Saturday, April 4, 2009

SuperSILLYous Censorship

On Senator Wafflepoop's (yes, really, but keep reading) LiveJournal site, an incident of censorship is described. In short, a nine year old boy's science project had not been allowed to go on display because adminstrators did not like the results of his study. Specifically the part where he said that what he really learned from this project was that some people don't want to be called boys or girls, and that those people need an "other" option. The post goes on to explain how many people are fascinated by the survey and that you can have a different gender identification and still be considered and counted and included. It seems the boy had been very understanding, ready to roll with the idea, accepting. The "worry" is that his good-natured, loving and freeing mentality is being squashed by the narrow-minded. You can read the whole post here.

Besides wanting to applaud and boo as necessary, one aspect of this "story" intrigued me. It prompted this posting. The lad also found those that classify themselves as 'other' tend to prefer blue to green. Why did that strike me? Here, have a look:

[Fairies:] the mauve ones are boys and the white ones are girls, and the blue ones are just little sillies who are not sure what they are.

- Peter and Wendy, Sir J.M. Barrie


It's almost as if Barrie had been a prophet. Or else he really knew about fairies and androgyny. I'm not really supporting either of those statements. Just being silly.

As for referring to the 'others' as sillies, I do not construe any offense in that word at all.

Consider my thoughts on silly in this post. Take note of Meyers saying that society oppresses "silly" and Dr. Seuss's notion that there has to be another way of looking at the world.

1 comment:

Danielle Filas said...

Goodness gracious. How sad. So they've basically taught this kid that it's ok to change scientific evidence to fit convenient social morrays?

[untorph--- you know if you accidentally torph- you've just gotta untorph later or there will be real trouble]