RUTHFULLY YOURS

The movement to extend transgender rights and awareness continues its push to determine how people speak. Third-person pronoun usage has become a major subject of contention in the last year, with the passage of laws that seek to govern how people refer to one another. The New York City Commission of Human Rights (NYCCHR), for example, declares that “individuals have the right . . . to be addressed with their preferred pronouns and name without being required to show ‘proof’ of gender.”

The range of “preferred pronouns” has expanded widely recently, with the introduction of a new set of pronominal terms, complete with their own declensions. The NYCCHR, in its guidance on municipal anti-discrimination law, explains that “ze and hir are popular gender-free pronouns preferred by some transgender and/or gender non-conforming individuals.” The guidance further explains that “intentional or repeated refusal to use an individual’s preferred name, pronoun, or title” is a violation of human rights law, which can lead to significant fines. “Ze” and “hir,” incidentally, are only two examples of the dozens of new pronouns invented in the last few years, including “ae/aer,” “ey/em,” “xe/xem,” “per/per,” yo/yo,” and “ve/ver,” among others.

Transgender advocates insist that nobody is in danger of getting jail time for misidentifying trans-people; rather, the law is meant to raise consciousness about the issue. “Our guidance encourages people to ask transgender and gender non-conforming individuals how they would like to be addressed,” says New York City Human Rights Commissioner Carmelyn Malalis. “The law is meant to address situations in which individuals intentionally and repeatedly target transgender and gender non-conforming people with this type of harassment.” The commission fails to specify, though, how many instances of such misidentification would constitute intentional and repeated harassment.

A new California law, the Gender Recognition Act, allows people to designate their gender as “nonbinary”—meaning that they “may or may not identify as transgender, may or may not have been born with intersex traits, may or may not use gender-neutral pronouns, and may or may not use more specific terms to describe their genders, such as agender, genderqueer, gender fluid, Two Spirit, bigender, pangender, gender nonconforming, or gender variant.” The Golden State has also required nursing homes and other long-term care facilities to “use a resident’s preferred name or pronouns after being clearly informed of the preferred name or pronouns.”

Pushing further, some advocates object to the idea that pronoun choice is even a question of preference. The student health center at UC-Davis clarifies that “a common misconception or trend these days is to say PGPs for Preferred Gender Pronouns. However, for many people, their pronouns are not preferred, they are mandatory.” As anti-discrimination law tends to follow the steepest path downstream, it’s not hard to imagine legislators soon regarding designation of pronoun choice as “mandatory,” with the appropriate penalties for those contravening the new norm.

It seems fair and just to refer to people as they present themselves and wish to be addressed. It would be rude to call a transman “Miss” just to make a point, and within reason, going along with whatever benign fiction people might have cooked up about themselves is simply good manners. “Preferred-pronoun” usage, however, is a bridge too far, and not just because it’s impossible to expect everyone to memorize lists of declensions of made-up words. The pronoun debate is also an effort to force us to change the way we talk about people who are not actually present: when we speak of “he” or “she,” we are almost always talking about someone who is not there. When speaking face-to-face, the only pronoun we commonly use is “you.” It’s considered improper to use third-person pronouns in the presence of their subjects; hence the old saying, “‘She’ is the cat’s mother,” meant to admonish against using the pronominal form instead of the individual’s proper name, if he or she is present. Insisting that we refer to absent people according to made-up vocabulary words upon threat of punishment is to interpose political ideology into conversation under force of law. It deputizes all listeners or interlocutors as surveillance agents in the name of gender equality.

Free people can think of and present themselves in just about any manner that they wish; nowadays, they have more latitude to do so than ever before. This should more than suffice. Anything further is fantasy, enforced by thought police.

Seth Barron is associate editor of City Journal and project director of the NYC Initiative at the Manhattan Institute.

