Joy Reid might be regretting her uncharacteristic decision to have Tiffany Justice (founder of Moms for Liberty) on her MSNBC show to talk about gender identity ideology in schools and the regulation of literature that is being put before minors in the public school system.
It was undoubtedly a more communicatively ethical move – in the Habermasian sense – than we normally get from the network. However, while providing a forum for genuine discussion and debate is a laudable step, it probably was not a strategically politic one. As we know from the infamous Denton’s Document, the position she seems to endorse in this matter is one that does not do well when exposed to the cold light of day, and so one wonders why MSNBC chose to open up discussion on this topic, when they are so loath to do so on just about all others.
The issue is well-aired at this point, so there is no need to go into it. The exchange centered on the provision of library books in schools, and whether parents, school boards, local authorities, or state/federal government should determine the content and accessibility of these books. Readers can watch, assess, and decide for themselves.
Let me be clear. I am neither a prude nor a stickler. I am actually fairly bohemian in my personal habits. I am not a moral-majority kind of guy and I am no Mary Whitehouse. Like Freud, I harbour no illusions about the powerful and confusing sexual forces that run through young hominids and I think that educating youth about sex is part of equipping them to be more self-governing and responsible individuals.
However, there is a world that separates youthful sexual drives from the sexualisation of the young. There is little doubt now that, for reasons we cannot adequately explore here, there is a movement running through our institutions that seeks (more or less unwittingly) to sexualise children in the name of a broader program of thought reform. It is also clear that this has piggy-backed itself onto the implosive trajectory ploughed through our political class by the epistemology of Identity, and it is exploiting the space the latter has carved out in our public discourses.
In terms of this particular issue, the cynical and neurotic compulsions that are driving the Identitarians are once again careening off the tracks that the majority of citizens expect from an education system. In the face of declining educational outcomes across the public school sector, it strikes me that our priority should be the mainline of pedagogical competence, rather than the branch line of child sexuality. This latter is surely taken care of effectively outside of the classroom (again, I’m not talking about sex-ed, but sexual-ed)?
Not so for the MSNBC host, who fails to see the irony in her favoured example of the proposed genre of library literature to be offered to children. The book she picks out as illustration of the kind to be promoted in schools is titled “All Boys Aren’t Blue”. She touts it as an ‘award-winning’ book, which of course confers instant ideological dubiousness upon it. It is presented as an innocent sample of the proposed lit. But it exemplifies something else that is not quite in line with Reid’s intentions.
Obviously, the argument is that “blue” is a gender construct that does not necessarily apply to the sex “male”. Some boys are masculine, others are not. Some straight, others are not. Some have short hair, others not. There is no necessary connection between “boy” and “blue”. Moreover, there is nothing essentially male about “blue”. It is just a color.
Fair enough. However, she fails to notice, as I am sure many who have been processed through the learning-mill have also failed to notice – that the title is illiterate.
Now, this is where I draw down the ire of the American reader, who has been similarly subjected to the same error since the cradle, and who will therefore very possibly be drawn into my crosshairs by implication. Apologies.
The correct wording should not be “All Boys Aren’t Boy, but rather “Not All Boys Are Blue”. This latter title correctly communicates the idea that there are some “boys” who are “blue” (by preference or convention) and some who are not, emphasising the point that the correlation is neither necessary nor total and that a plural space for other ways of being in the world exists. The wording “All Boys Aren’t Blue” incorrectly communicates a totalising claim that there are no boys that are blue, which is not only not the intended claim according to queer theory (there must be some hetero-normative “blue” boys or there would be nothing to “queer“), but it is also the opposite of what is being claimed – ambiguity, gender non-conformity, queerness.
If the reader has indulged my pedanticism thus far and not x-ed out at this point (thank you), let me just say that this problem is not really pedantic but to the point. This error is a persistent one running through North American speech patterns and always perplexes me. I am not moaning about vocab (pavement/sidewalk, torch/flashlight, potayto, potaato). It is not even a matter of “holding down the fort”, which sounds odd in comparison to “holding the fort”. In this case, it is actually a very telling deterioration of communicative competence that has in my presence on more than one occasion led to genuine misunderstandings and mistakes.
In short, this error is not just a consequence of a rich pluralism in our language community. It is not just innocuously incorrect. It is a degradation of speech that has been perpetuated through TV (most likely), but which has not been nipped in the bud by those who should know better (educators), and now it is officially endorsed by illiterate publishers in books tasked explicitly with educating the next generation.
For me, this is indicative. It sums up the problem here. It is not about puritans who want to stop children finding out about the world. My God! There are more than enough places for children in 2024 to find and expose themselves to sexual imagery. It is about whether the education system focuses its energies on the core competences and takes seriously its responsibilities to educate, enlighten, and equip the young with the tools required for successful integration into society and autonomous government of themselves in that society.
When it comes down to it, it is about ideology, not that unseen and unacknowledged Althusserian kind that lingers immanent to all thought and action, but the mundane and shabby sort that is about authority telling people what to to do and think right to their faces. Enough. Get the sodding words right before you start reforming our thought!