Chaya Raichik has a devastating story about a 90-year-old woman who was kicked out of her volunteer position with the National Multiple Sclerosis Society because she didn’t understand why she had to provide her pronouns in her email signature.
The woman, Fran Itkoff, had been volunteering for the MS Society for 60 years, running a support group for MS victims. She was inspired to do so with her husband, who had the disease, and continued her work after he passed away.
Fran was not being an activist and was not protesting the use of pronouns. She didn’t understand why she had to–for obvious reasons. It is stupid for somebody who is obviously a woman to be required to do so.
Fran’s failure to understand the point marked her as someone who violated the MS Society’s DEI policy, and she was dismissed.
Over the years, Fran’s work has been recognized numerous times by the MS Society, and they even sent her to present an award to President Carter for his help in promoting a fundraiser.
But now she isn’t good enough because she literally doesn’t understand the DEI requirements that were implemented 5 minutes ago.
All this storm and strife arose from her literally asking a question. For not understanding and embracing the new alphabet ideology she has been excommunicated from an organization to which she has dedicated her life for decades.
The excuse is that the Society is dedicated to “inclusion.” What a weird definition of “inclusion” they have: comply or be banished.
Even more than violence, this is the tactic of totalitarianism–the development of “Newspeak” and the requirement that everything must be redefined in a manner that forces everybody to think exactly the same thing and behave in the same way.
Luckily for the people, Fran has been helping, she is determined to keep up her volunteer work on her own. The people who attend her support group aren’t as inclined to turn their back on her as the Multiple Sclerosis Society has on her.
This is, of course, a perfect example of how our institutions have turned their back on both their primary mission and on anybody who doesn’t fit with their view of what the “proper” attitudes and ideas are.
In Fran’s case that simply meant ignorance of the new rules, which places her as a member of the ancien régime.
And you know what revolutionaries do to members of the ancien régime–to the guillotine.