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Never inclusive enough: Guide for use of woke pronouns by
British law association met with storm of mockery
20 Jun, 2021 12:55
The Law Society has faced a storm of online mockery and criticism after it showcased its guide for the use of pronouns in the workplace. While some found the initiative ridiculous, others blasted it for not being inclusive enough.
The law association, which represents and governs solicitors in the jurisdiction of England and Wales, has been actively participating in the virtual celebration of Pride Month, sharing its latest contribution on social media late on Saturday.
The group showcased its supposedly inclusive guide on how to ‘properly’ use pronouns in the workplace to avoid offending anyone.
“We frequently, and likely subconsciously, interpret or ‘read’ a person’s gender based on their outward appearance and expression, and ‘assign’ a pronoun,” the guide reads. “However, our inference as to that person’s gender identity may not be correct.”
If a person's outward appearance or expression suggests a particular pronoun, then it's that person's responsibility if his preferred gender is not used.
The group gave a series of tips on how to avoid this potentially offensive behaviour, providing examples of what a truly woke solicitor should say. Among other things, the association urged lawyers to “try to get into the habit of using ‘they/them’ until you know someone’s pronouns,” as well as to ‘discreetly’ ask a person for their pronouns, saying things like “Sorry, I didn’t catch your pronouns.”
Lawyers are required to use explicit and accurate language, especially when writing documents. They/them are plural, to use them to refer to a single person is inaccurate and illegitimate.
The advisory also suggests a rather awkward way of introducing people to one another, saying things like “This is Jen, they work in finance. This is Fred, he works in marketing.”
The Law Society’s way of celebrating Pride Month, however, has flopped spectacularly, as the guide received an overwhelmingly negative reception online with virtually no positive reactions in sight.
Many users with feminist views found the guide not woke enough and ultimately offensive to women, pointing out that the examples provided referred to the finance Jen as “they,” while the marketing Fred was referred to as “he.”
The more conservative-minded crowd said the whole pronoun thing and the supposedly ‘discreet’ ways of inquiring suggested by the Law Society was quite offensive in itself, warning that bothering with such nonsense could easily steer a conversation into a criminal law area.
Others, apparently jokingly, said the guide is already outdated given that there is an ever-multiplying number of gender identities, and the pronouns referred to in the document were probably insufficient to please everyone.
Those with less-than-conventional pronouns were quick to show up in the thread as well, coming up with quite cheeky demands like requesting that people address them only by the association’s bank account details.
Truck plows into crowd at Pride parade, mayor calls incident
‘terrorist attack against LGBT’ until driver ID'd as gay
20 Jun, 2021 03:20
Police and firefighters respond after a truck drove into a crowd of people during
The Stonewall Pride Parade and Street Festival in Wilton Manors, Florida, U.S. June 19, 2021.
© Reuters /South Florida Sun Sentine/ Chris Day
One person was killed and another injured when a truck drove into a crowd gathered for a pride parade near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The city mayor said the incident was a deliberate attack, targeting a congresswoman.
The incident occurred just as the Wilton Manors Stonewall Pride Parade kicked off on Saturday evening. A white pickup truck sped up, reportedly in the direction of the car of Democratic Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, but instead crashed into a business and hit two people, one of whom did not survive their injuries.
Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis, who was present at the parade, told local media that the suspected assailant’s car missed the lawmaker's vehicle “by inches” before it “smashed through a gate, smashed into a landscaping company, and hit two people.”
A video shared on social media shows police officers rounding up a man wearing a white T-shirt and black glasses at the scene.
Breaking: A person has died after a truck hit two people at the Stonewall Pride Parade in Wilton Manors, Florida. The Fort Lauderdale mayor says that the incident was a ‘terrorist attack’ against the LGBT community. pic.twitter.com/Gk5p7aOnsg
— PM Breaking News (@PMBreakingNews) June 20, 2021
While the Broward County Sheriff's Office reported that two people were “struck by a vehicle” when marching to celebrate “inclusion and equality,” they stopped short of saying if the incident was a premeditated attack.
However, the mayor appeared to have little doubt that the collision was intentional.
“This was a terrorist attack against the LGBT communities. This is exactly what it is,” Trantalis said. “It was deliberate, it was premeditated and it was targeted against this specific person. Luckily they missed that person, but, unfortunately, they hit two other people,” he added.