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/we-need-to-talk-about-transgenderism/20418#.WfhFN4gpCUk

When, eventually, enough time has passed for people to consider the current period with some objectivity, surely one thing that will intrigue them most is the shift that has taken place in our understanding of gender. The existence of two distinct categories, men and women, once taken for granted as biological fact, can no longer be assumed. The trend, particularly among young people, is to question whether their gender identity corresponds to their sex. Sex is now considered nothing more than an arbitrary designation, an act of violence performed at the moment of birth. Instead, in the media, in schools and universities, gender fluidity is celebrated and those bold enough to transition and make their biology conform to their new sense of themselves are applauded.

The practical impact of this new belief in gender as non-binary and fluid is felt everywhere. Schools have introduced gender-neutral uniforms and are now busy building new gender-neutral toilet facilities. Time is spent discussing which changing room boys who now identify as girls should use after PE lessons and which gender-neutral pronouns teachers should use to address pupils. At university, women’s colleges admit male students who have ‘taken steps to live in the female gender’. Male rapists who transition after sentencing can be moved to women’s prisons. The Church of England offers renaming ceremonies to parishioners unhappy with the sex they, presumably, think God allotted them at the moment of conception. Debates about how passports and the UK’s national census should accommodate gender fluidity are ongoing. Mermaids, a UK taxpayer-funded transgender charity, was, until last week, advertising ‘same day’ cross-sex hormone treatment for children.

What’s truly remarkable is that this disregard for biology and overturning of social convention is occurring with such little debate. Teenagers, swept along with the current fashion, or young adults with a history of mental illness, are not questioned but affirmed by schools and therapists. Challenging someone’s decision to change gender, advising caution and delaying hormone therapy is seen, by transgender campaigners, as an offensive denial of an individual’s right to exist. As a result, there has been little public discussion of the profound impact new attitudes towards gender are having on society more broadly, on what it might mean for the continued existence of single-sex schools and women-only spaces such as hospital wards and prisons, on whether money spent converting toilets in small schools could be better spent elsewhere. There is little discussion of what it means to be a man or a woman in today’s society.

Attempts to discuss transgender politics are closed down. Last month, feminists trying to meet to consider the government’s Gender Recognition Act, had to change venue after protests were threatened. At the meeting point to share the new location they were attacked by trans activists. Discussion was shut down with physical violence. At Cambridge University, the renowned feminist activist and founder of Black History Month, Linda Bellos, had her invitation to speak withdrawn when it came to light she planned to question ‘some of the trans politics… which seems to assert the power of those who were previously designated male to tell lesbians, and especially lesbian feminists, what to say and what to think’. Bellos had not said anything controversial. Like the feminists wanting to discuss the Gender Recognition Act, she hadn’t been given the chance. Even the prospect of raising questions was enough to have Bellos disinvited.

Elsewhere, research into the experiences of individuals who transition from one gender to another is being shut down. James Caspian, a psychotherapist who specialises in working with transgender people, hoped to study people who had undergone gender-reassignment surgery but then regretted transitioning, a group he was increasingly coming across in his work. Bath Spa University initially approved Caspian’s research but when he failed to recruit enough participants, and so broadened his proposal to include people who had transitioned to men but subsequently reverted to living as women without reversing their surgery, Bath Spa’s ethics committee rejected his proposal and he could no longer continue with his research.‘The fundamental reason given was that it might cause criticism of the research on social media, and criticism of the research would be criticism of the university. They also added it’s better not to offend people’, Caspian has said. In other words, his research was rejected for being ‘politically incorrect’. CONTINUE AT SITE

Almost every week brings a new campus controversy: a college speech code that goes too far, an invited speaker shouted down by students, a professor investigated for wrongthink. While lamentations abound for the state of free inquiry at American universities, few have suggested substantive proposals for redress.

Here’s a straightforward idea that would be easy to put into practice: Require schools to assure free speech and inquiry as a condition of accepting federal research funding. In addition to subsidizing tuition and providing student loans, Washington disburses billions of dollars to colleges and universities for research—nearly $38 billion in fiscal 2015 alone.

Those funds constitute about 60% of all support for university-based research, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Because universities build in usurious rates of overhead on this money—in some instances, upward of 50% goes to underwrite salaries and facilities—these are some of the most prized funds in academia. It would be easy for Washington to require schools to protect free speech before the cash can be disbursed.

