I remember how it was -- JR
The Uprising: Families Clash With Schools Over LGBTQ Propaganda
In a June like none other, where the LGBTQ agenda has been crammed at increasing velocity down the throats of unwitting Americans, everyday folks are reaching their limits.
With two more weeks to go in “Pride Month,” this is bad news for the rainbow mafia. But it’s a sign of character and courage that the rest of us can take hope in—especially when demonstrated by families in the direct line of propagandistic fire.
In response to the Left’s “sex-and-gender-everything” policies, parents and kids are both flexing their muscles in opposition to schools that are all in on “Pride.”
Earlier this month, a group of students at Marshall Simonds Middle School in Burlington, Massachusetts, reportedly protested a “Pride Month” event by tearing down LGBTQ “Pride” signs and banners and chanting, “USA are my pronouns.”
This prompted the Equity Coalition, an LGBTQ advocacy group, to demand that the Burlington school district discipline students involved in the protest and fill the district’s vacant position of director of diversity, inclusion, and equity, or DEI.
In Huntington Beach, California, students at Edison High School revolted against a “Pride” video shown in math class. For their outbursts, their teacher threatened: “if you’re going to be inappropriate, I will have supervision down and give all of you a Saturday school for next year.”
And a few miles up the California coast, in ultra-Left Hollywood, parents kept their children home from North Hollywood’s Saticoy Elementary School in protest of a planned “Pride Day.”
The frustration extends beyond LGBTQ school events to curriculum and policies, too.
Parents at an elementary school in Connecticut were infuriated after their 8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds were shown a video celebrating gender identity without the parents’ knowledge, and then given “puberty kits” to take home.
One parent, Kyle Reyes, the father of four kids under age 9, decided to pull them all out of the Granby School District as a result of policies on sexual orientation and gender identity, saying: “These are conversations that, if anyone is going to have with their kids, it should be the parents having with their kids.”
North of the border, at a large protest in front of an Ottawa school board led by Muslim Canadians but also attended by Christians and Jews, parents and kids voiced their opposition to radical gender ideology in the classroom.
Much of their ire was directed at the school board’s recent mandate on gender-neutral pronouns, prompting chants of “Let the parents decide.”
The divide between propaganda and common sense is no more readily apparent than in the context of scholastic sports—where Gallup now reports massive increases in the number of Americans who say biological sex—and not gender identity—should dictate participation in organized sports.
Gallup notes:
A larger majority of Americans now (69%) than in 2021 (62%) say transgender athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender. Likewise, fewer endorse transgender athletes being able to play on teams that match their current gender identity, 26%, down from 34%.
This finding tracks with a recent study indicating that 65% of Americans say they believe there are only two genders—an increase of six percentage points from 2021.
Now, if school districts had been paying attention to such numbers and operated according to federal law and not the will of cultural elites and LGBTQ evangelists in the federal government, situations like those in Wisconsin and Vermont high schools might have been avoided.
At East High School, in Wisconsin’s Sun Prairie Area School District, an 18-year-old biological male who identified as “trans” entered the girls’ locker room and showered naked in front of a group of terrified 14-year-old freshman girls. In a manifestation of what’s become a troubling trend on parental disenfranchisement, the school district chose not to contact the girls’ parents.
Now, Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty is urging the U.S. Department of Education to investigate whether the high school violated federal civil rights law.
A few weeks ago, a Vermont school district that punished a father and daughter for speaking out about a biological male using a girls’ locker room was ordered to cough up $125,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees. Considering this, the Wisconsin school district might want to get its legal house in order.
LGBTQ talking points once focused on “equality” and wanting to “live and let live.” Now, yearlong “Pride” initiatives look more like a hostile takeover of government school systems.
What with school libraries shelved with gay porn, LGBTQ curriculum, gender-neutral bathrooms, preferred pronoun policies, and gaslighting parents on the gender identities of their own minor children (frequently facilitated by school administrators), families finally have had enough.
For once, the alphabet mob is back on its heels. But only because taxpaying parents and their brave kids are speaking up.
As noted by Kyle Reyes, the Connecticut dad: “Parents are starting to come out of the woodwork, and it’s time to start fighting back.”
