What is this, Gender Pronoun Day?

Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto, is railing against “political correctness”, generally a good sign that we’re dealing with a right-wing wackaloon, depending on what has gotten them wound up. In this case, it’s safe to say he’s an outraged wingnut, because this is what has got him upset:

Gender identity is defined by the Ontario Human Rights Commission as “each person’s internal and individual experience of gender. It is their sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum.” The commission defines gender expression as “how a person publicly presents their gender,” which can include behaviour and outward appearance such as dress, hair, make-up, body language and voice, as well as a person’s name and the pronouns they use.

Yes? Seems like plain old ordinary common sense to me — gender is complicated and messy, and a matter of personal experience as well as biology. All I should care about is how a person presents themselves, and I should respect that.

But no, not to Jordan Peterson! This is unadulterated crazy talk.

Peterson is critical of these terms and their definitions as outlined by the commission, and compares the changes Bill C-16 would bring about to the policing of expression in “totalitarian and authoritarian political states.”

I think he’s got it backwards. Demanding that individuals conform to one of only two gender roles is the totalitarian/authoritarian position.

He also argues against the existence of non-binary gender identities, or those that are not exclusively masculine or feminine, saying “I don’t think there’s any evidence for it.”

By the way, he’s a professor of clinical psychology.

You could try typing evidence of non-binary gender identities into Google Scholar and see what comes up. Do you think it might be a blank page? It isn’t.

Peterson said that if a student asked him to be referred to by a non-binary pronoun, he would not recognize their request: “I don’t recognize another person’s right to determine what pronouns I use to address them. I won’t do it.”

Amazing. Why? So it would be OK for me to address Jordan Peterson as “she” or “her”? He seems to be saying the subject of a reference is not to be allowed any say in how they are addressed. I also wonder if he’s one of those professors who insist that students address them as “Professor” or “Doctor”.

It’s common courtesy to ask how someone wishes to be addressed, and especially in a formal relationship, to respect that. There’s nothing wrong with a professor insisting that they be addressed by title, or by first name — and students should respect that convention. Would it be OK if, against his wishes, I addressed Jordie-boy as “Maximum Sphincter Peterson” in the classroom?

Peterson told the National Post that he decided to make the video and go public with his views after receiving a memo from university HR outlining new mandatory anti-racist and anti-bias training. “That disturbs me because if someone asked me to take anti-bias training, I think I am agreeing that I am sufficiently racist or biased to need training,” he said in an interview.

Yes, Maximum Sphincter Peterson. You are sufficiently biased to need training. We all are. I have a terrible habit of calling an awful person a “sphincter”, and I could probably do with a little conversation about how it makes others feel.

My little university is hosting the Minnesota Out! Campus Conference this year — and it’s looking like a very well organized and busy event.

MOCC 2016 is hosted by the University of Minnesota Morris!

MOCC is a premier opportunity for students, staff, faculty, alumni, and community members from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the surrounding areas to discuss issues facing lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex , asexual, and two spirit persons (LGBTQIA2S+) on college and university campuses and in the greater community

You’re invited this November 11-13, 2016 to join the University of Minnesota Morris for MOCC 2016. This year’s theme is “Connecting to Our Roots: Where We’re From and Where We’re Going.”

By inviting leaders from across the state to our community we hope to encourage a conversation on discussing how we can best support LGBTQIA2S+ communities in the face of numerous challenges and limited resources. In places such as Morris, opportunities to host events such as MOCC are few and far between. And, as such, hosting this conference means a great deal to us! We are proud of the work we have accomplished and hope to use this conference as a catalyst to create even greater change at our small campus and the community surrounding it.

I hope there’s good attendance — we need more people to come on out to our little town on the prairie to see that rural America can be open and tolerant and welcoming.

This is an amazing response. VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates) reviewed a young-adult book and flagged it as “recommended for mature junior and senior high readers” because it used naughty language and one of the main characters was described as bisexual. Not that it described sexual activity explicitly, but simply that the character was stated to be bisexual.

Horrors. Can’t have young people discovering that sexuality isn’t a simple binary switch.

Just to make it even more fun, the review was published around the time of Bisexual Awareness Week. So readers called out the magazine for their inappropriate and thoughtless commentary. Wait until you get a load of how VOYA responded to that.

I’m impressed. That’s a world-class notpology. But it looks like they’ve practiced a lot, because the whole magazine went into a prolonged notpological freakout over the fact that readers criticized them.

This has led me to the SorryWatch blog, which is most entertainingly horrifying. But they also have an excellent post on what makes a good apology, and a fun post on what makes for a bad apology. Both are useful resources.

And I’m stuck in rural Minnesota. You can at least follow the conversation on #WiS4 on Twitter, or read the summaries going up on centerforinquiry.live of the Women in Secularism conference.

I wish I could be there.

It’s not as if Yiannopoulis is contributing anything interesting. But, as Shiv mentions, he’s got a new profile published which throws him softballs. It’s the equivalent of Jimmy Fallon’s Trump interview — it presents a dangerous crackpot as just another goofball, rather than as an inflammatory bomb-thrower.

