Bound by institutional policies
This made me sit up and take notice.
The point is to say don’t push academics to use “the wrong” pronouns, but if you stop to think more about it your hair stands on end. Universities have institutional policies about something absurdly called “misgendering”? Universities have institutional policies that forbid referring to people by what we’ve all learned from infancy is the natural intuitive unforced way to refer to people? Universities have institutional policies that mandate referring to people by anti-intuitive and inaccurate pronouns? Universities have institutional policies that order employees to perform this entire system of lies?
It takes my breath away.
So much for speaking truth to power. The mighty trans cult won’t allow it.
Yes universities and medium and large businesses do have such policies. I work for a big business that makes us go through training courses on preventing sexual harassment , avoiding racist tendencies, etc. I have noticed that LGBT related course has been introduced a couple of years ago. It has a full page describing misgendering and how to avoid it at work place.
My thinking on these courses is that they may be boring but are necessary to some extent because what we learn from infancy is the natural and intuitive way but not necessarily free from several prejudices such as racism, sexism and homo phobia, etc. In fact the usual conditioning we are subjected to by the environment around us ensures that we are more likely to have such prejudices than not.
Helen, I have to complete these courses every year, too, and my experience is that they are neither helpful or necessary. The people who are racist, sexist, or homophobic at work remain as racist, sexist, and homophobic after going through training, and those of us who have examined our lives and our assumptions are probably equally as unchanged. There is nothing in any of the courses I have had that makes a difference. As for policies, they are only good if they are enforced. My work has policies against sexism, for instance. And we don;t have sexism at work. Why? Because they ignore it. Because women don’t dare come forward. And they know we will not, so they can deny. Now people are coming forward, and they are retaliated against, but the union has not been helpful on that, nor has anyone else. Especially now that trans issues tend to predominate in both the sexism and homophobia training.
As for misgendering? Yeah, sorry. This is, in fact, something we recognize early on that is quite accurate. There are males and there are females, and we know how to tell the difference, other than in some isolated instances (not necessarily ‘intersex’, just people who dress or present in a way that is ambiguous). When a person calls a trans woman a man, they are not misgendering. When they call them a woman, they are misgendering.
Perhaps what Ophelia should have said is that she is astonished for them to have policies that are science-denying, reality-denying, and in violation of academic freedom.
Helen:
All the studies I am aware of show that infnats and toddlers are blithely unaware of racial and even sexual differences, and ‘have’ to be taught them. (There are jokes about their ignorance on sex.)
But to teach children that people born male and with male sexual apparatus can be female if they say they are is to take the first step down the road that leads to the flat Earth and beyond, to the Wonderland world of Lewis Carroll, where anything goes.
Definitions and everyday categories are not arbitrary, which I suggest is the reason why dictionaries and encyclopaedias exist.
Such courses as the one you attended will be boring as long as the audience is required by their employer to sit there and take in the currently fashionable make-believe bullshit as it is served up to it by the barrow load. If the emperor is stark naked, somebody should point that out. Otherwise, this stuff leads not just to men using womens’ restrooms, but in time, it will wend its merry way right back to the Dark Ages.
See this is why I included the sentence “Universities have institutional policies that mandate referring to people by anti-intuitive and inaccurate pronouns?” They’re anti-intuitive AND inaccurate. I realize that some intuitions are racist or sexist or homophobic, in fact I catch myself having them often, and figuratively smack myself in the head for them. But the intuitive recognition of female people and male people isn’t in that category. My point in saying intuitive as well as inaccurate is that it’s extremely hard to override the recognition of female or male, so it adds to the freakish incomprehensible issue of universities mandating bespoke pronouns and all the rest of it.
Ophelia,
I am sorry I missed that subtle finer point. On re reading and re thinking, I am beginning to realize that this issue (about trans gender people) may be different from other issues in this category.
Not just universities. I’m a humble clerk in Seattle, and our company requires “gender neutral” speech. My manager told me many who work there are “genderqueer”, though in fact few are. HR and some of my colleagues claim that misgendering leads to suicide among the Trans. Fortunately, it’s usually not difficult to maneuver around the requirements, but sometimes not. I detest it, but I must feed myself.
What is sad beyond this is that sooner or later it will get the attention of righties, who will bring their manure to the table.
No need to be sorry, Helen! Yes, I think this issue is very different – I think it rides on the coattails of the genuine ones, sexism and racism and so on. It imitates the vocabulary and arguments but the content is radically different.
