There’s a petition we can sign in support of the University of Southern Maine professor under attack for saying there are only two sexes. I just signed it.
There’s a conversation about the effort to get her fired at Why Evolution is True.
There’s a petition we can sign in support of the University of Southern Maine professor under attack for saying there are only two sexes. I just signed it.
There’s a conversation about the effort to get her fired at Why Evolution is True.
Comments
20 responses to “Large gametes, small gametes”
Here’s something hilarious for you:
I have taught at USM as an adjunct writing instructor for 30 years. I don’t teach in Portland much as I live in a rural area, but I know the campus well.
I have heard nothing–Not. One. Thing.–about this incident in either the local news or on campus.
In fact, this website is the SOLE reason I even know about this case!
What. The. Fuck.
Golly. I’m guessing there’s not a lot of solidarity among the faculty then?
What.The.Fuck indeed.
This just got more hilarious–and thank you for the WEIT which pointed it out to me:
“During the session at Bailey Hall on the Gorham campus, a free-for-all discussion erupted over both social gender and biological sex identifications, with one student and Hammer saying they believed only male and female biological sexes exist.”
Uh, er… that is the campus where I teach. That is the very building I teach in.
I’m immediately headed over to sign that petition…
You are welcome. Venceremos!
There’s more at WEIT here, regarding the professor’s “punishment.”
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/10/05/maine-professor-demonized-for-teaching-that-there-are-only-two-human-sexes-penalized/
The professor herself came into comments:
“I’m guessing there’s not a lot of solidarity among the faculty then?”
That’s the life of the adjunct. You barely exist. USM nearly failed about six-seven years ago, and since covid the campus is like a ghost town. I go in, teach my classes, and leave, sometimes without even seeing other faculty.
At least I don’t have to attend department meetings.
Mike, as full time faculty, I can attest to that. I teach in a small rural community college, and we use adjuncts. I’ve never met them (except one, who holds a full time staff position as well). There has been much discussion about whether adjunct faculty can be part of the union; in our bylaws, the answer is yes. None of them join, but it’s possible none of them know they can.
There is a lot that happens on my campus that I don’t know about, even though some of it is important. Faculty are so nervous about the administration, they don’t talk about much, afraid someone will find out. We do have some on our faculty who are willing to spy for administration; I know who one of them is, but it isn’t someone I interact with or could identify if I saw him, so I can safely say he isn’t hearing anything from me.
Did anyone else spot Nick Matzke from NCSE showing up in the comments to offer support? I’ve been saying “it’s creationism all over again” for ages, and now I feel vindicated.
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/10/01/professor-in-maine-demonized-for-teaching-that-humans-have-two-sexes-students-walk-out-and-demand-her-suspension/#comment-2016326
My comment when signing the petition:
iknklast, pt has a union at USM. That’s partly why I have stayed there over 30 years. Health ins., 403(b), 2-year contracts. I’m free to farm, write, live pretty independently from the horrors of faculty politics. After I received my MA, I decided an English PhD was not a worthy goal for me. In another life, I would be a geologist.
I wonder what accountability should look like for these students? If I were the administration, I would hold the students — GRADUATE students ffs! — accountable by saying, “accept the truth or fail the course.”
Signed the petition also, btw, but somehow missed out on the comment window.
maddog1129
If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you can still comment :)
maddog1129:
This reminds me of three Mafiosi walking into some terrified Italian-American’s shop.
The leader says “Nice place you got here”. (pushes jar on the floor, where it smashes). “Be a real shame if something happened to it.”
Nobody seems to believe in academic freedom anymore in the US. Nobody seems to respect the right of academics to teach ideas anymore.
Piglet @ 8 – I did, yes. Good to see!
