It’s just not something you say out loud
More credulous bilge pours out of people at the University of Southern Maine:
USM grad students in Professor Christy Hammer’s class say recent discussions on social gender and biological sex identifications got heated when Hammer told the class only two biological sexes exist, male and female.
All but one student walked out of class, feeling the professor’s comments were a personal attack on trans, non-binary and intersex students.
An utterly basic biological fact was interpreted as a “personal attack” on people who share the mass delusion that they can soar free of that basic biological fact.
“I believe that everyone should be accepted based on their identity,” [student Liv] Petersen said. “And I think the professor was in the wrong for invalidating her own students.”
In other words “everyone should be accepted” as whatever they claim they are, no matter how absurd, and people who pay attention to reality are in the wrong for “invalidating” such fantasies, even teachers in classrooms – in fact especially teachers in classrooms, because they’re supposed to get things right. In short the righteous students want their professor punished or removed for teaching reality instead of fantasy.
“It’s just not something you say out loud, especially with the current environment and stuff like that,” USM student Jalen Charles said. “It’s something you should really keep to yourself.”
Kind of like France under the Occupation, yeah? Keep your head down and above all don’t say anything.
Just something you don’t say aloud. I remember being told that. You know, like not to say, “I don’t believe in God.”
What little shits.
It’s sort of helpful (in a way) for them to be forcing the issue this way. Because the sooner it is confronted the sooner it is exposed and the sooner it evaporates.
It will be too bad for everyone who mutilated themselves for the cult but subsequently there will be a lot less people destroying their lives for a delusion or a fetish.
Maybe if more people were familiar with narcissistic rage, they’d recognize this kind of identity-preserving tantrum as exactly that.
Helen Joyce did a lengthy interview with Jordan Peterson in which they discuss these outbursts and how to respond to them. (The “tl;dr” is, of course, don’t apologize or kowtow.)
OH, Brother. I mentioned last time that I’m an adjunct in writing there. It floors me to hear this is happening at our little school. Must be the Portland campus, because Portland is “gay mecca,” as they say.
I’m girding myself to hold my ground should the issue ever come up.
No, sex is not binary. That’s a straw man (er, person). It’s bi-modal. There are two distinct modes that individuals cluster around. They are called “female” and “male.”
I would have said that sex is binary: male or female. Sex characteristics are bimodal.
A woman with some characteristics that align more with males is not “a little bit male”; she’s female, unequivocally.
Characteristics are how we can discover someone’s sex, but they are not in and of themselves the definition of what that sex is.
Sex is binary. For species in which true hermaphrodites exist, that means “male or female”. (This is a logical or, which is inclusive.) In species in which true hermaphrodites do not occur, that means “male if-and-only-if not female”, which is equivalent to “female if-and-only-if not male”.
As Sackbut said, characteristics do cluster, and they cluster around around binary sex. Bimodal sex would imply many sexes forming two clusters, but there are exactly two sexes.
Sex is binary, but biology is messy.
Indeed. That may be why our building changes custodians so frequently. They don’t want to clean up the lab. (Animal parts are bad enough; we also have skeletons).
In the middle of this essay by Lorenzo Warby (on Helen Dale’s substack) is a neat explanation on why there is no confusion over the number of sexes.
The incompetent falsity of social theory
I included this last paragraph, even though there is some dispute about it. Some evolutionary biologists claim that it reflects a bias in how we observe nature through a human perspective, and that females are not necessarity coy about their own mating imperatives. That aside, the point is correct that Warby makes. There are only two sexes in humans, primates, mammals, most plants, and all but the oddest slime molds. While there may be exceptions to the distributions that are bimodal in secondary sex characteristics, this does not alter the way that we make more of us.
I also want to say that I’ve gone to more than a few colleges in trying to finish my bachelor’s, and I never experienced the great cabals of leninists forcing social theory into unwitting students who are empty vessels. Either I missed out on all the good stuff, or it’s just not quite the pandemic that some people claim. I was expected to apply my own critical thought, and I learned that I could get a low grade from agreeing with a professor if I hadn’t applied thought while a higher grade could be earned by disagreeing but using critical thought. I don’t doubt that gender studies classes are out their spreading pomo claims on sex, but I don’t know that it’s the prevailing wind on campus.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong here, though.
Mike, there is a big push in the humanities to pushing post modern theory. I struggle with my students on their overview test (yes, these days we have to test over the syllabus and expectations). They will ALWAYS put “true” on the statement “The instructor regards every view as equally correct”. They continue to check true if it’s the fifth time they’ve taken it, and they’ve gotten it wrong every time. They simply can’t imagine anything else anymore, because they’ve been encouraged toward post modern thinking.
Our entire educational system is wrapped up in that idea. Somehow it’s seen as essential to be inclusive of people from other cultures, people from other socioeconomic classes…there can’t be any truth.
That was the standpoint of my instructors in my writing program. There is no truth, they proclaim, with straight faces, because they believe it. So if someone chooses to write a play where Mrs. Charles Darwin has an affair with Jesus, who are we to say it might deviate just a little bit from biographical reality? No, because if someone thinks it, it’s as true as all the claims we compile evidence for and detail the methods of collecting that evidence.
Meanwhile, as our administrators push us in this direction (and our science teachers resist fiercely, for which I am seriously glad), the requirement to teach critical thinking remains part of our curriculum. Very few seem to see the contradiction.
I was hoping you’d respond, because my experience is not evidence. It’s just my experience.