What, Indeed, Is in a Name?

A couple of days ago, one of Curmie’s friends posted link to a Facebook page, which in turn showed a guest essay by Bud (né Howard) Herron. Here’s the link to the original source, The Tribune in Seymour, IN, so you don’t have to mess with Facebook if you don’t want to. 

Herron is reacting to a new law in Indiana (there’s one in DeSantistan Florida, too, of course, and probably elsewhere) that prohibits teachers from addressing students by their chosen names, even, apparently, by a shortened version of their “real” first name, without a signed permission slip from their parents. 

This is all in the name of “parental rights,” a charming euphemism for removing rights from students and teachers and transferring that power to the state. Curmie is so old that he remembers when conservatives were in opposed to governmental interference in personal matters. This, of course, was when they didn’t control the statehouse, and therefore wailed incessantly about stuff like mandatory inoculations against measles or mentioning the fact that slavery was once a thing in a large swath this country. 

The laws in question, of course, are a paean to cis-gendering at the expense of individual liberty. What passes for the argument suggests that insisting on parental control over what a child can be called will somehow preserve that kid’s retention in the ranks of the cis-gendered. It won’t, of course; it will only add another layer of stress to a young citizen trying to figure things out. 

And Ron (who, being an adult, can be called “Ron” without a note from his Mom) DeSantis’s claim that this effort will eliminate the need for pronouns is nothing short of daft. A few months ago, Curmie compared the two frontrunners (or at least they were then) for the Republican nomination thus: “Donald Trump is just as wrong [as DeSantis] on the issues, just as authoritarian, and even more narcissistic, but at least he’s stupid.” Curmie hereby apologizes to Mr. Trump, who does not, in fact, have a monopoly on stupidity. 

For the moment, let’s leave aside issues that involve physical actions: hormonal injections, surgery, etc. These areas are more contentious, and an argument that a 10-year-old isn’t mature enough to make that kind of decision, even with parental consent, carries a good deal of validity. Calling someone who used to be Bobby “Bobbi,” though, is a lot less permanent. 

That said, if young Dana (to pick one of more than a few names that could refer to a boy or a girl) wants to be Daniel or Danielle, and the parents object… THEY’RE THE PROBLEM. Curmie shudders to contemplate the fate of children who cannot trust their parents to support them as they work through questions of identity. And now, the state wants to take away their sanctuary: adults who see them as they believe themselves to be instead of what the parents want them to be. 

Curmie happens to have a nephew who used to be his niece. He remembers going to dinner with the family, and cringing as this young man, then in his mid-20s, was consistently dead-named not only by idiot cousins who thought this was all a joke, but by his own father. If, while he was still in high school, he’d sought consent to go by his chosen name, a standard non-gender-specific nickname for his middle name, it probably would have been denied. To what end? 

This is the principal reason to oppose legislation like this: it’s cruel, and it denies reality. There are other arguments against this inanity, of course. 

Even the authoritarian pols who support this restriction on personal liberty are smart enough to avoid mentioning the real reason for their action. They therefore insist on consent for any name other than the full first name. So young James needs parental approval to be called Jimmy, and then needs another form to shorten that to Jim, a variation on a theme that is quite common, especially among boys, generally around the tween years. It’s unclear whether teachers could still call him Jimmy after the change, so a simple slip-up could conceivably be a fire-able offense (or worse). 

There are, of course, a host of names that do not automatically signal a specific gender. Curmie mentioned Dana, above. Let’s see… Curmie has also known both male and female versions of folks named Ashley (Curmie once had two Ashleys with the same surname in the same class: one male, one female), Austin, Avery, Beau, Beverly, Carson, Chandler, Christian, Cleo, Cory, Dominique, Jan, Jody, Kelly, Kim, Lauren, Lee, Lynn, Ryan, Stacy, Taylor, Tyler, Whitney. There are probably others that have slipped Curmie’s mind. Notice, Gentle Reader, that many of these names conjure up a specific gender identity… which might very well be incorrect in a specific instance. 

These are just the ones that are spelled the same and pronounced the same: alternatives would be things like Angel in English or Spanish pronunciations, or Jordan/Jordyn. Then there are the standard diminutive nicknames: Alex, Andy, Chris, Mel, Mickey, Pat, Sam, Terry… that list goes on forever. Finally, there are the names that may seem to be a nickname but aren’t: Curmie has known a Betsy (not Elizabeth) and a Billy (not William, not even Bill), for example. 

