A larger spectrum
Nearly two dozen graduate students at the University of Southern Maine are demanding their education professor be replaced after the professor allegedly said only two biological sexes exist.
“Allegedly.” The professor allegedly said humans don’t have wings.
The students said professor Christy Hammer’s remarks were inaccurate and transphobic.
The students were wrong.
All but one of them walked out, they demanded a “restorative justice” meeting (as if she’d committed an injustice), they got their wish but she refused to lie for them.
Biologists believe there is a larger spectrum to sex than just the male-female binary.
No they don’t. The link is to that SciAm article that SciAm should never have published.
University officials have yet to make a decision on the request, but students say they don’t want to return to class until they get a new instructor.
Waaa. Waaaaaaa. Don’t WANNA go back to class. Wanna new instructor!! One that will lie to us!!!!
“I want her to do some diversity training at least — or just retire,” said student Elizabeth Leibiger, who plans to become a high school English teacher.
And teach high school students that it’s inaccurate and transphobic to say there are two sexes.
One student wasn’t in class that day, a “non-binary” student who “uses the pronoun they.” “They” learned about the crime from other students.
When Leibiger arrived for the next class, on Sept. 14, they immediately brought up the discussion again.
“I asked [Hammer] how many sexes there were,” Leibiger said. “She said, ‘Two.’ I felt under personal attack.”
There’s the narcissism right there. Reality is a personal attack. Naming reality is a personal attack. Not participating in the fantasy is a personal attack. Meanwhile, what the stalinist students are doing to the professor is of course not a personal attack at all, it’s restorative justice.
Leibiger then gathered their things and walked out of class because they no longer felt respected.
Leibiger then gathered their things and walked out of class because they spotted an opportunity for extra attention.
“I let her know I didn’t think she was qualified to teach a class about positive learning environments,” Leibiger said. “It’s the ultimate irony.”
Back atcha, punk.
So they all got together in the hall and decided to demand “a facilitated restorative justice meeting with their professor and the single student who agreed with her.” How dare that student agree with her! There are at least 87 sexes, it’s been proven!
“We thought she was just speaking from a place of ignorance, not hate,” Leibiger said.
While also of course thinking they the students were speaking from a place of complete and perfect knowledge, not social contagion and tragic gullibility.
The meeting took place Wednesday, and the sole student who had disagreed reportedly apologized to classmates. But Hammer maintained her position on the binary nature of sex.
“I went in very optimistic, but at the end of the three hour session it felt like we weren’t listened to,” said Lombardi, who plans to teach high school science.
Three fucking hours of being harangued by a pack of delusional fad-embracing Young Adults. Imagine the tedium of it.
Lombardi said he wasn’t sure if he and his classmates would show up to the next scheduled class on Oct. 5 if university administrators didn’t agree to replace Hammer. But he’s hoping it will happen.
“Knowing in my heart, as a teacher, that I always want to have my ears open to what my students are saying, and then not have that reciprocated — it was very frustrating,” Lombardi said.
Yes so frustrating to be unable to bully their professor into teaching a stupid lie. I hope the university tells them to go swim across the Atlantic.
Oh, Goddess, I teach there! I thought I would be spared the horrors of TRA up here in remote Maine.
I was wrong.
Please don’t let it come up in my creative writing class….
Oh no!!
Sorry about the shocker.
I’m practicing my responses.
TRA: How many genders are there!
Me: As many as I think there are.
TRA: How many do you think there are!
Me: None of your goddamned business.
Maybe they should start identifying as lemmings. Lemmings have five sexes, or, more accurately five karyotypes, of which one is normal XX female, one is normal XY male, and the others are anatomically female and breed as female, but have weird karyotypes. A consequence of this is that many more newborn lemmings are female than male.
Anyway, thank goddess that I’m too old to have to worry about this nonsense in class. It hasn’t gone nearly as far in France as it has in Anglophonia, but it will come, as the French eventually adopt all the good things that come from the USA. When I was at the University of Birmingham (England, not Alabama) I used to have a discussion with final-year students, three at a time, on evolutionary biochemistry, mainly protein evolution. Once, and only once, I had a student who said she was a christian and didn’t believe in evolution. OK, I said, and we continued. She didn’t rush out shouting, and she didn’t alert the authorities, but just continued to participate. However, that was in about 1975; it might be different today.
Reminds me of all those old stories I’d hear of Kids from creationist backgrounds going of to uni to study something biology related and having a meltdown when evolution was brought up. Only this time the creationists are the majority and have the ear of the university administrators. I’ve been asking myself recently if this is the worst pseudoscience to go mainstream in my lifetime and I think it might be, because it’s corrosive to one of the most fundamental facts about humans as a species, something that effects everyday life in the here and now. Climate change denial will probably be worse in the long run, but Transgenderism just seems so much stupider.
Cool. You all fail.
If it’s passed the Drop/Add period they pay full tuition for it, of course.
What puzzles me is this “non-binary” they student. Non-binary isn’t a biological sex, it’s a (stupid) identity that is about gender independent of sex. So, no, THEY wasn’t being denied their specialness. Their biology is independent, their sex is independent.
Gender ideology confuses, perhaps deliberately, so that even its most ardent believers don’t know that the hell it actually is. Kind of like the Catholic Mysteries. It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand it as long as you have faith.
The most sinister part of all.
Except, possibly, for:
Mike Haubrich #6
Once again we see that TRAs – in good Orwellian fashion – are the most eager to conflate the categories that they themselves imposed on the rest of us. You know, the ones they have been telling everybody else not to conflate.
Bjarte:
Indeed. Without distinct categories, there’s nothing to conflate. They had to introduce the distinction in order to blur it.
There’s no “perhaps” about it, from what I can see. It’s deliberate, malicious, and sinister.
But it seems to me like this teacher actually validated “their” identity. If there is no binary, then non-binary is totally meaningless (it is anyway, but in the case of no binary, then everyone is non-binary, then how are you a special “they”?)
I have been called on the carpet for teaching reality, the reality that cars pollute and that agriculture destroys habitat. No one ever demanded I be fired for it, and when my boss hinted that I shouldn’t talk about it at all, I ignored him and taught the class I was hired to teach, and I taught it based on science and reality. The students shut up. That is as it should be.
Students should be allowed to speak about honest, legitimate grievances, and profs are in no way always in the right. But to demand firing of someone for saying “there are only two sexes” is to go beyond the boundaries of sanity.
I have a non-binary student in one of my classes. So far, it hasn’t been a problem. The student isn’t in my biology class, so the topic of how many sexes probably won’t come up unless “they” brings it up.
There are 57 varieties of Heinz beans, why not the same for sexes? Otherwise, it’s discrimination; based on something or other.
A: “There are only two sexes, male and female.”
B, C, … Z: “Heresy! Transphobia!”
A: “Name another.”
B, C, … Z: *crickets*
The way these college students – who are extraordinarily privileged people – feel “under personal attack” when they actually encounter people with different beliefs to them is incredible.
Maybe it’s helicopter parents, or these students growing up in social media bubbles where every *single* person spouts the cliches of websites like Pajiba or Refinery29, but they don’t seem to know a university is a place where you will meet people with different ideas.
There is a quote from the anthologist Roger N. Lancaster (about the change in US society in the 1990s) that I think of when I hear about these easily-offended teenagers and twentysomethings:
“The liberal hero of yore— the risk- taking individual, who takes responsibility for his or her own fate and triumphs over adversity— gave way to the aggrieved victim who perpetually recounts unhappy experiences and calls for the punishment of others.”
Leibiger? Is it pronounced in German?