And fight back they will.
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Academic Freedom Is Social Justice
In 2014, Harvard student Sandra Korn wrote a column in the undergraduate newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, titled “The Doctrine of Academic Freedom: Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice.” Korn, a joint major in history of science and studies of women, gender and sexuality, argued that rather than relying on the principle of “academic freedom” to guide decisions about what kinds of academic expression should be permissible, we should rely instead on principles of “academic justice”:
"If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of ‘academic freedom’? Instead, I would like to propose a more rigorous standard: one of ‘academic justice.’ When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue ... It is tempting to decry frustrating restrictions on academic research as violations of academic freedom. Yet I would encourage student and worker organizers to instead use a framework of justice. After all, if we give up our obsessive reliance on the doctrine of academic freedom, we can consider more thoughtfully what is just."
A fellow undergraduate, Garrett Lam, a neurobiology and philosophy major, penned a response, “Academic Freedom Is Academic Justice.” He answered “Korn’s central question: If we oppose social injustice, ‘why should we put up with research that counters our goals?’” Thus:
"We shouldn’t ... science can do many things, but it can’t justify oppression. After all, science tells us the way things are. It tells us what is natural. But just because things are a certain way does not mean they ought to be that way ... If we believe people should be treated equally, an institution that treats them unequally opposes our values. But even if it were true that people are born with unequal capacities, this would not imply that we should treat them unequally ... Rather than closing our eyes and plugging our ears (which, by the way, wouldn’t make [scientific] truths cease to exist), we’re better off confronting them in the long run. After all, we choose how to apply knowledge, and can leverage it to effect the change we want in the world."
During the Korn/Lam exchange, I was busy teaching and advising Harvard undergraduates in my department, Human Evolutionary Biology, and somehow missed it. But it was far from the first time that members of the Harvard community disagreed about the limits of academic freedom. One particularly noteworthy event occurred in 2005, months after I’d earned my Ph.D. from Harvard (on testosterone and sex differences in cognition). I was furiously preparing to teach my very first class as a lecturer, “The Evolution of Human Sex Differences,” when the president of Harvard, Larry Summers, plunged right into my area of expertise.
At what was supposed to be a small, closed conference focusing on the problem of the underrepresentation of women in STEM careers, Summers gave a talk in which he proffered several hypotheses to explain the imbalanced sex ratio. One invoked “different socialization and patterns of discrimination” which was unlikely to ruffle any feathers. But another hypothesis was that the underrepresentation was partly due to “different availability of aptitude at the high end.” It does appear that on many traits, including cognitive ones, males vary more than females—the male distribution curve is flatter, with more males than females in both the high and low tails. As Summers noted, this can result in a large male bias at the extreme levels of ability, from which elite universities draw their STEM job candidates.
Although Summers only said that he was offering his “best guesses” which “may be all wrong,” when his remarks were leaked, the Harvard campus (and the wider world) exploded in controversy. I was interviewed by a writer for the Crimson, and said what seemed obvious to me: “We tend to put blinders onto science when the explanations for behavior or social problems are distasteful or difficult ... We must explore all reasonable hypotheses.” Summers said what he did because he believed that openly debating the possible causes of a problem was an important step in trying to solve it. All these years later, I am even more convinced that this is right.
I teach behavioral endocrinology, which touches on sensitive issues related to stress and trauma, health disorders, and sex and gender. Student after student has told me how learning about this topic has helped them personally: gay students who have gained the confidence to come out to their families; trans students armed with knowledge about how hormones shape behavior and impact gender transitions; and students with differences/disorders/variations of sexual development, who can make better decisions about treatments. Students also tell me that learning about the science of sex and gender has increased their understanding and empathy—especially toward those who are different in terms of sex-related biology or gender expression. Many of them have been inspired to pursue careers in the medical or psychological fields as a way to care for people with such differences. These are the same students who don’t always agree with me about where the evidence points, but we almost always have productive, respectful conversations, in and out of class.
