She “firmly corrects them” all right
Oh good, the tv machine is training kids in how to lecture medical staff.
The first clip is merely stupid and cloying, but the second is infuriating. The lecturing kid is what, 12? Maybe 13? And she’s lecturing two medically-trained adults as if they were puppies who had eaten the carpet. And they look grief-stricken and horrified, as if they’d torn the patients limbs off by mistake. Also the clip is teaching the world that it’s a fabulous righteous thing to do to give medical staff false information about patients, like for instance getting the sex wrong.
It’s as if everybody is trying to out-stupid Trump.
Also, girls don’t wear blue.
I’m wondering a) how a kid of Mary Anne’s age manages to rush Bailey to hospital (I know she probably called for an ambulance but the writing makes it sound as though Mary Anne herself was the means of transport): b) at the legality of a child of Mary Anne’s age – a minor – being in sole care of Bailey: and c) why the hospital staff looked set to start treating Bailey in the absence of a parent or legal guardian to authorise such treatment. They were certainly looking to insert an I.V. and the doctor is planning on examining Bailey despite there being no immediate life-threatening symptoms, and that last bit is, as far as I’m aware, the only situation in which a minor can recieve treatment in the absence of a parent or guardian, in the UK at least.
It appears that criticism and maybe even legal action is deserved all-round, just not for any ‘mis-gendering’.
You don’t just “know” you’re right-handed by mentally consulting the way you feel, it’s how you use your body. Your mind learns from the body. All Bailey knows is that he feels and reacts a certain way and he then disconnects from his body to conclude he must be a girl.
And I don’t see Bailey claiming to like being rough and brash and contemptuous of girly stuff but gosh, he’s just that gender-nonconforming butch kind of girl cause he knows it. It’s the girly stuff. The butterflies and rainbows.
I didn’t watch the other clip. It sounds too disturbing.
It is disturbing. I had a visceral ewwwwwwwwwww response to it.
True about Mary Anne’s age. She carries on as if she’s 30 and the medical staff are 6 – which could be silly fun if it were a Mary Poppins kind of thing, but this shit ain’t that.
So much this. I had an accident when I was 17 (three weeks before my 18th birthday). I was bleeding and needing surgery, but they waited for my parents (who were out of town, but fortunately only one town away, and could get back quickly). They wouldn’t let my brother-in-law, who was in his 20s, sign consent. It had to be my parents. My condition was not life threatening, but without surgery I would never have walked again. Since it was not life-threatening, they did what they could to stop the bleeding and waited for my parents.
“Maybe children really are our future”?
Unless all life on earth ends, then yes.
Oh, they mean metaphorically, as in they’re leading us to a better way of thinking? Did children write that show? Does Netflix know these are actors reciting lines? Or do they know but think we don’t?
The first scene comes across like something a liberal would created according to the fevered imagination of a cultural conservative. It’s almost like a parody. Maybe somebody should as experiment write the wokiest garbage they can think of to see if people will buy it. Hey—maybe they did, and this is it!
What mind-numbing infantilising tripe this is. Handedness is a poor analogy to sex and gender, because it can be altered by training. Professional rowers are a great example of this; they train themselves out of their original handedness to become exactly ambidextrous, because otherwise they would pull unevenly to the left or right and so ruin their stroke. Other sports also provide examples of handedness training, with nearly every ball sport requiring equal facility when passing, kicking, throwing etc. with left or right hands or feet. Handedness is just a matter of frequent use and muscle memory.
So much for the first video. But I did like the throwaway line. “Well, I am from California” is quite suggestive that this is a trendy social fad rather than biological fact. I could equally see it as a reply to “How do you know so much about Reiki and crystal healing?” and similar.
As has been noted, the stupid only ramps up in the second video. “I don’t want the blue one” says Bailey, and “if at all possible, could you find me a non-blue hospital gown?” says Mary Anne… never mind that Bailey is wearing mostly blue. And never mind that one of the staff is plainly female while wearing blue scrubs. FFS that shit is infantile.
