Progressives are Punishing a Gay Professor for Stating the Obvious

Progressives, drunk on cultural power and sanctimony, steeped in vapid ideology, and patinated in faux-fragility demonstrate that history does, indeed, repeat itself as the political left again become oppressors.

The most recent demonstration of leftist tyranny comes from the University of Washington (UW) where Stuart Reges, an openly homosexual lecturer in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, is being hounded out of his 15-year job by students, colleagues, and administrators who have no understanding of the critical importance of First Amendment protections to a healthy body politic.

The saga began in June of 2018 when Quillette, an online “platform for free ideas,” whose female founders “respect ideas, even dangerous ones” and “believe that free expression and the free exchange of ideas help human societies flourish and progress,” published an article by Reges titled, “Why Women Don’t Code.”

His article, inspired by the firing of James Damore by Google for the offense of writing an inter-office memo on, inter alia, the disparity in numbers between men and women and the absence of intellectual diversity at Google, addressed similar problems within academia, including the enraged responses to his pleas merely to discuss diverse views on diversity.

In this first article for Quillette, Reges established both his academic credibility as well as his bona fides regarding his commitment to fostering a love of computer science in young women. Then he addressed three professionally perilous topics:

• Reges argued there are, broadly speaking, two different approaches to advancing workplace “diversity,” one of which is the “equality agenda” that seeks to remove “artificial barriers.” He calls the other approach the “equity agenda,” which “involves a commitment to righting the wrongs of the past. Political and religious diversity are not on their list because they don’t represent the immutable characteristics previously used to justify discrimination.”

• The equity agenda’s view of “inclusion often demands the exclusion of ideas and opinions.”

• Reges next stated what should be a commonplace observation: men and women are different. Instead, that observation was met with howls of outrage from those who ironically argue that in order to attract more women into the computer science field, the field must change in ways that will attract women—who, they claim from the other side of their mouths—are no different from men.

• Finally, Reges argued—with evidence—that there are complicated reasons for the male-female disparity in the field of computer science, among which are innate inclinations and free choice.

Jordan Peterson, 2018 cultural mega-star, then tweeted about Reges’ article, which put Reges on the radar of the faux-fragile and sanctimonious, including students and colleagues at his own school and in his own department. Since, Reges had a three-year appointment, the intolerant had to wait until December 2019 when his appointment expired to exact revenge, and exact it they did. In another article published January 11, 2020, Reges reported the following:

I was stripped of my primary teaching duties and given a highly unusual one-year probationary appointment. … In the 15 years I have been part of the school, I am the first regular lecturer to be offered less than a three-year extension. … The one-year reappointment is also odd given my faculty rank. I was the first lecturer in the College of Engineering at UW to be promoted to the rank of principal lecturer. The faculty code indicates that the normal period for reappointment for a principal lecturer should be at least three years. The administration had to obtain special permission from the provost to make such a short appointment. It is also perhaps worth noting that I am the only current member of the faculty in the Allen School who has won the Distinguished Teaching Award, which is the highest award given for teaching at UW.

At least as troubling was the response from a group of graduate students who filed a grievance against Reges with the Union of Academic Student Employees and Post Docs at the University of Washington (UAW) and then concocted recommendations that reveal their puerility:

• A relaxation of grading on coding style.

• Allowing students to work together in a group for part of their grade instead of requiring them to complete all graded work individually.

• Training for TAs in inclusion and implicit bias.

• Review of all course materials for inclusiveness. For instance, of a lecture that involves calculating body mass index (BMI) using guidelines from the National Institutes of Health, the report noted that it “seems insensitive to present students with a program that would print out that some of them are ‘obese’ while others are ‘normal.'”

• A reduction in the amount of effort expended pursuing cheating cases by 50 percent even though there has been no reduction in cheating cases.

These graduate students also recommended “that courses incorporate inclusiveness best practices as outlined in an Allen School document,” including these:

• The addition of an indigenous land acknowledgement to the syllabus.

• The use of gender-neutral names like Alex and Jun instead of Alice and Bob.

• The use of names that reflect a variety of cultural backgrounds: Xin, Sergey, Naveena, Tuan, Esteban, Sasha.