Typical hyperbole around LGBTQ communities. The mayor owes somebody an apology.
Although the mayor claimed that the incident was a premeditated attack on the LGBT community, preliminary information suggests otherwise. The driver of the truck that hit the two men was a member of the Fort Lauderdale Gay Men’s Chorus, the group’s president told media, and the vehicle was actually part of the parade.
“Our fellow Chorus members were those injured and the driver is also a part of the Chorus family,” the group’s leader, Justin Knight, said in a statement. “To my knowledge, this was not an attack on the LGBTQ community.”
Wasserman Schultz, who was attending the event in a convertible, looked visibly distressed in wake of the incident.
On Twitter, the congresswoman said that she was “deeply shaken and devastated” by the loss of life at the parade, while expressing gratitude to law enforcement and rescue workers that rushed to the site.
The parade was canceled to allow a “thorough investigation” and out of respect to the victims, the city announced. However, the Stonewall festival is set to continue, police confirmed, declaring that there was “no danger to the public.”
Backlash as Swedish National Museum slaps racism and
sexism warnings on CLASSIC ART
21 Jun, 2021 16:07
The Swedish National Museum is under fire for attaching “warning labels” to classic pieces of art, tipping viewers off about the dangerous “nationalism,” racism, and “patriarchal gender roles” apparently hidden on canvas.
From reimagining its viking warriors as “transgender” to hanging homosexual art in its churches, to declaring its own history “copied,” Swedish society has apparently committed itself to a full-throttle woke makeover in recent years. The Swedish National Museum in Stockholm is no different.
Since it reopened in 2018, audiences soon noticed new, “politicized” labels on paintings. Archaeologist Leif Gren reviewed them last week in an opinion piece for Vestmanlands Lans Tidning, concluding that museum officials weren’t letting visitors “think for themselves.”
Gustaf Cederström’s world-famous painting ‘Bringing Home the Body of King Carl XII of Sweden’, for example, is accompanied by a miniature social sciences treatise stating: “The populist and nationalist view of Swedishness, which is used politically today, is based on the idea of a statically idealised and constructed past. The idea that there is a historical time and place to look back on, where everything was in a certain way, is not true.”
Heaven forbid the audience would see the procession of royal banners in the painting and feel a stirring of patriotism.
Anders Zorn’s ‘Midsummer Dance’, which depicts peasants dancing in a field, gets a “warning for nationalism.” Yet the warnings don’t stop at depictions of country life. Even paintings of Sweden’s wild landscapes are apparently rife with nationalism. One realistic landscape painting is described as “an almost unreal idyll,” while another – this one depicting a cascading waterfall – is described as using “powerful nature” as “part of a nationalist movement.”
Others are racist by association. Carl Wilhelmson’s classic painting ‘Churchgoers in a Boat’ features a group of typically white Swedes in rural dress, but is described as racist, because it was painted at a time when “anthropological racial research” was being carried out.
The museum also has a dim view of 19th century gender relations, and views art from this period through a distinctly modern lens. A simple painting of a house is criticized because the male homeowner apparently slept in a “huge four-poster bed, while [his wife] slept in the room next door with the children, in a single bed.” This inequality is simply attributed to “nationalism.”
A painting of a nude nymph and two fauns in a forest is described as showing “how 19th-century viewers were schooled into the ‘male gaze’ tradition. The fauns look at the naked female figure as a game.”
Dozens of similar “warnings” abound. 20th century art, however, is described completely differently. After World War II, art and design “just like society at large, are democratized and reflect an increasing diversity,” one sign on a collection of mid-century paintings reads, while others tout the country’s progress toward a more egalitarian society.
How have these “politicized” labels gone down with Swedes? Not well, according to some online reaction to Gren’s article. “The permanent exhibition is therefore one great left-wing indoctrination – funded by our tax money,” one commenter complained.
“This madness will continue until everything in Swedish culture is branded racist. Everything that makes us Swedes proud of our cultural heritage must be branded racist by these state-sanctioned left-wing extremists,” another ranted. “We gave them the finger, they took our hand!”
“Is everything Swedish racist? Those of you who think so, why do you still choose to live in such a racist country?” another asked.
What madness!
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