Mary Anne has more stupidity to offer: “I know that you guys are busy [so why the fuck did you interrupt their medical duties for this drivel?], but as you would see, if you looked at her and not her chart, Bailey is not a boy.” Apparently the doctors were supposed to conclude that Bailey is a girl because he has long straight hair and bright colourful clothing. The script writers don’t even realise how revelatory this is about TRA theory. Colourful clothing and long straight hair = not a boy any more. Straight out of the 1950s.
About halfway through the first clip, I metaphorically threw up in my mouth a little. I’m not going to watch the rest or the the second.
A: How much do you weigh?
B: 117 pounds.
A: And you’ve known this since the moment you were 117 pounds?
B: Um, no, I had to use a scale.
A: Well, that’s how Bailey fee–wait. Did you just say no?
B: Yeah. I have no way of knowing when exactly I hit the 117 pound mark, and I have no way of knowing from moment-to-moment whether I actually am currently 117 pounds. All I can do is use the best, most accurate information from an objective source and refer to it with confidence proportional to how recently the information was recorded.
A: But … You were supposed to say yes! My whole Ray Comfort-style script requires that you say the thing you’re supposed to say!
B: Um … Sorry?
A: You should be. That’s cis-fragility. It’s what happens when you’ve got unexamined transphobia.
B: Oh, that sounds terrible! What can I do to get rid of it?
A: You can accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lor–wait. Wrong script. I mean, you can start over and answer yes to my question.
B: Okay! Ask it again. I’m ready this time. I’ll educate myself and do better.
@OB #4
More like Freaky Friday
I assume those kids are the same age, so why are the doctors addressing Thingy as if she’s Bailey’s guardian? And why is Bailey mumbling in a high-pitched toddler voice? And do US hospitals really keep a whole rainbow selection of hospital gowns so they can match the colour to a patient’s skin tone? Or is it just pink and blue?
Anyway, since handedness has come up, I have long thought that it would be a great way to ease people in to discussing the concept of privilege without anyone getting upset or defensive about it. Any given group will almost certainly contain some left-handers. Sometimes right-handers notice, sometimes they don’t. Mostly, people get that it’s just the way someone is. Right-handers have the funny stories about how the kettle is always the “wrong” way round when the leftie has used it. Left-handers can explain why they have to use scissors with their right hand. Everyone can marvel together that they never noticed how the flush is always on the right, as you face the toilet. And a lot of people will have an older relative who did badly in school because they were left-handed but it was just not acceptable then.
Catwhisperer, In the first video, whilst the two girls are apparently playing poker for biscuits the conversation suggests that as Mary Anne is Bailey’s babysitter (although childminder would be more appropriate at that age. Infantilising the trans? Tut-tut) she is the older of the two. As for Bailey’s voice, well, the poor love does have a temperature*, and is being played by an actor who thinks that that is how slightly unwell people speak.
Regarding left-handedness in school (and ignoring the lefthanderphobic bit in the video where it is suggested that those of the sinister** persuasion are so inept they cannot use scissors without stabbing themselves), my late mother was initially left-handed but was ‘cured’ of it at school by having her left hand tied behind her chair during lessons.
*A true story: when she was around nine or ten, one of my daughters came in from playing and was limping. I asked her what she’d done and she said that she had hurt her arm. Obviously, I asked why ahe was limping if it was her arm that hurt and her reply was ‘Because that’s what you do when you’ve hurt yourself isn’t it?’ Twenty-some years later and I still remind her of that one if ever she says she doesn’t feel well. ‘Which side are you limping on?’ instantly cheers her up.
** I seem to recall that there used to be a superstition linking left-handedness to witchcraft and Devil worship. It was something about part of a ritual when the worshippers would dance ‘widdershins’ (anti-clockwise) in a circle, and such people were said to have taken the ‘left-hand path’. The roots of the word sinister itself pertained to the left side, which is how it became associatwd with the dark arts.
Re handedness: I think it’s clear that handedness is to some degree innate, and refers to a preference for one hand, which usually but not always corresponds to greater skill with that hand, but skills can be trained, as was pointed out. The vast majority of people are right-handed, not because small children mimic adults (as some friends of mine have claimed), but because that’s what feels appropriate to them; small children are notoriously bad at telling which side is which, and sometimes use handedness to name the sides. But handedness is poorly defined; some people prefer different hands for different tasks. (There are people called “sit-down lefties” who write with the left hand sitting down and the right hand at a blackboard.)
