Girl loses bid to join Berlin’s boys’ choir

V.Lind says:

I am, as may not be clear from my post above, female. I am a feminist in the sense that I believe in equal opportunity, equal pay, the broad stroke meaning of rights for women, including in some fields from which they had been traditionally excluded. (Remember when women doctors were as rare as rain in Arabia?). My politics are probably more left than right, though I would not like to be voting in the UK these days, where the Labour party is like some sort of Mickey Mouse club without the coherence. If being a SJW means I think there is an environmental crisis that is being ignored by corporate interests and political dinosaurs like the US president, then guilty as charged.

I do not consider gender to be a social construct; I consider it to be a grammatical one. I do not believe in quotas, or no-platforming, or trigger warnings or the culture of offence. I think all spaces should be safe spaces, and in situations where women need extra protection, such as in campuses with a rape culture where frat boys notch their belts based on sexual encounters voluntary or un, then that’s a social construct I can support.

But as I have said above, I do not believe in the culture of entitlement on the because-I-want-it principle. Or the political culture that gets behind such views and pats itself on the back every time “another barrier” is breached. I would like all kids — both sexes (if “both” is still a permissible word to use), any race, any socio-economic stratum — to have a chance at any university in the land — but NOT at the cost of lowering standards of admission. The universities have to be places where HIGHER learning is still maintained, and it is evident that the way to open them up to wider audiences is to improve schools throughout the land.

And I do not believe in storming the ramparts because some little darling from the generation of negotiations with children and no losers, all winners and Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas wants to sing in a boys’ choir or play on a boys’ team or sit in a men’s club. Girls and women have proven they can play football and other sports — on their own often brilliant teams. We know women can sing in choirs — if the women’s choirs are not as famous as the boys’, time to raise their game. (Those Bulgarian nuns a few years ago proved there was an audience for interesting and beautifully performed female singing). We know women can conduct and play in orchestras — so perhaps SD can now stop lobbying for every orchestra in the world to choose women for all vacancies and leave it to merit. Perhaps some orchestras had to be prodded more than others, but the message sees to be through.

I detest identity politics. I think degrees in “gender studies” and the like are preposterous. If people would address themselves to real social injustices, from poverty and environmental damage to the justice system and its applications and to getting along with their neighbours and helping those needier than themselves, things would probably shake down fairly equitably. While I think the “Me Too” movement was necessary, courageous and long overdue, I regret its name, because ever since the “Me Generation” was identified, there has been far too much focus on the “Me”s of this world in every field of endeavour. A little looking around might convince these German parents with their First World problem that there were other outlets for little Gretl and better causes to throw their weight behind.