WTF?

[uwe]

Meet Max Hightower:



If I would have gone to school with Max in the early to mid seventies, I would have probably said about him: "Between a boy and a girl, Max is somewhere in the middle." and that would have been that. Whether in a school play he would have played a boy or a girl, I wouldn't have cared either way, not that I was great fan of school plays. There have always been people like Max.

My school days are long past, yet I have to read something like this and my mind just boggles:

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2023/11/08/why-was-a-transgender-texas-teen-removed-from-his-lead-role-in-a-school-musical/?outputType=amp

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/10/trans-teen-oklahoma-role-max-hightower

Mind you, I'm not above making ribald jokes ---> doughnut bumper about the LGBTQ movement and sometimes it gets  - like any activist movement can - plain on my nerves. But this type of a desperate rollback denying what has always existed (and especially in theater and entertainment arts which have always attracted people who weren't all that obsessed with choosing a side) leaves me gaping. It's theater culture-historically inane too: Hell, in Shakespearean times, women were largely not even allowed to act and most women roles in his plays were initially played by men/boys. (That this turned a majority of British men into gays and had the population of the British Isles die out subsequently has not found its way into anthropological records so far.)

Max of course wasn't cast to play a woman, he was to play a male role in the school's performance of the musical 'Oklahoma!' Why that needs to be taken away from him because he is apparently "not male enough" to some people, is beyond me. How bigoted - and scared shitless about your own positioning on the gender scale - can you be?

[doombass]

Certainly a quite tiresome read. I don'y get it either.

[Pilgrim]

Uwe labels it simply and clearly: Bigotry. There is a massive outbreak of it in the US., often hidden under a thin veneer of religion. It might as well be the Klan walking around in hoods.

It is deeply disturbing, and even MORE disturbing that more people aren't up in arms about it.

[TBird1958]

Texas............

Having visited I still can't grasp what anyone sees in that state. Sorry.

[gearHed289]

This kind of stuff just leaves me speechless. Like a lot of other things that have been going on over the past 8 years or so.

[Pilgrim]

Texas............

Having visited I still can't grasp what anyone sees in that state. Sorry.

When I moved to TX to work at A&M (85-98) I planned to stay only 5 years, but got into a PhD program and ended up there 13 years. It was worth it, because the degree got me OUT of Texas!

Many good people, many good times and interesting places and history, but the state is an entirely different culture from anywhere I've ever been in the northern tier. It has only gotten more bizarre.

It really is a country with its own culture.

[Dave W]

the school board, by a 7-0 vote has overruled the school administration.

[Ken]

Cue the death threats to the board members.

[Dave W]

Let's hope not.

[uwe]

I'm always happy if people correct their own mistakes. Not everyone does.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/15/texas-trans-student-musical-max-hightower


You just wish that people would sometimes think before they decided on something. Still, a happy end of sorts. May Max play whatever roles his acting is good enough for going forward.