I am left-handed, and, like many lefties, I am drawn to articles and books about left-handedness, most of which I think are crap. Too much is made of handedness. Too many papers seem weak on definitions, and more interested in showing statistical prowess than actually learning something. One of the better articles on the topic suggested that many of the purported attributes of left-handers are more associated with a weak hand preference, a characteristic found disproportionately among lefties.
The post about training and handedness got me thinking. No, training doesn’t change basic hand preference, but it can develop skills and abilities. It’s interesting to apply that to sexuality: there are any number of gay people who managed to have successful heterosexual relationships and bring children into the world; there are straight people who have engaged in same-sex relations; and many other examples. Preferences influence but do not dictate behavior, skills can be learned. It might be easier to deal with a lot of things if “is left-handed” were replaced with “prefers to use the left hand”, and “is gay” with “prefers relationships with members of the same sex”.
In regard to the video, which I haven’t watched, I gather Bailey is expressing preferences for things coded “female” in our culture. It might be better here, too, if this preference were simply expressed as a preference rather than an indicator of some physical state.
Colin @ 9 – Freaky Friday – that’s it. I’ve never seen it so didn’t call it to mind in the moment but yes. Mary Poppins was meant to convey just the genre of cheerful magical fantasy mixed with reality storytelling. I loved the books as a kid – still think they’re genius – because apart from the magic Mary Poppins is a classic stern brisk “off to bed, spit spot” nanny who takes offense at the drop of a hat and yet…
Catwhisperer: You’d still get pushback from certain types, like, oh, me, for instance. Mostly for the choice of terminology. “Privilege” carries some normative connotations that are, I think, both inapplicable to the subject and antagonistic to a goal of fairness or equality. A privilege normally refers to something extra, a bonus in addition to the norm. Alternatively, “x is privileged” can be a passive construction of “y privileges x”, which normally means that y grants a privilege to x.
Neither meaning really applies to handedness, unless one would also say that hunters without red-green colorblindness are privileged because they can see ungulates in the woods. Neither really applies to matters of racial injustice, either, for who could argue that not being denied basic rights is best conceived as a bonus? Not living in fear of having your autonomy violated due to your skin color or your sex is no privilege. It is a right. To call it a privilege distorts the moral calculus. When there is abrogation of rights, restoration of those rights brings justice. When there is privilege, elimination of that privilege brings justice.
On Facebook, agender critical feminist writes:
She also reports that Abbott Laboratories, makers of Lupron, a popular puberty blocker, have stock in Netflix.
On his own Twitter, rosedommu has posted a picture of himself kissing an axe, with the caption “Happy Trans Day of Vengeance”; harassment directed at JKR, and lots about his “slutty” (his word) sexual fantasies.
https://twitter.com/netflix/status/1286389732939665408?s=19
I’ve never had anything other than dishwater whitish with a faded blue stripe, but maybe they’ve gotten more cheerful since the last time I was in the hospital.
Sackbut @12, decades ago, when I worked in another field, I recall reading an interesting paper from some Indian authors. They had been looking at the prevalence of a wild growing legume in the diet and had noticed that it was overwhelmingly very poor rural people who ate this particular stuff, especially when times were really grim. The significance here is that it was known to be toxic and appeared to preferentially kill left handed people. They posited that there may be other plants similar out there around the world and that could be why there are fewer lefties around.
Too long ago for me to remember the journal or details. It was just a 20 minute distraction from what I should have been reading.
That was disturbing. Is that program written by children? Where the hell are the parents?
Big note to transgender people: We don’t mean to make a mistake naming your gender. >99% of the people we meet look like we think they might look. If we get your gender wrong, it’s not necessarily our fault. Ten seconds of patience and everyone will be happier.
OK, I finally saw a clip with a key part of the video, the, er, dressing down about the dressing gown. I think the whole speech would go much better if it said “Bailey does not consider herself a boy” instead of “Bailey is not a boy”, and “who she thinks herself to be” instead of “who she is”, and so on. But that’s not the narrative they want.
It is laughable that looking at Bailey instead of the charts is supposed to correct the sex determination, when a physical examination would find that he is male.