• An avoidance of references that depend on cultural knowledge of sports, pop culture, theater, literature, or games.

• The replacement of phrases like “you guys” with “folks” or “y’all.”

• A declaration of instructors’ pronouns and a request for students’ pronoun preferences.

Puerility and Newspeak come to academia.

To illustrate the “mob mentality” among students and administrators, who seem to believe the ends of destroying the career of Reges justify hasty judgments, incuriosity, and deceit, Reges tells the story of an anti-affirmative action campus bake sale he attended:

[T]he UW College Republicans organized an affirmative action bake sale, at which cookies were sold to Asians for $1.50, to whites for $1, and to African Americans and Hispanics for 50 cents. Cookies were free to Native Americans.

I attended the event to see how it was received and ended up having an hour-long conversation with a young woman about race relations on campus. . . .

The Stranger published an article about the event which included photographs of my interactions with the young woman. I was quoted as saying, “I don’t see racism on campus.” … But, as footage of our exchange captured by a local news team later confirmed, what I actually said was “I don’t see rampant racism on campus.” A small but important difference between a denial of ongoing racism and a disagreement about its prevalence.

[T]he day after the article in the Stranger appeared, I received a message from the director of the Allen School which included this:

. . . in my opinion, this is not about freedom of speech, and it’s also not about affirmative action. . . . This is about your lack of sensitivity to minority students and your continued (and almost gleeful) denial of their experiences, which I find extremely regrettable and disappointing coming from somebody of your stature and experience.

[The director] later told me that his judgment was based entirely on the misreported quote. He didn’t ask me what had happened. He didn’t ask if the quote was accurate. He simply concluded that I was insensitive to minority students. How he decided that I was “almost gleeful” is beyond me, but it indicates a reflexive disapproval among some my colleagues since the publication of my Quillette essay.

So far, the oppressors have failed to break or even bend Reges. He has since “joined Heterodox Academy” and “attended the 2019 Heterodox Academy Conference and the 2018 faculty conference for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).” Reges won’t acquiesce to the oppressors because he understands what’s at stake. Perhaps his warning will strengthen the spines of conservative students, teachers, and administrators:

Today, the people on campus who need to worry about expressing their ideas are conservatives and religious people. Now it is gays doing the punishing of anyone who opposes gay marriage, gay adoption, hate speech codes, and civil rights protection for gays. Everything old is new again. I’m once again having private conversations behind closed doors in my office with closeted individuals, but this time they are students, faculty, staff, and alumni who oppose the equity agenda. They are deeply concerned about the university’s direction, but they are also afraid of jeopardizing their current or future job prospects. They also worry about losing friendships and professional relationships. One faculty colleague described it as “mob rule.” … I am concerned that people believe free speech is improving on college campuses when in fact things are getting worse. We have fewer overt examples of speakers being shouted down and disinvited, but now the censorship is going underground. Those who talk to me behind closed doors censor themselves because they know the consequences of speaking up.

If every conservative would speak up, the oppressors would lose.

This article was originally published by our good friends at Salvo Magazine. Check them out and subscribe to this great publication!

In an essay published by the online magazine Quillette titled “‘I Basically Just Made It Up’: Confessions of a Social Constructivist,” Christopher Dummitt, associate professor of Canadian Studies at Trent University, confesses to “making up” his argument in defense of the dubious proposition—now widely accepted in academia as well as the culture at large—that “gender” is a social construct.

The view he promulgated through a book published in 2007 and an article based on his master’s thesis that the differences between males and females that are observed in virtually all cultures throughout history are wholly constructed by culture, he now rejects. He also admits the thinness of his past support for this thesis, which was built on little more than the regnant ideology in academia during the 1990’s when he identified as a “gender historian.”

Dummitt finds especially “disappointing” the embrace of those error-ridden, poorly supported ideas regarding sex differences saying,

My flawed reasoning, and other scholarship using the same defective thinking, now is being taken up by activists and governments to legislate a new moral code of conduct.

While issuing his mea culpa, Dummitt makes the troubling but not surprising claim that he “wasn’t alone. Everyone was (and is) making it up. That’s how the gender-studies field works.”

