the maidservant would, upon completion of her indenture, be sold to the local parish for two years. This was to prevent female servants from avoiding work through pregnancy and then attempting to leave their children in the care of their masters.
As with most conditions of servitude, the lives of servants tended to be nasty, brutish, and short. Although they often worked alongside their masters in tobacco fields, they usually lived apart and often under primitive conditions. They worked from dawn until dusk, six days a week through the growing season, which on tobacco and wheat farms could last from as early as February until as late as November. The mortality rate was very high with a majority of new arrivals killed by disease in the "summer seasoning." Whether seasoned or unseasoned, servants were property subject to overwork and beatings. Servants working in tobacco fields served longer, were subjected to more rigorous punishments, and were traded as commodities. Proper Christian gentlemen and ladies of means would often arrange for runaway servants to be beaten to the point of death. It was not unheard of for masters to permit servants to starve and languish for lack of food medical treatment. And female servants were often victims of sexual assault. The distinction between slavery and servitude seems insignificant here.
I don't think there's anything unique about it. I think it's a continuation of a long, slow, drawn-out process. It's the conversion of Homo Sapiens to Homo Marketus.
We can fool ourselves but we can't fool nature. The human marketplace has always assumed it could ignore basic physical laws. That assumption appeared to be correct when there was one or two billion people but it will be challenged before the end of this century as we continue to increase world population by 80MM+ per year and increase energy use per capita by 2-3% per year. We've likely exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet, but it should be much more obvious in 15-20 years.
Re: .............& then it arrived at Liverpool Uni!
dcarrig...."The expansion of market orthodoxy into every facet of life, into all transactions, demands a complete and total breakdown of tradition and identity."
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A student wears a sticker calling for the removal of a statue of Cecil John Rhodes from the campus of the University of Cape Town Photo: Reuters/Mike Hutchings
Photo: PA
Ntokozo Qwabe and the Cecil Rhodes statue on Oriel College in Oxford Photo: Rex Photo: Rex
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