Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Thanks for participating peacefully.

She added: “Diversity promotes critical discussions, new understandings and enriches the academic experience. But we may also find ourselves exposed to divergent views and even views we find personally abhorrent.”

Please describe in detail how the fact (or even the idea) that men can’t be women is “personally abhorrent.” Please explain how this is no more than a “divergent view” that must be shouted down. Does not the truth of this simple statement have any bearing at all on the discussion?

The reality of sex is no more a “divergent view” than the existence of rain and sunshine. See how far you get protesting them. I can see how someone heavily invested in the belief that men can be women might find the reality of sex inconvenient, but that inconvenience, however passionately (or violently) expressed, does nothing at all to change the facts of the matter. If this factuality is irrelevent, please let us all know when you’ll be congratulating peaceful protests against gravity and the inability of two solid objects occupying the same space simultaneously. For some, these facts could very well be as personally abhorrent (there are more people injured in falls than there are trans identified people, and it sure would be handy not to run into walls and trees), though you’re less likely to get a crowd of people gathering to bully others into agreeing that they aren’t just the consequences of the laws of material reality. Please explain how the intractably binary nature and immutability of sex, is any different than gravitation and the impenetrability of matter. I’ll be right here, wishing I could float through walls.