Dummitt explains the opaque process by which poorly supported gender studies advance and infect culture in consequential ways.

The first step was to exploit “cultural and historical variability” to suggest that superficial cultural and historical differences in, for example, clothing styles for men and women, is conclusive evidence that maleness and femaleness are wholly separate from biology. Dummitt and his ideological confreres viewed (or used) variation across time and history in styles associated with men and women, as proof that not only was “gender” socially constructed but also that “Gender wasn’t binary: It was variable and maybe infinite.”

The second step involved linking gender differences to power differences. Dummitt explains that “power was, and remains, a kind of magical word in academia.” Its magic lies in its use as a kind of ideological shield to thwart all challenges to gender theory dogma. Any dissenter who dares to express support for biological or gender essentialism (i.e., the “belief that males and females are born with distinctively different natures, determined biologically rather than culturally”) is viewed as “making excuses for power. They were apologists for oppression.”

The final step in developing his thesis was to “cherry pick” from the vast reaches of history particular moments that could offer plausible reasons for society to want or need sex role differences that would then be socially constructed. In other words, rather than merely observing the way or ways sexual differences manifested culturally at a specific historical moment, Dummitt saw the historical context as the cause of socially constructed gender differences.

Dummitt now acknowledges this counter-cultural truism:

Of course, it would be possible to look at the same material and come out with entirely plausible alternative explanations…. My research didn’t prove anything either way. I just assumed that gender was a social construct and proceeded on that basis…. Yes, there are variations over the life cycle, and some cultural and historical particularities. But if you didn’t start your research assuming that the small differences must matter greatly, it’s not clear that you would conclude this from the evidence.

Unfortunately, the wholesale cultural adoption of the ideology Dummitt now rejects and which denies the reality and meaning of biological sex will not be easily relinquished even as its sandy foundation is exposed.

This article was originally published by our friends at Salvo Magazine.

The “trans” rebellion against science, nature, and morality is well underway, trampling under its jackbooted stilettos athletic achievement; academic inquiry; physical privacy and safety; speech rights; religious rights; association rights; children’s needs and rights; parental rights; and the bodies of boys, girls, women, and men. “Trans”-cultists want everyone to accept their faith-based assumption that immaterial feelings are more real and more meaningful than objective biological sex. Daily, news stories emerge that attest to the “trans” madness that pursues the impossible: de-sexing the entire the world.

It’s important to bear in mind that in the service of effacing sex, “progressives” manipulate language. “Sex” refers to the objective, biological categories (i.e., male and female) into which humans are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions. “Gender” is no longer synonymous with “sex.” “Gender” now refers to the arbitrary, socially constructed and imposed roles, conventions, interests, traits, and behaviors commonly associated with maleness or femaleness. And “gender identity” is the subjective internal and often fluid sense of being male or female, both, or neither.

The worst manifestations of this “trans” madness pertain to children—often the first victims of pernicious ideologies. One of those manifestations is the growing movement of parents raising their children to be “gender creative.” These parents conceal their children’s sex from the world, and often from close family and even the children themselves. Two of these parents are “Nathan” Levitt and her female partner, both of whom are women who fancy themselves men. These two women use the plural pronoun “they” when referring to their singular child “Zo” whose sex they conceal in order to prevent society from, in their view, imposing socially constructed arbitrary expectations on him or her, which, in their view, is damaging. Absolute autonomy to define even objective material existence is the driving force in their parental decisions.

Levitt, a registered nurse and long-time “trans” advocate, claims that

random people on the street… are incredibly invested in what gender our child is. That’s always the question, “Is that a boy or a girl?” And so often we will say to people, “We don’t know yet.”

Levitt is either being inconsistent or dishonest. Remember, in the socially constructed “trans” dystopia, “gender” and “sex” are different phenomena. Random people on the street are not asking about their child’s “gender” or its “gender identity.” They’re asking about its sex—which Levitt and her partner do, indeed, know. And their baby’s sex is as important as its humanness. In fact, biological sex is arguably the most important objective feature of every human being.

