Time for a Culture War post, and one in which I actually am going to hide most of the content behind a paywall, since I’d rather have the privacy of conversing with my paying members on most of this one. Let’s start with this:
What this article pertains to is the fact that the elementary schools in my fair city of Palo Alto had decided that bathrooms would be gender-neutral, meaning that 1st grade girls would have the pleasure of taking a dump in the same bathroom that 5th grade boys were using. Never having been a girl myself, I still can’t help but imagine that approaching a urine-splattered toilet rim would be unsettling for a young lass.
Even for Palo Alto, I thought this was extreme. The Bay Area prides itself on being progressive to a fault, and Palo Alto is certainly no different. The residents here are fond of their multi-million-dollar houses, their new cars, their vacation homes, and their high-paying jobs, but by God, most of them knew a person of color back in college, honest, and they don’t want to offend anyone, so they hop onto whatever Cause is hot.
Still, this was just too far, and since the parents of Palo Alto (those who send their kids to public schools, at least) shell out around $35,000 every year in property taxes, they want to have some say-so in the school system, so they said, nope, girls’ and boys’ bathrooms should be separate things. Thus, the city relented.
It doesn’t end there, of course. We all know about the batshit insane gender and pronoun nonsense going on, and frankly I’m surprised it didn’t die out years ago. Here’s a handy table if you’re behind the times. Read it. Know it. Live it.
Now let’s take a moment and recognize a simple truth: as members of the Slope community go, I probably seem like a left-wing radical. It took me a very long time to realize just how right-wing Slope is (or at least the portion of this population that hasn’t been cowed into silence), so I tend to keep my mouth shut. But, by Palo Alto standards, I’m a red-hat-wearing, red-neck-having, carnivorous, cis-male heteronormative throwback. Having said all that, I’d like to move on to the real topic of this post, which will be visible to all paying members.