Unfortunately, the production and communication of science, on university campuses, scientific journals, and the popular press, has become more politicized over the last few decades. As academic freedom has been significantly eroded, disagreements about its limits have become more extreme and heated. One recent example of this erosion is a statement from the editor of the prestigious journal Nature Human Behavior, describing new guidelines and policies that echo Ms. Korn’s proposal in her 2014 Crimson article. The editorial, innocuously titled “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans,” indicates that editors’ publishing decisions will be influenced by their judgments about an article’s potential to “cause harm.” Problematic content includes that which “undermines—or could reasonably be perceived to undermine—the rights and dignities of an individual or human group on the basis of socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings.” Groupings based on “sex, gender identity, sexual orientation” are given as examples.
Since the word “dignities” in particular is hopelessly vague and subjective, policies of this sort threaten to further restrict scientific research and scholarship in the areas of sex and gender. If we restrict research on the basis that it may undermine “dignities,” then we place severe limits on our ability to discover what is true. And to whom should we bestow the power to determine our “dignities,” and what qualifies as undermining them? Are these judges of dignity deemed to be the most moral among us? Would they represent everyone’s views, or just a subset of society? Or would they be elevated to the position by others with power?
Last but not least, when we censor research that fails the “dignity test”—say, research claiming that psychological sex differences may have some biological origin—we implicitly endorse the idea that troubling ethical and practical consequences follow from evidence of group differences. That is a big mistake, one that science educators, researchers, and publishers should focus on correcting before real damage is done to science, and to the lives of vulnerable people.
Apart from helping to attract a huge number of students to my seminar on sex differences, the Summers controversy had no practical effect on my work or life at Harvard. But a similar controversy, in which I became embroiled 16 years later, did. I found myself on the receiving end of public moral outrage in response to comments I made about human sex differences (also on a public platform), which have impinged upon my ability to teach and research in my area of interest and expertise. As a result, I am currently on leave from my position at Harvard.
Part of what is significant about my case, and most others like it, is that the limits on my academic freedom were not set by explicit, detailed, formal guidelines and policies like those outlined in the Nature Human Behavior editorial. Rather, my troubles were due to informal and personal attacks on my character, initiated by people without much institutional power, but implicitly sanctioned by those with it.
In the summer of 2021, shortly after the publication of my book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, I appeared on Fox and Friends, a news program on the Fox network. I was asked to comment on an article written by the journalist Katie Herzog, about the pressure some professors felt to back away from using language like “male and female” and “pregnant women” in teaching.
I agreed to appear on Fox and Friends for a few reasons. First, my book had just been released and I wanted it to reach as large an audience as possible. Second, while I am in favor of using language that makes people feel respected and comfortable, I feel strongly that we should resist succumbing to the demands of bullies and be unafraid to use clear, indispensable scientific terms like “male” and “female.” And third, I wanted to explain that sex categories are facts of nature which do not carry implications for anyone’s value or rights. I had nothing to say in the interview about how to describe pregnancy.
While people might have objected to just about anything I said, simply because I said it on Fox, here’s the bit that got me in real trouble:
The facts are that there are ... two sexes ... there are male and female, and those sexes are designated by the kinds of gametes we produce ... The ideology seems to be that biology really isn’t as important as how somebody feels about themselves or feels their sex to be, but we can treat people with respect and respect their gender identities and use their preferred pronouns, so understanding the facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect.
In response to my appearance, a graduate student tweeted out a thread, representing herself in her official capacity as director of my department’s Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging task force. She said, among other things, that she was “appalled” by my “transphobic” and “dangerous” remarks which allegedly interfered with the task force’s efforts to ensure that the department was a “safe space” for people of “all gender identities and sexes.”
At the time, I had few followers on Twitter and was not particularly active on the platform. I was not tagged in the student’s tweet. I learned about it secondhand. I felt scared and nervous that this awful portrayal of me, written by someone in an official position in my own department, was broadcast to the entire world. (This might be a good time to make clear that I care deeply about my students, whatever their identities happen to be. Based on my strong relationships with students, their comments and reviews of my teaching, the teaching and advising awards I have earned, and my being repeatedly voted one of “Harvard’s favorite professors.”)