“The targeting of us – the desire to get us disciplined or sacked for breaking those policies – is real.” – Jon Pike is a lecturer at the Open University, where Jo Phoenix, Professor of Criminology, has been harassed to the point where she is taking the university to an employment tribunal for constructive dismissal.
She has said: ‘It has been a few months now since me and Jon Pike launched the Gender Critical Research Network at The Open University. Immediately after, there was a concerted and targeted campaign, launched by staff and students of the OU, to get the network shut down. Right now, there is an open public letter on google docs organised by OU academic staff and with over 360 OU staff or Postgraduate signatories accusing the Gender Critical Research Network (and by extension its members) of being transphobic.’ [More]
https://jophoenix.substack.com/p/on-launching-the-open-university
Last week Jo resigned her post. In January she is taking up a new post as Professor of Criminology at Reading University.
Prejudices against race, sex, or homosexuality may indeed be taught to us from infancy (in which case there is nothing “natural” or “intuitive” about them), but our ability to tell male from female in our own species is a product of millions of years of evolution. Is recognizing that someone who is male is male a “prejudice?” Is referring to a male individual as “he” or “him” bigotry? Demanding the use of particular pronouns is a demand to espouse and partake in what amounts to a religious belief. It is not simply a that an individual believes in the Actual Presence in the Eucharist, or that an individual refuses to partake in the eating of pork, or the drinking of alcohol. Such beliefs, held personally, would have no impact on fellow employees. This changes with insistence that “TWAW.” “Misgendering” is to be punished. You might not believe in “gender”, but they will force you to ms-sex someone. The enforcement of pronoun use in the workplace, pronoun use that runs counter to reality, and the “natural intuitive way,” is equivalent a demand that unbelievers are forced to take the Body and Blood, that theyares not allowed to eat pork and drink alcohol. The demand for “validation” and “affirmation” is integral to this personal belief. To extract it from others is to compel them to validate an untruth, to affirm a lie. Why is it that the power of the employer is wielded fin favour of the personal belief of the “trans” employee, against the beliefs of those who are unconvinced that there is any such thing as “gender identity?”
There is a further complication in this with regards to sexual discrimination. Trans identified males are happy enough to conflate their “gender identity” with sex when it comes to taking advantage of positions and opportunities that have been set aside for women. At least one trans activist has said that a board that is supposed to be 50% women would be fulfiling its mandate if all those positions reserved for women were taken by trans “women.” Strange how the obvious counter-example of Rachel Dolezal is somehow ruled out of bounds in these discussions.
I was required to take “diversity training” by my firm, which included an exam at the end. I was told that I was required to adhere to the teaching in the course in order to be employed, and that included getting a passing grade on the exam.
Needless to say, the training and the exam hammered in the full menu of identity politics, including the horrors of “misgendering”. I easily passed the exam, because I really don’t care about some stupid thing that was probably mandated by their insurance agency. However, it was definitely mandated, and is official policy that is now included in the employee handbook.
I just ran across this First Amendment argument, and found it compelling. Requiring a person to state their belief in the invisible gender soul is compelled religious practice. Our government isn’t allowed to establish that.
I don’t know if this analysis has come to trial elsewhere, but the First Amendment argument was made by Prof. Nicholas Meriwether against Shawnee State University, and the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found it convincing.
It’s hard to find reporting on this that isn’t either breathlessly snarky or red-faced and jubilant, but here are a couple fairly dry descriptions:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/29/us/ohio-professor-transgender-appeals-trnd/index.html
https://adflegal.org/press-release/6th-circuit-upholds-first-amendment-rights-shawnee-state-professor
If I understand it right, this appeal only cleared the way for Meriwether to continue suing the university. I can’t figure out if a further suit is ongoing. If it is, it’s probably the ADF that’s supporting it, as it did the first one and a similar suit in Virginia:
https://apnews.com/article/dc-wire-religion-education-4236e2b1ce163e97c287263aeed99c19
I’ll be interested to see if this argument has legs in the US legal system. If it does, we’ll probably find the ADF at the table. Yes, politics makes strange bedfellows: the same organization also supports forced birth and opposes vaccine mandates.
Papito, yes it is compelling. I think that for it to work, instead of ‘compelled ideological conformity’ it should rather be opposed to compelled religious belief or simply compelled speech. The reason being is that the US constitution itself is a form of compelled ideology, complete with penalties for non conformity, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The trick would be to make the argument such that the trans ideology would be categorized unquestionably and considered widely as rather a religious belief, which is an obvious violation of the first amendment, and/or that the compelled speech that the trans ideology insists on could be shown to violate the first amendment, which might be less problematic.