What this boils down to is that the rule is fundamentally unenforceable, meaning that it will inevitably be applied capriciously to punish a teacher who calls Donald “Don,” not really for that infraction, but for suggesting that no, maybe segregation wasn’t all that great an idea. Meanwhile, a more obeisant teacher in the next class continues to use a different Don’s deadname without repercussions. 

And there are a lot of people who go by their middle names, or initials, or like Mr. Herron, by Bud or Butch or Bubba, to choose three examples from the same part of the alphabet. 

The imposition of stupid rules won’t work, not merely because the requirements are so unwieldy, but because even self-righteous politicians can’t come up with a way to stifle the speech of children. Stephen wants to be called Stephanie; the teacher can’t do that without a permission slip, but classmates Johnny, Suzy, and all the rest are free to do so, and quite likely will. (This also, of course, increases the likelihood that a teacher might call a child the name they just heard another student use.) 

There’s also the potential for embarrassment. Kids giggle and make fun. So woe betide Quint (he’s actually Hollingsworth V) or Bud, whose real name is Cantwell or something. The teacher can’t call him Bud because the parents forgot to sign the form? Really? Back when Curmie was teaching, he’d call role on the first day by reading the last name aloud and asking the student what they wanted to be called. Then he’d write it down so he’d get it right in the future. Simple, yes? Of course, Curmie was dealing with a slightly older clientele, but extending this rather rudimentary level of respect to an adolescent seems pretty damned reasonable. 

Pronunciation can also be an issue. Curmie once had a young man named Sumarliði in his class. Care to take a stab at the correct pronunciation of that one, Gentle Reader? The student in question was kind enough to supply a more pronounceable (to Americans) name we could call him instead. But if he were a current high school exchange student in Indiana or Florida, he couldn’t do that without parental permission, leading to embarrassment for all concerned as every American teacher butchered his name. 

At one level, the unenforceability of this legislation matters. At another, it doesn’t. The driving force of this movement is—hat-tip to Stevie (or should I say “Stephanie”?) Nicks—hauntingly familiar. The GOP, or at least its political leadership, is all about the rights of the “unborn,” coining phrases about “fetal heartbeat” when there’s no heart to beat and the transition from embryo to fetus hasn’t happened yet. 

But once those kids are born, they belong to the state: they’ll will be sheltered from realities like the fact that racial prejudice currently exists, or even that it ever did. They’ll miss out on experiencing art, literature, or theatre if one loudmouthed parent in the school district doesn’t like exposing their child to ideas that might challenge their dogma, so no student can have that access. And the ability to define yourself, to forge your own path, the erstwhile central tenets of the American Dream: forget it. 

Curmie is no fan of the Democratic Party or its leadership, but when the alternative is this…

Florida Out-Floridas Florida: On the Imminent Demise of Education in the Sunshine State

Four somewhat related stories appeared over the last few days. Curmie has already written about one of them, the saga of a marble statue’s dangly bits causing a Florida principal to be fired. Two other incidents—we’ll get to them in a moment—also in Florida (go figure), of capitulation to heckler vetoes further indicate that legislation like the “Parental Bill of Rights,” which passed the US House a few days ago, is aptly named. 

That’s the good news and the bad news. Curmie is going to assume that the good part is self-evident: that in general terms parents ought to be more aware than they have been of late about school curricula, safety concerns, etc. There are deeply problematic parts, too, of course. Demanding that teachers tell parents if students use different pronouns than they were born with, for example, is creepy at best. 

If those kids can’t be their true selves as they perceive themselves to be at home, then demanding that school officials nark them out has a legitimate chance of placing them in danger. The current law even in Florida (!) allows a school to withhold information if there is a legitimate fear for a child’s safety; the proposed national legislation does not. Having more of a 1950s mindset than Florida is not a good look. 

Curmie stipulates that the urge to use different pronouns than biology would dictate might be a “phase.” So be it; let it play out. But a truly loving home would never demand that children deny their nature. (The trans and gender fluid people Curmie knows have been, by and large, supported by their families, albeit sometimes after a period of confusion and dismay; that doesn’t mean that all such folks are.) 