These foolish parents believe they are refraining from imposing an ideology whereas, in reality, they are imposing the belief that biological sex has no intrinsic meaning relative to, well anything, including even bodies. But, as reported by Alex Morris on the website The Cut, avoiding cultural indoctrination takes a lot of indoctrination:

Pronouns are likewise scrambled in books to give equal airtime to female and nonbinary heroes (one family tells me of reading the Harry Potter series using they/them pronouns for Harry). Parents do not shy away from describing body parts, but are quick to let children know that “some people with penises aren’t boys, and some people with vaginas aren’t girls,” as one mom told me. 

Morris reported that parents of “theybies” ask everyone in their social circles to use “they” rather than he or she. Parents of “theybies” ask that daycare workers who change diapers, keep secret the body parts they will see and that purportedly have nothing to do with maleness or femaleness.

Morris continued:

A common fear among gender-open parents, then, is that their family will be isolated, cut off from people for whom interacting would require just too much cognitive work. 

Yes, socially imposing doctrinaire science-denying dogma requires a carload of cognitive work, as well as a morsel of emotional manipulation and a smidgen of social stigmatization. Propagandizing biological sex out of the public consciousness is very hard work.

Writing on the CrossPolitic blog, Ben Zornes writes this about parents of “theybies”:

[T]hese “parents” feign to be “not choosing” to assign their child a gender, thus sparing it from the social pressures of conforming to being a boy or girl. But their not choosing is… itself a choice which their child has no say in. They have made a choice about what sort of gender values they want their child to have. They want their child to value autonomy when it comes to choosing its gender…. But autonomy is the fairy dream of postmodernism….

This child…. is growing up being taught that it can chart its own destiny, be its own sovereign. This humanistic worldview is the broad way which leads to destruction. The only way off this path is through repentance. Repentance, in this case, looks like embracing the sex which God assigned this child in its mother’s womb…. The real sorrow here is that these parents are tying the millstone of their own sexual rebellion to the neck of their precious toddler and sinking it into the sea of the diabolical madness of the GQBLT religion…. Their “not choosing” is a choice to place a vile temptation before this little one at every turn it makes. God will judge, and will not spare. Unless they repent of their own folly, and the folly they’ve introduced to their child.

Forty-one-year-old lesbian, “trans”-activist, and law professor “Dean” Spade offers a glimpse of where “trans”-activists would like to lead culture (To be clear, Spade is a woman who passes as a man and has relations with women.):

We’ve fought against the idea that the presence of uteruses or ovaries or penises should be understood to determine such things as people’s… proper parental roles, proper physical appearance… [and] proper sexual partners…. Our bodies have varying parts, but it is socialization that assigns our body parts gendered meaning.

Spade and everyone else who pretends to believe that the emperor in the peignoir is an empress should listen to biologist Colin Wright who wrote this for Quillette:

[S]ocial justice activists attempt to jump the epistemological shark by claiming that the very notion of biological sex, too, is a social construct. As a biologist, it is hard to understand how anyone could believe something so outlandish. It’s a belief on a par with the belief in a flat Earth.

…

[T]he most prestigious scientific journal in the world, Nature, published an editorial claiming that classifying people’s sex “on the basis of anatomy or genetics should be abandoned” and “has no basis in science” and that “the research and medical community now sees sex as more complex than male and female.” In the Nature article, the motive is stated clearly enough: acknowledging the reality of biological sex will “undermine efforts to reduce discrimination against transgender people and those who do not fall into the binary categories of male or female.” But while there is evidence for the fluidity of sex in many organisms, this is simply not the case in humans. We can acknowledge the existence of very rare cases in humans where sex is ambiguous, but this does not negate the reality that sex in humans is functionally binary. These editorials are nothing more than a form of politically motivated, scientific sophistry.

The formula for each of these articles is straightforward. First, they list a multitude of intersex conditions. Second, they detail the genes, hormones, and complex developmental processes leading to these conditions. And, third and finally, they throw their hands up and insist this complexity means scientists have no clue what sex really is. This is all highly misleading and deceiving (self-deceiving?), since the developmental processes involved in creating any organ are enormously complex, yet almost always produce fully functional end products. Making a hand is complicated too, but the vast majority of us end up with the functional, five-fingered variety.