ThinkProgress protests his presentation as a representative of the LGBT community.

The Out profile of Yiannopoulos represents the peak of this harm. Here is a white supremacist whose entire career has been built on the attention he can get for himself through provocation. His attacks against women, people of color, Muslims, transgender people, and basically anybody who doesn’t like him are as malicious as they come, and he catalyzes his many “alt-right” followers to turn on any target he deems worthy of abuse. This puff piece — complete with a cutesy clown photoshoot — makes light of Yiannopoulos’s trolling while simultaneously providing him a pedestal to further extend his brand of hatred. Indeed, he does so in the profile itself, openly slurring the transgender community, which Out published without any apparent concern.

Amanda Marcotte was at the photo shoot and took the opportunity to grill him on his views. He likes to claim that he’s just a troll who is trying to get a response, but Amanda found him to be completely serious about being an anti-feminist, anti-immigrant, far right wing bigot.

Milo Yiannopolous is not playing around. He is utterly sincere about his far-right views.

He is sincere enough that he lectured me for about 15 minutes and was so caught up in the moment that he seemingly forgot that he was half naked while wearing a wig and makeup. He was sincere enough to get genuinely wound up during this time.

Yiannopolous was so sincere that when the Salon team shut off the cameras so as to move to another vantage point, he demanded that I leave the room, refused to answer any more questions and called me a “bitch.”

Well, now we know how to get under his skin: actually talk about what he really believes.

It’s a brutal question. Suddenly, my whole life has become a lie because Terry Gross asked a penetrating question of a gay soccer player, Abby Wambach.

So I want to ask you more about like comprehending your sexuality, your sexual orientation. You’d had a boyfriend in high school. You went to the prom together. You were considered, like, the jock couple of Rochester, New York. Was it helpful on Long Island to have had a boyfriend, to have had sex with a boy, so that you could know with more certainty, “no, I love women?”

Dang, Ms Gross, you made me realize…I went through all of high school (and my life since high school) not even dating any boys, let alone having sex with them. With that huge lack of experience, how can I possibly know whether I’m sexually attracted to women, especially my wife? I’m supposed to be all about prioritizing empirical research, and apparently desire has to be evaluated like a taste test, and I have to sample all the varieties before I can truly love someone.

There is a mysterious shadow work force that is undermining good Americans in their quest for jobs.

The only solutions I can think of are to build walls and deport them.

We’ve got know-nothings railing about trigger warnings, which they don’t understand, and safe spaces, which they also get wrong, but what about no-platforming, in which an institution bows to pressure and denies a speaker a place to say their piece? I’m generally sympathetic to their concerns — we should be encouraging diverse views — but let’s think it through. Sometimes, maybe, there is no virtue in asking someone to present their ideas.

Having unusual (or frighteningly mainstream) ideas does not justify getting paid. You might not warrant censorship, but you are also not entitled to a $100,000 speaking fee. That one is easy.

But what about this? Brock Turner, the guy who raped an unconscious woman and got off with a 3 month jail sentence because he was a Stanford athlete, wants to do a speaking tour of college campuses, warning them of the dangers of alcohol. I am just fine with a university telling a convicted sex offender “Hell, no, we’re not going to bring you here to blame your crimes on alcohol”. He might even get invitations to speak, but it won’t because he’s presenting a valuable lesson — he’ll only be invited by assholes who want to troll feminists on campus, all under the guise of the absolute purity of untrammeled free speech.

So where do you draw the line between free speech and abuse of free speech?

I get asked that question all the time, since I’m at a liberal arts college, and face it, the women are taking over. So here’s an article wondering about those poor suffering men.

“I actually feel like women are taking over the world,” says Ishwar Chhikara, a 36-year-old investment officer at an international development bank, citing statistics showing more women now have college degrees in the US than men. He says this laughing, but with no audible irony.

“I feel bad for men, especially those who don’t go to school, or study. The whole system is changing drastically with the coming of the information age. It’s not about strength anymore, it’s about the brains.”

While muscles at the center of an economy made the physically stronger sex have more power, Chhikara isn’t so convinced with the switch-up.

“It is a positive thing from a woman’s perspective, from a man’s perspective I don’t know.”

The statistics are true, and I consider them kind of inevitable. Here’s my explanation: as we generally improve opportunities, the people who have historically had less than satisfactory outcomes are more eager to improve their situation, and are more likely to take advantage of those opportunities. The groups that have historically had an advantage are slower to recognize that they need to work to keep up, and in fact may resent that they have to jump through a hoop to earn what they used to be simply given. So the current situation is actually a consequence of past inequities and men’s sense of entitlement.

There’s another factor, too: the social stigma of feminization. Look at what happens to occupations associated with “women’s work”, like nursing and teaching. They get paid less, and men actively avoid taking up the occupation. I worry that some of that is happening to universities, as well — we see, for instance, that liberal arts colleges are particularly attractive to women, so why would a man go there? Too many of them are looking at the performance of those manly athletic teams in order to determine where to go.

You find it hard to believe that a winning football season could influence people’s decisions to make an academic commitment? Look up the Flutie Effect, and be horrified.