You call that empathy?
Victoria Richards at the Independent bravely stands up for male employees handling the breasts of teenage girls seeking their first bras.
…when I recently took my daughter for her first bra fitting, I was peculiarly gratified to see that she acted pretty much the same way I did. Teenagers may have smartphones and TikTok and all the tech and street smarts we didn’t, but some things really do never change.
You don’t say. Rain is still wet, ice is still cold, the earth still rotates on its axis. Thanks for the vacuous banality which warns us that you don’t really have much to say.
The one thing that has changed, on the whole, is Gen Alpha’s greater understanding and empathy towards those around them. And so much the better.
Half of my daughter’s friends school the adults around them in the right pronouns to use for their peers. “They/them” is second nature to most of these kids. Us dinosaur millennials and Gen X-ers, meanwhile, should stand happily corrected (and make an effort to get it right when we slip up).
Wrong. Gross error. Completely back to front. Teenagers “schooling” adults to use pronouns incorrectly is not a new frontier in rectitude. We humans more than 19 years old are not dinosaurs for using accurate pronouns as opposed to play along with his fantasy ones.
Which is why, when I read the story about M&S – the same M&S who boast about being “Your M&S,” which presumably includes their own employees – reportedly apologising for “distress” over a trans member of staff asking a teenage customer if she needed any help in its bra section…
Aw look at you hiding the most important fact like any other obedient Independent stooge. You know perfectly well the issue was not “a trans member of staff” but a male one. The fact that you concealed that fact shows that you know it blows your claim out of the water. You’re too chickenshit to come right out and say M&S should allow and encourage male staff to volunteer to help girls fit their first bras.
…I only had one question: what on earth were they apologising for?
Bullshit. You knew and know perfectly well what they were apologizing for.
I understand those defending personal choice. In an ideal world, nobody would feel uncomfortable – especially children. But isn’t it our job, as parents (and members of society at large) to unpick this discomfort and name it for what it really is: prejudice. And to teach our children, just as we teach them to treat others equally, to be kind through our example.
It’s prejudice for female people to prefer female gynecologists and bra-fitters? You’re going with that?
What would you say if you heard, for example, that a person of colour working in M&S had approached a teenage customer and politely offered assistance, only for the teenager to feel uncomfortable, the parent to be outraged and complain about their “distress” – and the store to write an apology?
What would I say if I read a columnist for the Independent compare female people’s reluctance to have random men handling their breasts to racism?
How much time do you have?
The assumption that the young know better because they’re young is just so … Weak. Or rather, it’s indicative of psychological, moral, intellectual weakness. These are the people who fold under peer pressure. These are the people who kept turning the dial higher in the Milgram experiments. These are the people who convinced themselves the long line is actually short in the Asch conformity experiments.
I kind of get it though. There is this Whiggish pattern of awakening to the oppression of various Others. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” type of thing. I think that’s why “the young know better” is such a persistent idea. But in this case it’s a gigantic false positive.
But some “discomforts” are good, and useful, because they are warning of danger. They keep us alive. To try to equate safeguarding with bigotry erodes safeguarding. For some reason, while reading this section, the word “pedophile” popped into my head unbidden.
If I had teenage offspring who sought to school me in the use of unnatural pronouns I would delight in mortifying them (offspring) by getting them (pronouns) wrong just when it would cause maximum embarrassment.
A slight rewrite of Nullius’ opening sentence: the assumption that the young know better because they’re young is an assumption of youth. Ms. Richards sounds like she wants to be seen as a ‘cool’ parent who’s down with the kids. That approach to parenting works really well right up until it doesn’t. It’s perfectly fine to tell your kids when they’re wrong, and it beats the alternative of one day having your child say ‘you were the adult; why didn’t you warn me/stop me/protect me?’
That would depend entirely on whether the employee/person of color was male or not. It’s not the color that matters; it’s the sex.
I guess we’re supposed to be able to see their magical gender soul. If that doesn’t work, we’re supposed to go by the lipstick and dress. Somehow we’re supposed to disregard the fleshy bits that reside between the invisible essence and the wardrobe and cosmetics. That these are the only reliably truthful signals normally accessible to us is beside the point. Apparently.
What.
This is projection, pure and simple. It is not obvious at all that, on the whole, Gen Alpha children have greater understanding and empathy towards those around them. The author’s anecdotal evidence is not convincing, and in fact my experiences have evidently been very different from hers. It seems to me a significant amount of Gen Alpha kids really struggle with social interactions. (Which wouldn’t be very surprising, what with smartphones and the pandemic and all that.)
I don’t believe Victoria Richards is trying to follow Gen Alpha’s lead or anything like that – I think she’s using the young to validate her own beliefs. She’s seeing what she wants to see.
Let’s not forget that for the past decade or so, the young have been targeted by heavy doses of “inclusion” proselytizing in the schools. The views of the young reflect what adults have told them and the values and policies they’ve enforced. It’s a damming indictment of the schools that “they/them” is second nature to these kids.
We know that and they know that, but they continue to push a supposed link between transgender and race because they are trying to build a ‘separate but equal’ narrative. “Look how oppressed we are, no different from Black Americans under the racial segregation laws”.
Ophelia: Said pattern is and has always been the outlier. Parents and elders almost universally know better than young’uns, so it stands out when the opposite holds. The only areas in which the young have anything like a track record of knowing better are aesthetic and linguistic. That is, the young in large part determine future fashion and language, which is a rather banal fact.
Ok but it’s a big outlier. Really noticeable. The shift in views on race and sex/gender was massive. I think that gave The Kids a credibility that made gender bullshit seem like holy wisdom.