Massive federal investment in higher education dates to World War II, when the U.S. purposely made universities a pillar of the nation’s approach to research and development. In a 1945 report, Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, insisted that “freedom of inquiry must be preserved under any plan for Government support of science.”

At the time this meant measures to protect university research from governmental interference. Today the threat to free inquiry on campus comes from within. In a study last December, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reviewed 449 higher-education institutions—345 public and 104 private—and found that 92% had policies prohibiting certain categories of constitutionally protected speech.

Cross-referencing FIRE’s data with figures from the National Science Foundation illustrates a disheartening reality: Of the 30 higher-education institutions that collected the most federal research funds in fiscal 2015, 26 maintain formal policies restricting constitutionally protected speech. Six of them—Johns Hopkins, the University of Michigan, Harvard, Penn State, the University of Texas at Austin, and New York University—maintain policies FIRE categorizes as “substantially restricting freedom of speech.” These 26 colleges and universities took more than $14 billion in federal research funding in fiscal 2015, or nearly 40% of the total disbursed.

Academics used to understand that policies to stymie speech and expression are anathema to free inquiry. Consider the “General Declaration of Principles” issued in 1915 by the American Association of University Professors. The group asserted that the university should be “an inviolable refuge” from the tyranny of public opinion: “It is precisely this function of the university which is most injured by any restriction upon academic freedom.”

Prohibitions on what can be said or written inevitably favor certain questions, points of view, and lines of inquiry while discouraging or barring others. Speech codes, trigger warnings, bias-response teams and the like lead students and professors to self-censor. In a national survey this year by FIRE and YouGov, 54% of students said they “have stopped themselves from sharing an idea or opinion in class at some point since beginning college.” All to the detriment of a good education. CONTINUE AT SITE

Seeming to give credence to Bertrand Russell’s observation that “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts,” a student-written op-ed that ran in the September 25th issue of The Daily Princetonian argued that conservatives should not have the benefit of free speech, and do not even have the right to expect its protection because, given their ideological stance, “they are appealing to a right that does not exist” for them.

“In my belief,” student Ryan Born continued in this astounding piece of sophistry, “when conservative ideas are opposed, there is no right that is being infringed.” In fact, he seemed to be saying, the essential worthlessness of conservative ideology—as opposed to the virtue and fundamental truths embodied in progressive thought—means that instead of debating their ideological positions, conservatives should recognize the errors in their thinking and abandon their views. “Some ideas will already have been judged wanting,” Born wrote, and “Conservatives ought to question why some ideas are so stringently opposed and then adapt their arguments, instead of begging for ‘free speech.’”

Why? Because “conservatives are interested in being able to propose their ideas without any political opposition to their right to speech.”

For evidence that academia is currently awash in this type of execrable sentiment, one only has to look at the number of campuses which, just in the opening months of this semester, have experienced the actual shutting down or exclusion of conservative speech—purportedly with the intention of rejecting “hate speech,” right-wing thought, white supremacy, fascistic ideology, and a host of related extremist modes of thought the progressive left on campuses has conjured up as being an imminent threat to their emotional safety and well-being.

Now, any speech that the left wishes to suppress or avoid it categorizes as being equivalent to violence; conservative ideology is thought of as being weaponized as “hate speech” and potentially harmful to listeners. Any speech that is labeled as “hate speech” condemns that expression to lacking the protection of free speech, and because it thereby falls outside the bounds of acceptable expression, it is undeserving of being heard and justified in being suppressed. Speakers who question prevailing liberal orthodoxy are said to be committing virtual “violence” against marginalized victim groups on campus who might be exposed to these extremist ideas and be injured by them in some way, and speakers are disinvited or obstructed proactively to ensure that victims are never threatened by ideas they do not wish to hear or tolerate.

