6 THE DAILY VOICE, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2012 EDITOR ROSS ARMOUR Toy release aids gender neutrality | illy, put your dolls away! We Be: to pick your sister up at paintball.” Most people’s understanding of gender is rudimentary at best. When prissy girls play with dolls and butch little boys play with guns, it embla- zons ideas about how girls and boys should behave into our belief systems. It takes tremendous undoing of what we think we know to grasp the socially and culturally constructed, dynamic concept of gender. It’s different from biological sex, different from sexual orientation and it’s ultimately a performance. But try explaining that to a five-year-old. In 2011 American mother Cheryl Kilodavis permitted her son to wear pink dresses. Child abuse? Brain- washing! Mom turns son gay? A good deal of the media’s knee-jerk reaction came from the fact that we have deeply rooted, overly simplistic notions of gender that exist because of our blue-is-for- boys upbringing. We struggle to adjust to a reality where the things engrained in us as children aren’t inherently right. For twenty years I’ve considered sandwiches to be staple to the human diet; turns out we were never evolved to eat wheat or lactose. The hole in Kilodavis’ story — big enough to fit Barbie’s dream beach house —is that dresses are inani- mate objects and don’t have a gender, no matter how pink or sparkly they are. Swedish toy company Top-Toy is taking the gender out of toys with its new catalogue, wherein boys play house and girls wield Nerf M-80s. This marks a colossal step in people gaining a better understand- ing of gender, gender variance and when not to bat a big shiny eyelash. Having pronouns other than the cringe-worthy “it” to describe people who are gender non-conforming is also essential to building accep- tance. In Sweden, the word “hen” can be used as he or she. If kids grow up accepting that playing house and firing camouflage weapons are “ungendered” things, they will become more open-minded adults. OPINION ANNE ELLISON We want to hear from you Did we get a fact wrong? Tell us. Got a different point of view? Write to us. Problems with something we've said? Let us know. Journalism instructor Nicholas Read oversees The Voice. Email him at nread@langara.be.ca Drift from tolerance is diminishing democracy willingness to put up with people e dislike. Given the diversity of people in society, it’s the only way freedom of thought and conscience can exist. This putting up with people who think differently than ourselves used to be known as “tolerance.” Unfortunately, in recent years the principle of tolerance has been turned on its head. It now means forcing everyone to accept “diver- sity,” another abused word that has been twisted into a synonym for political correctness. Today’s moral enforcers maintain a new orthodoxy by characterizing anyone who disagrees with them as ignorant and intolerant. Theodor Adorno’s authoritarian personality theory goes as far as characterizing conservatism as a personality defect. This way of thinking has done serious harm to the public dis- course. Once you've decided that | iberal democracy depends on our everyone who disagrees with you is simply ignorant (or worse, bigoted), there is no longer any need to listen to different opinions. You know that you are right, and that your policies ought to be adopted as a matter of course. Those who disagree simply need to be taught the correct view. If they don’t come around, well, that just shows that their prejudice is so deep-rooted that they’re beyond redemp- tion. In England in 2010, a Pentecostal Christian couple were denied the right to adopt children by their local city council because they disap- proved of homosexuality. The gay, atheist historian David Starkey commented on BBC’s Newsnight: “It OPINION KEVIN HAMPSON seems to me that what we’re doing is producing a tyrannous new morality that is every bit as oppres- sive as the old.” This way of thinking is also observable in the debate over Bill-279, a private member’s bill that would include gender-identity in the Canadian Human Rights Act for protection against discrimination. According to yesterday’s The Voice, Dara Parker, director of Qmunity, a Vancouver LGBT community centre, “says adverse reactions to the bill are representa- tive of peoples’ limited, binary understanding of gender.” The assumption is that anyone skeptical of the bill suffers from an incorrect understanding of gender, and that the only source of truth on the nature of gender is queer theory. This isn’t about who is right and who is wrong. It’s about maintaining the freedom of thought and con- science. TRADITIONAL. Genoer QOLLs CARLY RHIANNA SMITH photo Vancouverites should feel lucky with our peaceful city scenario Vancouver is a very polite even monotone city. Our political parties all get along, they often share the same ideas and vision, thus volatile action is at a minimum. There’s hardly any controversy, vocal spats are very rare- the city has a profound reputation of being rather “nice” on the whole. But while some may see this nice factor and a possible lack of political fireworks as boring- this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I moved here four years ago from the United Kingdom and I love living in Vancouver. It has a whole range of different cultures, it’s surrounded by pan- oramic views of the Coast Moun- Cis: wisdom suggests that tains, and this past September, it was voted the city with the world’s best reputation in a poll involving the G8 countries. Folks, all is well here. I can’t help but think, and if you look elsewhere it’s obvious, that there are a lot worse things going on else- where throughout OPIN ON | the world. Never-ending breaches of peace in Palestine, political chaos in Egypt, the Syrian fiasco, as well as daily pondering of whether North Korea or Iran may ROSS ARMOUR start a nuclear war. Most people would agree that world peace is an important thing. So the idea that all of our politi- cians get along better than they do in most places, strikes me as a good thing. We may not have the fun of a political bun fight, but there’s a lot to be said for civility. Back in February of 2011, a survey proclaimed Vancouver as the best city to live in on earth, just ahead of London, England. This was the fifth time in succes- sion Vancouver had won this crown. So we have this quiet, polite, clean city with very little controversy and breathtaking scenery. Maybe critical Vancouver citizens should look on the bright side of life. 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VSY 226 WEBSITE wwwlangara.bc.ca/voice EDITORIAL STAFF THIS ISSUE: MANAGING EDITOR/ PAGE 6 Ross Armour PAGE EDITORS PAGE 1 Audrey McKinnon PAGE 2 Cara McKenna PAGE 3 Carissa Thorpe PAGE 4 Omar Shariff PAGE 5 Ley Doctor PAGE 7 Ashley Viens PAGE 8 Jeremy Sally WEB EDITORS Jake Hewer Sascha Porteous Clayton Paterson REPORTERS Ryan Banagan Judy Chem Steven Chua Katja De Bock Anne Ellison Gillian Hames Kevin Hampson Tanya Hill Richard Hodges Brandon Kostinuk Jules Knox Michael Letendre Jana Minor Simone Pfeiffer Samuel Reynolds Bronwyn Scott Jennifer Thuncher Contact us: Our blog at www.langara- voice.com Twitter at @langaraVoice Youtube at VoiceLangara flicker at Langara Voice