"Think of the property values. Now we can no longer say only straight people have been in this house!"
As I've frequently noted this is not a current events blog. However, one piece of clickbait did successfully bait me recently: "A student at Oberlin College in Ohio
described being "scared" and "angry" after the school announced a work
crew would be installing radiators in a "safe space" dormitory for women
and trans students, explaining the crew would likely be "cisgender
men.""
Now, this hits close to home for me, as though I don't live in a dormitory, I do live in an apartment building in a college town and my landlady tends to latch on to excuses to send maintenance workers in to check whether the drunken party animals have demolished the place yet. Unofficial surveillance. And, while she's gotten much better at scheduling the past couple of years, she also used to have a habit of notifying us only one or two days beforehand.
I will confess it pisses me off. It's intrusive and insulting. I have done nothing worthy of relinquishing my right to privacy like some prison inmate. However, never in seven years has it occurred to me to frame this as a genital intrusion! On a personal level, I don't give a flying cisgender fuck whether my uninvited guests are men or women or black or eskimo or click beetles or spiders. Just GTFO! Potential property damage notwithstanding, this apartment currently exists for the use of myself, five aquarium fish, four snails and a handful of plants and that's that.
But, leaving aside the comical image of hiring committees scouring the land for transsexual plumbers and electricians (glass slipper in hand) let's not pretend the little hubbub in Ohio is about privacy or personal space, or that social "justice" activism writ large is about anything other than imposing power over others. The modern incarnation of the safe space a.k.a. cloister has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with exclusive membership in a private club of the morally superior. It's fundamentalist, and the attitude displayed in such complaints mirrors that of superstitious proscriptions against contact with unclean classes, be they jews, gentiles, dalits, burakumin or Scruffy (The Janitor) for fear of metaphysical contamination by the damned.
Back in 1997, for all our faults, we were still able to mock and dismiss Homer Simpson's panic over sharing air with someone of the wrong tastes in canoodling. Now, every random apprentice eunuch and bearded lady who demand the rest of us subsidize their very own hareem must needs be applauded as "progressive" heroes for their bigotry.
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