Students call for professor at University of Southern Maine to be replaced after teaching that there are only two sexes

The more I hear about gender identities, the more I see it as a negative force. Used as a tool to cancel people, berate them for ‘not conforming to MY ideology of the world’, getting people sacked.

I am increasingly feeling f&^% gender!

What on earth is it anyway? An abstract concept, a play thing for people with less serious issues. It doesn’t seem to any good at all. If an individual likes to play around with words and concepts - fine. But it’s NEVER about that is it - it HAS to validated, it has to have others conform to it, even though it’s not even real.

Why do these people think it’s the job of other humans to validate them?

I have never expected ever other human being to validate every part of my deeply held identities. Just as well, as these have evolved over time.

Becoming a secure human being involves developing a stable core of self. You can’t have that if you rely on others to ‘validate you’ ( whatever that means. It appears to mean bullying others into lying to you tbh).

Your self belief has to come from security within yourself.

And why are grown adults pandering to the bullying youth cult?

It describes a demand from "nearly 2 dozen students" that their professor be replaced and says that the one who originally stood with the professor and reality apologised to the rest at the "facilitated restorative justice meeting". We know how these purity spirals work.

There are multiple events though. It's possible only 4 students walked out at the time but then most of the other students either decided or were pressured to join in with the original 4.

twitter.com/Elizabeth_Curti/status/1576631738092367872

"This is WILDLY inaccurate. Only 4 students walked out and the class was dismissed by the professor. Get your facts straight."

Obviously you can't trust everything you read on Twitter, but if it's true, it does make me feel a bit better about the situation.

It's been a couple of days though, have there been any developments.

Jerry Coyne, in his article linked in the OP, says this:

The Channel 23 piece also implies that something has been done to placate the students:

Two students in the class say they’ve reached a solution with USM that all the students are satisfied with, though they’re not releasing details.

I don’t know what that solution is, but it’s not one that I think biologists (or true liberals) would like. It has to involve penalizing the professor in some way: either through making her apology, allowing the students to avoid her class but still get credit, or something else.

They may be worried about lawsuits if they expel they/them. I'm sure the ACLU'll be waiting to charge in. They should call their bluff, let them boycott the class and fail the course.

Yes I think that's the best course of action.

well, quite!

Nonetheless, some extremely insistent people are claiming to have one which is fine (in the way that a personal religious faith is fine) but we clearly can’t organise society around it.

Imagine all the extra toilets!

There are infinite gender identities!

Although the biggest category must surely be 'none'? Who needs or wants one?

Fail the course. An you imaging the wailing and pooing of pants (probably in public) about this? Tiger moms and dads threatening to sue the unis because their little baba’s civil rights have been attacked?

what a mess.

They may be worried about lawsuits if they expel they/them. I'm sure the ACLU'll be waiting to charge in. They should call their bluff, let them boycott the class and fail the course.

It's been a couple of days though, have there been any developments.

cant lecturers and serious students call for the twerps to be kicked out of uni/college? They aren’t there to learn, just to ‘live their authentic life’ or whatever nonsense they spout.

@MangyInseam @dropthevipers @Anactor
I guess the point of this thread is that your debate would not be tolerated because it would upset students who would call for your resignation and cancel you. That is the issue.
But also certain things are real and factual. We can all muse away philosophically. But unless we built on reality, we are lost.

It’s a bit of a stretch to leap from the poster saying that the Abrahamic religions think ‘the physical world is in fact real’ to suggesting that they’re disputing the existence of physical reality.

That certainly wasn't my intent.

There are certain philisophical positions, for example, most of the western pagan ones and many eastern religions, that saw the physical world and nature as being a kind of degraded, unstable emanation of what was real and stable. They tended to see the human soul, for example, as being trapped in matter for a time, and thought it was freed from that when the body died. So the material element of the body was not part of our true nature.

That's quite different from the Abrahamic religions which believed that the natural world's physicality was an inherent part of its nature and also a good. They thought that the human soul and physical body were an organic unity, incomplete when either element was missing.

Pretty much all religions and philosophical schools had some kind of explanation for the problems that matter seems to bring with it, death, suffering, vice, and so on, as these phenomena were seen to require explanation, but seeing the problem as matter itself wasn't the explanation the Abrahamic religions took.

Yes, I agree that it says that. I just don’t agree with what it says.

All Abrahamic religions don’t have a profound mistrust of the physical body. There’s an ascetic strain in Christian monasticism, which the writer seems to be over-generalising to to both the wider Christian experience and the other Abrahamic religions.

I think there’s also a couple of minority Jewish traditions - but the emphasis is on ‘minority’. It’s not a mainstream view; we’re talking about a religion that has a prayer suitable for going to the loo - in which you give thanks that everything’s working!

Declaring that we are animals among other animals is simply the mirror image of elevating the soul over our material reality. The students in the original post insist that their gender-souls trump mere biology.

But if you go too far in the other direction, you end up with ‘uterus-havers’ and ‘people who bleed’. We are more than simple animals, because we’re capable of seeing beyond our biological roles. Because we’re capable of doing that, we are capable of recognising where the role-constraints are social, not biological.

And we can also see where the constraints are biological - which brings us back to the teacher, telling the students that the number of genders/sexes is two. That’s a material constraint. The students need to know that.

You seemed to be disputing the existence of physical reality, which is a bit of a stretch for most people

I don't even know how to pronounce Icke.

I did study ancient philosophy during the early Christian period, at university. And the musings in that article just don't reflect a very clear understanding of how they conceived of the physical body.

Just because something sounds right doesn't mean it's correct. That's as true of the history of philosophy or theology as much as science.

These students who think it’s ‘literal violence’ to speak biological facts are going to be parents at some point soon (if they aren’t in denial of biological reproduction that is) … wtf is happening and what will they teach their children?!

It’s the Gnostic heresy that has the aversion to sex and bodily reality. Gnosticism rears its ugly little head in almost every generation.

In gnostic type beliefs, you are ‘saved’ by a knowledge of the ‘hidden’ divinity, and you can only access the ‘true’ divine through mystic insight that’s inaccessible to the ‘unenlightened’.

Sounds remarkably like being ‘saved’ by the knowledge of your ‘hidden’ gender and only being able to access your ‘true’ self through your amazing insight. Which is obviously inaccessible to us unenlightened types. We’re just not esoteric enough.

Of the Abrahamic religions, Christianity was the first to offer women a lifestyle that didn’t necessarily involve getting married. Not so much an aversion to sex and bodily reality, more a recognition that it can be slightly difficult to concentrate on God while dealing with ten dc, a dh and assorted df.

You are David Icke and I claim my five pounds.

No, it's a pretty basic misunderstanding of how the Abrahamic religions think about the material world. Which is characterized, unlike many of the eastern religions or western pagan religions, as thinking the physical world is in fact real, that it's physicality is part of it's nature, and that it is intrinsically good.

It's just wrong at a basic level.