What these articles leave out is the fact that the final result of sex development in humans are unambiguously male or female over 99.98 percent of the time. Thus, the claim that “2 sexes is overly simplistic” is misleading, because intersex conditions correspond to less than 0.02 percent of all births, and intersex people are not a third sex. Intersex is simply a catch-all category for sex ambiguity and/or a mismatch between sex genotype and phenotype, regardless of its etiology. Furthermore, the claim that “sex is a spectrum” is also misleading, as a spectrum implies a continuous distribution, and maybe even an amodal one (one in which no specific outcome is more likely than others). Biological sex in humans, however, is clear-cut over 99.98 percent of the time. Lastly, the claim that classifying people’s sex based on anatomy and genetics “has no basis in science” has itself no basis in reality, as any method exhibiting a predictive accuracy of over 99.98 percent would place it among the most precise methods in all the life sciences. We revise medical care practices and change world economic plans on far lower confidence than that. 

A relatively few brave professionals from the medical, mental health, and academic communities are stepping forward at great personal and professional risk to speak the truth about the “trans” ideology that seeks to eradicate recognition of the fact and meaning of sexual differentiation. Increasing numbers of doctors and scientists are trying to stop the socially contagious “trans” madness that, left unopposed, will effectively de-sex and bring incalculable suffering to the world. But as Wright explains, stepping forward is a risky endeavor:

Despite the unquestionable reality of biological sex in humans, social justice and trans activists continue to push this belief, and respond with outrage when challenged. Pointing out any of the above facts is now considered synonymous with transphobia. The massive social media website Twitter—the central hub for cultural discourse and debate—is now actively banning users for stating true facts about basic human biology. And biologists like myself often sit quietly, afraid to defend our own field out of fear that our decade of education followed by continued research, job searches, and the quest for tenure might be made obsolete overnight if the mob decides to target one of us for speaking up. Because of this, our objections take place almost entirely between one another in private whisper networks, despite the fact that a majority of biologists are extremely troubled by these attacks to our field by social justice activists. This is an untenable situation.

It is astonishing that so many sheep-like Americans believe or pretend to believe the “trans” ideology. We should no longer marvel in horror that the Holocaust or slavery happened. We should no longer shake our heads in disbelief that ideas as utterly evil and patently false as those that propelled the extermination of 6 million Jews or the brutal enslavement of men, women and children could have been embraced, tolerated, or acquiesced to.

The embrace of and acquiescence to evil, false ideas are taking place in our time, in our midst, before our open but un-woke eyes. And it advances through the same mechanisms that prior evil, deceitful ideas gained cultural ground, that is, through government-subsidized propaganda, bad legislation, bad judicial decisions, control of cultural institutions, and cowardice.

The “trans” ideology, an evil and patently false set of dogmatic beliefs is wreaking havoc on individual lives, families, and virtually all cultural institutions, and relatively few people are opposing it.

To be clear, I am not comparing the degree of evil intrinsic to Nazi beliefs or pro-slavery beliefs about racial superiority or the effects of those beliefs to the degree of evil intrinsic to “trans”-cultic beliefs or their effects. Rather, I am comparing the oppressive mechanisms by which these sets of beliefs achieve cultural ascendancy and the cowardly absence of resistance from those who should know and proclaim the truth despite the cost.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Trans-Madness.mp3

Save the Date!!!

On Saturday, March 16, 2019, the Illinois Family Institute will be hosting our annual Worldview Conference. This coming year, we will focus on the “transgender” revolution. We already have commitments from Dr. Michelle Cretella, President of the American College of Pediatricians; Walt Heyer, former “transgender” and contributor to Public Discourse; Denise Schick, Founder and Director of Help 4 Families, and daughter of a man who “identified” as a woman; and Doug Wilson, who is a Senior Fellow of Theology at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, and pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho .

The Transgender Ideology:
What Is It? Where Will It Lead? What is the Church’s Role?
Stay tuned for more information!

Help us meet our end-of-year matching challenge goal!
Dollar for dollar match through December 31st.
Your $25 becomes $50, $100 is $200, and $250 becomes $500.