Ultimately, though, however qualitatively damaging such incidents are, they’re likely to be rare. So it’s really the “parents’ rights” part that has the greatest chance to cause quantitative problems. As Curmie wrote a few days ago, “’Parental rights trump everything else’ is not merely problematic, but chilling. No, they don’t, or at least they damned well shouldn’t. Education is not, cannot be, about serving up whatever pabulum the most insular and doctrinaire parents want. It’s about students, and what is best for them must be the primary objective.” 

If we look at these bills in purely political terms, devoid of ethical or philosophical elements, the situation becomes clearer. Schoolchildren don’t vote and they don’t make campaign contributions. Parents do. And True Believers of every description are going to be more forthcoming with those political contributions than the average citizen will be. Thus, the wackadoodle base has outsized influence. 

The seemingly innocuous provisions of the Parental Bill of Rights actually provide a de facto open invitation for every homophobe, Christian nationalist, racist, or garden variety anti-intellectual within hailing distance to remove any topics of discussion, course materials, library books, or whatever else that might disrupt their myopic and theocratic view of the world. What purports to be an exercise in ideological balance and freedom of expression, therefore, is precisely the opposite. 

To be fair, this isn’t intrinsic to the bill, although we might reasonably suspect that some of its sponsors and supporters were aware of the dark ironies at play. Much of the blame can be placed squarely at the door of local school officials—boards of education, superintendents, principals—who tend to be (how to say this?) invertebratedly inclined. It’s easier to go along with utterly stupid interventions from even the most irresponsible sources than to say “no, this book stays, not only in the library, but in the curriculum.” Standing up to bullies can get you in trouble in places where being the loudest is all that matters. 

One of the cardinal principles of American government has always been, or at least was until recently, the twin concepts of majority rule and respect for the minority. The latter was often more aspirational than reality-based, but at least the concept was out there. But if you happen to be in a disenfranchised minority (if you’re gay or Muslim or—heaven forfend!—trans, for example), that respect is not always perceivable in certain communities even in tiny manifestations. 

Of course, BIPOC people are often at the center of these contretemps. Curmie isn’t going to deny that in some instances the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction (DEI regulations are often contrary to at least two of their three initials, for example), but the two specific cases Curmie mentioned in his introductory paragraph certainly do little to suggest that racism isn’t a major force in the “parental rights” movement. 

The first story is sort of a two-parter. The exact details are a little unclear, in part because there’s contradictory evidence, in part because not all journalists write well. We know, sort of, that some 73 books were returned to the distributor by the Duval County, Florida, school district in December. 

Quoting the online version of Jacksonville Today: “Among the rejected titles are a book about Martin Luther King Jr. intended for fourth graders; a biography of Rosa Parks for second grade classrooms; a first grade Berenstain Bears book about God; and multiple titles including LGBTQ+ characters and families.” Gee, I wonder what the agenda of those censors was. 

Homophobia and variations on the theme are still considered acceptable in some places, but rejecting books about perhaps the two most famous figures in the Civil Rights movement suggests a racial animus that ought to infuriate even the most conservative members of the citizenry. (Curmie grants that they could just be terribly written books, but if that’s your argument, you damned well better make it, and provide some evidence for the allegation.) 

Duval officials claim they didn’t really reject the Rosa Parks book because, you see, they never actually bought it to begin with. It was apparently shipped as a substitution for some other book in the order; anyone who placed an online order for grocery pickup during the pandemic understands this phenomenon. 

What appears pretty clear is that Duval did reject the book after it was delivered (intentionally purchased or not), and Curmie is tempted to wonder how it looks better for Duval that they’re now claiming they had the opportunity to order the book but declined, sight unseen. 

Books about black baseball players Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente, the two greatest rightfielders of Curmie’s youth, were finally approved, but only after a long delay and a national outcry. Nope. Nothing to see here. Keep the line moving. Move along. 

But let’s return to Rosa Parks for a moment. The Grio reports that the publisher Studies Weekly actually tried pandering to Florida’s absurd governmental interference by producing multiple versions of their Rosa Parks story. One version omits race altogether, saying only that “She was told to move to a different seat.” Apparently this was too much even for Florida, but the mere fact that the publisher thought it was worth a try tells us more than a little. 

Let’s face it, Gentle Reader, we all know about Rosa Parks not because she was somehow accidentally in the wrong seat, but because people of her race weren’t allowed to sit where she was sitting. The publisher bears a good share of the blame here, but their cowardice wouldn’t have been necessary, even to them, if the state weren’t run by people whose paranoia is exceeded only by their authoritarianism. Hell, Curmie would settle for grown-ups. 

