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Wesley Yang

@wesyang

Apr 29

https://twitter.com/garylfrancione/status/1784922307837788329

Transgenderists demand that you pay verbal tribute to their beliefs by affirming them in the course of daily life and seek to make the state compel such tribute by punishing unbelievers -- the Biden Administration just made such belief compulsory in all American schools

https://twitter.com/garylfrancione/status/1784922307837788329

Believers are free to try to peer pressure or coerce unbelievers into acquiescing to such tribute ("I am asking you to be kind"; "it costs you nothing to comply," "what are you some kind of far right fascist?" etc.) -- but everyone has a right to unbelief that no one can infringe

No one has a civil right to: 1.) compel others to share in their belief about subjective claims about who they are or are not 2.) identify into biological categories that constitute the basis of differential access to protected spaces to which they do not belong

Read 5 tweets

Wesley Yang

@wesyang

Apr 27

If you knew nothing else about the transgender movement but this text, you would instantly see from the plangent, seething, furiously buttonholing register that its rhetoric somehow sustains in every sentence and punctuation mark, that something was deeply awry

actioncanadashr.org/news/2021-05-0…

The incredible list of signatories is a roll call of moral abdication

The profound breakdown in character and judgment it requires to do the bidding of anything so importunate, to join in maligning and threatening and defaming anyone who is not swept away by such eruptions is terrible to contemplate, especially because it has afflicted so many

Read 5 tweets

Wesley Yang

@wesyang

Apr 21

Thread provides helpful background on one of the main sources of viral misinformation dominating coverage of trans issues in the US. These are the people being cited by US media on the Cass Report.

This is the sort of info that would have been banned from Twitter under its prior leadership.

But I get it -- I'm the weirdo with a disturbing obsession for wanting to understand why we've been inducting thousands of confused children into a cult of medicalized self-harm on the basis of zero evidence to support its safety and efficacy

https://x.com/Wo_Mim/status/1752759077556387902

Oh yes, you see, this person encouraging thousands of his followers to get hormones with zero psychological evaluation is normal and healthy. Oh and he's a woman and if you doubt that he's a woman, you're a Nazi.

https://x.com/Wo_Mim/status/1752759077556387902

Read 5 tweets

Wesley Yang

@wesyang

Apr 19

Corinna's appeal is poignant because it's so human and humane, premised on the capacity for rationality and empathy in a person devoid of these qualities and consumed entirely by partisan rancor, blind self-righteousness, and smug self-assuredness in the rightness of second-hand opinions he has no ability or willingness to question no matter how much evidence piles up to contest it

Corinna wants to safeguard children like himself from the grievous harms he suffered -- but Will doesn't want to hear about any of it. He was given his marching orders by the party and he will smear and defame anyone who deviates from the party line.

Engaging with Stancil and his ilk is exceptionally unpleasant. But they generate teachable moments. These personality types are familiar to those with who have read about the Communist movements of the 1930's in Orwell or Koestler.

Stancil is not a hard leftist but represents the importation of the apparatchik's mindset, personality and conduct into American liberalism that we saw with the emergence of "Resistance" politics after HRC's loss -- a callow and childishly histrionic form of LARPing that Trump's continued salience keeps on life support.

It makes him at once a ridiculous lolcow and a potentially very dangerous person if he ever obtains the power he seeks. @feelsdesperate like to make sport of Stancil to keep people from taking him seriously but also (perhaps) as a form of anxious wish fulfillment. We want it to be the case that absurd white male hysterics like Stancil have no chance at obtaining power. But that he hungers for and seeks it is an important prerequisite for having that few decent people fulfill.

These are the people passing laws to strip parents of confused children caught up in the gender social contagion of their rights -- the people who will not listen to those harmed by this movement and who will use the state without remorse or mercy to inflict further harms on children and families. The human deficiencies of people like Stancil, their willingness to resort to vicious and dehumanizing invective when confronted by some of the necessary and unavoidable entailments of the ideas they support to the hilt are a potentially serious matter.

Read 7 tweets

Wesley Yang

@wesyang

Jan 13

https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1746279320060854687

I don't think many people would have considered this thinkable before it happened. But those with the wherewithal to do it knew in advance that not one person whose opinion they cared about would be willing to criticize it in any way.

https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1746279320060854687

They did it, received zero pushback, and reformatted expectations at a new equilibrium

But the bubble in which universities administrators (and corporate executives and professional societies and our culture industries) operate does not encompass the whole world.

Something like a year later, the universities are newly politicized -- what a surprise.

Read 5 tweets

Wesley Yang

@wesyang

Dec 20, 2023

The woman from whom Gay copied her acknowledgment, Jennifer Hochschild, is a colleague in the same department writing on adjacent topics.

Worth looking at her list of publications as a reference for the expected degree of productivity of scholars tenured at America's leading university.

Hochschild has been publishing since 1979, so I began counting in 2000. (Gay finished her PhD at Harvard in 1998.) She has published 87 papers in that time. Has authored five books to Gay's zero over her career.

Gay switched over to administration, so you wouldn't expect the same degree of productivity as a full-time scholar. But with eleven papers to her name, Gay was tenured at Stanford and poached by Harvard.

It just doesn't work that way for anyone else. Not even close.

scholar.harvard.edu/jlhochschild/p…

Affirmative action was initially sold as institutions exercising their discretion to provide a "tip" in the direction of an otherwise equivalently qualified candidate in the interest of diversity. That lasted about five minutes in practice.

Everyone involved has known it and self-consciously chosen to lie about it for five decades.

The same year that SCOTUS struck down racial preferences in college admissions, we see the actual scope of the preferences -- the overwhelming favoritism -- at the very pinnacle of the system.

Here's how it works: Having diversity around helps the university feel good about itself; that's a value distinct from scholarship. And when you are bringing in students to serve this role rather than be competitive, you need faculty to serve as role models, inspirations, and to serve a therapeutic function.

So you put someone on the fast track to perform this service function, hiring them on the basis of a record that would not remotely pass muster for anyone else.

All fine, so long as you are honest to yourself that you are creating a self-referential make-work jobs program where "fostering diversity" is the job that pretends to be about diversifying the campus when the job itself is the thing that is diversifying the campus.

But if you drink the Kool-Aid required to buttress everyone's self-esteem and pretend that they aren't there for cosmetic purposes to make rich white people feel good about themselves, and if you then get high on your own supply of the ideological cope because you're swept up by the racial fan fictions that overwhelmed the media during the Trump years, you end up doing something really dumb like elevate someone obviously unqualified by any conventional metric, and not possessed of any significant personal qualities -- eloquence or authority (as she demonstrated herself to lack before Congress) -- to a position that makes it so that your hated enemies on the Right have endless undefended shots on goal.

Read 7 tweets

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