As usual, Sastra nails it at WEIT:
Sastra’s comment
Signed, with this comment:
@Mike:
I have a somewhat different read on the situation than Sastra does. Even in the midst of our current anti-feminist backlash, few left-leaning college students would endorse the idea that a man is a traditionally masculine person and a woman is a traditionally feminine person, while deviation from gender norms is the sole province of the so-called “gender queer.” Surely they have all encountered many individuals, both among their peers and their elders, who don’t claim a genderspecial identity but nonetheless depart from gender norms: blunt, assertive women and soft-spoken, sensitive men; outdoorsy women and artsy men; frumpy women and frou-frou men. Conversely, they surely also realize that women and men who fit the Barbie/G.I. Joe model of absolute gender conformity are in fact few and far between.
When the professor stated that there are only two biological sexes, the unforgivable heresy that the students heard uttered was very simply this: identity does not dictate reality. And what the particularly aggrieved nonbinary student heard was this: you are female.
@As The Smoke Rises Upwards;
Yes, they know that self-identified men and women don’t all fit into stereotypes. They also know that having only two sexes means that men and women are being forced into “narrow, restrictive boxes.” There’s that fundamental back and forth confusion between sex and gender: “They’re not the same thing … and now I’m going to talk about gender as if I’m really talking about sex and then I’ll say things about sex that only make sense if I’m talking about gender.”
@ Sastra:
Respectfully, I don’t quite agree. I interact extensively with a number of young adults who are in all likelihood fairly similar to the witch-hunting students of USM, and my take is that when someone says “there are only two sexes,” what they hear is a direct challenge to identitarian ideology in general and trans ideology in particular.
The person who asserts the existence of two and only two human sexes asserts that there is some fundamental property of the individual that is determined by impersonal forces beyond that individual’s control, a property inamenable to alteration or redefinition. One is male or female whether or not one wishes to be. Nonbinary identities are summarily invalidated: Moss may believe that xe is neither male nor female, but Moss is mistaken in xir belief; like it or not, xe is in fact one sex or the other. Worse yet, a shot is fired across the bow of binary trans identities. If sex is real, chances are it’s also immutable, in which case trans women are male, in which case (thoughtcrime of thoughtcrimes) they may in fact just be men.
I don’t believe that the woke posse interpret the statement that there are only two sexes as a call to enforce traditional gender roles, although to a degree this varies according to context. If a far-right Baptist preacher thunders from the pulpit that there are only two sexes, then the woke posse will (correctly) hear something along the lines of “women are meant to submit and men are meant to lead” lurking just behind that utterance. But they will become just as righteously angry—in fact, probably even angrier—if the statement that there are only two sexes comes from someone who rejects the culturally conservative vision of gender roles.
Picture this: a magnificently butch lesbian rides onto the main quad of a college campus, wearing a studded leather jacket over an oil-stained mechanic’s jumpsuit, flying a rainbow flag and a “Death to Patriarchy” banner from the back of her Harley Davidson. “Men and women can do any job, have any personality, love whoever they want, live however they want,” she announces to the assembled students.”Sex-based stereotypes are backwards bullshit; your sex doesn’t say anything about who you are as a person, just like your height or your eye color doesn’t say anything about who you are as a person. But biological sex is real, and humans come in two and only two unchangeable sexes.”
This speech will go over like the proverbial lead balloon. Granted, many of the students will be standing there wondering what the hell is going on, but the social justice warriors? The trans allies? They’ll be gnashing their teeth and readying their pitchforks. They’ll be drafting a petition to deplatform hate speech on campus. They’ll be planning a counter protest. And they won’t be doing this because they believe that the hypothetical motorcycle-riding lesbian is trying to force men and women back into narrow, restrictive boxes. They are outraged because she’s saying “sorry, you can’t always choose or change who or what you are”—and this, of course, is an act of utmost cruelty and heresy.
Tl;dr: Nine times out of ten, the people who get rabidly angry about the statement that there are only two sexes are reacting to what they see as an anti-identitarian/anti-trans stance; they know perfectly well that the person who made the statement doesn’t believe that women should be stereotypically feminine and men should be stereotypically masculine.