The last (please, let it be the last!) story in our trio looks a whole lot like the second, except in happened in a different city and about a different medium. This one comes, again, as the result of a single complaint, from a parent in St. Petersburg about the 1998 Disney film (well, technically an episode of “The Wonderful World of Disney”) ”Ruby Bridges,” which had been a staple in Pinellas County classrooms for years. 

Young Ruby, you may recall, Gentle Reader, was the 6-year-old girl who had the grim but significant responsibility of being the black child who integrated New Orleans schools in 1960 (six years after Brown v. Topeka, in other words). The film presents an accurate portrayal of historical events, centering, of course, on the steadfast courage Bridges showed, even as a child, in the face of racial slurs and threats of violence directed against her. 

Ah, but you see, an accurate depiction of those events might lead to the impression that white people hate black people. Or that’s the argument of a paranoid and/or racist idiot named Emily Conklin, who wouldn’t allow her child to watch the film and subsequently lodged a formal complaint. Needless to say, rather than telling Conklin to shut up and sit down, school officials capitulated, at least to the point of banning a program that was shown on network television over 20 years ago from all classrooms at North Shore Elementary until a committee can decide what to do about the situation. 

Now, of course, the school is saying they didn’t actually ban the film (despite considerable evidence that they did): it was a “miscommunication,” you see. If you take that excuse at face value, Gentle Reader, please accept my apologies, but you’re on the wrong page: this blog is for grown-ups. It’s far more likely that they got busted for being craven imbeciles, and now they’re backfilling as fast as they can. 

It’s worth noting at this juncture that Curmie has more than a little sympathy for parents who don’t want their child exposed to truly controversial materials. Curmie wouldn’t put images of Michelangelo’s David, a book about Rosa Parks, or a film about Ruby Bridges on that list, but whatever… None of this, however, grants a lone parent the right to prevent other people’s kids from having access to those media. 

Considerable damage has already been done, of course: damage to the schools’ reputations, to the possibility that good sense might someday prevail in Florida, to the education system in Florida and beyond. That this morass should be the direct result of political initiatives of the GOP—you know, the unintrusive small government, reduced bureaucracy, individual freedoms folks—is darkly ironic but hardly surprising. Duh: they’re hypocrites. 

Curmie isn’t saying the Democrats aren’t, of course. In the words of the image currently used on the cover photo on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, “A plague o’ both your houses.” (Note: you’ll have to click on the image to see the quote; Curmie hopes many of you will recognize John McEnery as Mercutio in the Roman Polanski film version of Romeo and Juliet, so you’d know what Curmie was up to without the quote.) 

There are, of course, a few professions that gather as much commentary from people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about as teaching does—professional athletics comes to mind, acting is up there—but there are literally none which allow a tiny minority of often stupid and almost always ignorant people to have such an outsized influence on the way a profession operates. The subtitle of a recent article in Salon may be a little harsh, but it’s not altogether inaccurate: “Republicans want the dumbest parent at the school to control the curriculum.” 

But no one in the New York Jets hierarchy, for example—not the coach, not the general manager, not the owner—gives a damn that Joe from Poughkeepsie (or Curmie from Texas) thinks that spending potloads of money and talent to get a 39-year-old prima donna as their quarterback is a bad idea. But virtually every board of education or principal will do backflips at the behest of some moron who thinks Michelangelo was a pornographer. 

Curmie has often argued that the only people who know (or care) less about education than boards of trustees and boards of education are state legislators. It appears that US congresscritters felt overlooked in this analysis and wanted to assert their claim. But (with the exception noted above, which is inexcusable), at least some of them might have thought they were doing the right thing instead of paying obeisance to the prescribed talking points. Doubtful, but possible. 

But there’s a reason that all three of the incidents Curmie mentions here are from the same state. Ron DeSantis has been masterful at maintaining plausible deniability (Curmie has a half-written piece about this phenomenon that he may someday finish), but if he’s going to run for President using his intrusions into a space where he doesn’t belong, he needs to be held accountable. Indeed, he’s the scarier of the two front-runners for the GOP nomination. Donald Trump is just as wrong on the issues, just as authoritarian, and even more narcissistic, but at least he’s stupid.