Campus progressives have shown themselves perfectly willing to shut down speech that they themselves have decided is unworthy of even being heard, and this behavior is not surprising given a 2017 national survey of 1,500 current undergraduate students at four-year colleges and universities conducted by John Villasenor of Brookings Institute. When asked if it is acceptable for students to shout down and disrupt a speech by a “very controversial speaker . . . known for making offensive and hurtful statements,” 51 percent of those polled agreed that, yes, shutting down such speech with the “heckler’s veto” is justified. Even more troubling was the response to a follow-up question which asked respondents if they believed in using violence to interfere with and shut down the controversial speaker’s appearance; astonishingly, 19 percent of students answered affirmatively that a violent response to the controversial speaker’s ideas and words was appropriate and justified.

Forget everything you’ve ever learned about math, because you’ve been taught a racist system that has perpetuated white supremacy for millennia.

According to University of Illinois Professor Rochelle Gutierrez, math is political and very problematic because of white privilege:

“On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White.”

“Curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans,” the professor says.

Gutierrez argues that too much emphasis is placed on math in our economy and that too many white professors teach the subject and receive the majority of grants, above “social studies or English” professors. She defines that as “unearned privilege.”

“Are we really that smart just because we do mathematics?” she asks:

“If one is not viewed as mathematical, there will always be a sense of inferiority that can be summoned… [minorities] have experienced microaggressions from participating in math classrooms… [and are] judged by whether they can reason abstractly.”

“Things cannot be known objectively; they must be known subjectively,” Professor Gutierrez said objectively.

Her teaching philosophy centers around the Spanish phrase, political conocimiento, which means, “political knowledge for teaching.” By employing that, two plus two doesn’t have to mean four anymore. It can mean whatever you want it to be, as long as it’s not offensive to others.

Class doomed dismissed.

A math-education professor at the University of Illinois wrote about some of the more racist aspects of math in a new anthology for teachers, arguing that “mathematics itself operates as Whiteness.”

“Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White,” Rochelle Gutierrez wrote, according to an article in Campus Reform.

Confused? Think that math is just math? Well, you’re wrong; math might as well be called “white math,” because as Gutierrez explained, “curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.”

As further evidence of her argument, Gutierrez added that more white than nonwhite people are math professors and that math professors often benefit from “unearned privilege” — getting more grants and more respect than other professors — just because they are math professors and not professors in another academic field.

“Are we really that smart just because we do mathematics?” she asked.

Now, whenever I see stories like this, I just have to ask one question: What, exactly is Gutierrez proposing that we do? Because other than her statement that “things cannot be known objectively; they must be known subjectively” — apparently, a suggestion that additional focus, respect, and grants should be given to nonmathematical fields — I’m not really seeing one.

This is particularly true when it comes to her statement that math curricula “emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi” makes math seem too Greek and European. To me, it seems like the decision about what to teach in mathematics should be based solely on the standard of what will be most important for students to learn in order to succeed.

There’s one thing about Gutierrez’s work, however, that I can totally get down with: the idea that math-y type people shouldn’t automatically be seen as being smarter than non-math-y type people. After all, I was an English major; I still add and subtract using my fingers, but that doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t think I’m a genius.

If anything should be immune to the machinations of social justice warriors, it should be math.

Two plus two will always equal four, after all. Math is the ultimate meritocracy. It doesn’t care who you are or what your background is, math is the same for everyone.

Yet, that’s apparently not what some people think. From Campus Reform:

A math education professor at the University of Illinois argued in a newly published book that algebraic and geometry skills perpetuate “unearned privilege” among whites.

Rochelle Gutierrez, a professor at the University of Illinois, made the claim in a new anthology for math teachers, arguing that teachers must be aware of the “politics that mathematics brings” in society.

“On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White,” Gutierrez argued.

Gutierrez also worries that algebra and geometry perpetuate privilege, fretting that “curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.”

Math also helps actively perpetuate white privilege too, since the way our economy places a premium on math skills gives math a form of “unearned privilege” for math professors, who are disproportionately white.

“Are we really that smart just because we do mathematics?” she asks, further wondering why math professors get more research grants than “social studies or English” professors.

Well, I’d say some math professors are smarter than other math professors. That’s a big fat “Yes” right now. Gutierrez is pushing for social justice in math, which is probably one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard from the social justice zealots — and that’s one hell of a high bar to clear. CONTINUE AT SITE