Since I thought the tweet thread might adversely affect my relationship with future undergraduates and my reputation in general, I attempted to control the situation by quote-tweeting the thread, asking the student to explain what I had said that was harmful to undergraduates. I didn’t get what I considered a straight answer. Soon the whole thing went viral, with headlines like “Harvard professor Carole Hooven who refused to use term ‘pregnant people’ rather than ‘woman’ is accused of transphobia.” Again, I never said anything about “pregnant people,” but some newspapers seem not to care about getting the facts straight.
Most of the public (and private) comments and coverage were in my favor, and the graduate student received lots of criticism on Twitter, some of it harsh. Inside Harvard, though, things were quite different. Soon a narrative developed in the department that I was the primary bad actor, “punching down,” and had caused a graduate student to suffer abuse. A petition against me was linked to a Crimson article about the incident. Thankfully, the petition never gained much steam, but the damage had been done. I found myself walking with my head down in places on campus where I used to feel at home. I feared that someone might recognize me as the “transphobe” from whom students needed to be protected.
Being called transphobic for declaring the reality of sex on Fox and Friends was not a complete surprise; in the few years leading up to that appearance, I had felt an increasing intolerance of straight talk about what it means to be male or female. What was a surprise was the way people “in charge” responded: Vacations were interrupted by this “situation,” and a flurry of activity followed, in the form of emails, phone calls, and Zoom meetings. I was not privy to most of it, however.
Even though someone publicly maligned my speech in their official capacity as a representative of the institution, which is a clear violation of Harvard’s Free Speech Guidelines, the person who maligned me was not sanctioned. A few faculty members, still my good friends, expressed concern about my well-being and supported me personally, and I owe them a debt of gratitude. But despite my pleas for help, those who could have done so failed to defend my right to express my views and to communicate biological facts, to apologize for what happened, or to make any statement on my behalf.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/academic-freedom-social-justice
*****************************************************Don’t stop at affirmative action: End college legacy admissions too
Sometime this month, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the future of affirmative action in college admissions.
A pair of lawsuits brought against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, by advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions, accuse the effort to admit a more diverse class of systemically disadvantaging Asian applicants.
A decision could come anytime between now and June 30, and many legal analysts expect the conservative-majority court will overturn race-conscious admissions practices.
It would be a consequential and disruptive decision that, in my view, would represent a victory for fairness in the application process.
But it would only do part of the job of making college admissions truly fair: The next behemoth that should be tackled is nepotism.
Thanks to the Supreme Court case, Harvard had to hand over troves of internal data about how they craft their classes. And, when you pull back the curtain on that infamously cutthroat and opaque admissions process, you find rampant backdoors into Harvard.
In 2019, researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research analyzed Harvard’s admissions data. They found that, while Harvard’s admissions rate averaged 6% from 2009 to 2014, special interest groups had a drastically easier time getting in.
A legacy applicant with a close relative who graduated from Harvard had a 33.6% chance of acceptance (the Common Application used by most colleges and universities explicitly asks where your parents went to school, which shouldn’t even be a question).
A student on the “dean’s interest list” — code for someone whose family donated to the school — had a 42.2% shot. And a child of faculty or staff had a 46.7% chance of getting in.
In fact, the researchers found that 43% of white students at Harvard were either legacies, children of faculty, kin of donors, or a recruited athlete. And a staggering 75% of them wouldn’t have gotten in if not for that special status.
Harvard admits fewer than 2,000 students per class, and its admissions rate has plummeted to just 3.41% this year.
It’s harder than ever to get into Harvard… that is, if you were born with the wrong last name or to parents with the wrong bank balance.
I saw this firsthand when I went to a boarding school. My father never went to college, and I didn’t apply to my mom’s school.
But my peers who were children of Ivy League graduates sailed into their parents’ alma maters, and oftentimes their more qualified classmates received rejection letters from the very same colleges and universities.It was straight up unfair — and everybody knew it.
Every spot taken by someone who got in for the wrong reasons is a spot stolen from another applicant who busted their butt to get flawless grades and perfect test scores while juggling varsity sports and starting their own company on the side. There are many such stories of unsuccessful Harvard hopefuls.
Booting those kids out for an affirmative action admit is no less justifiable than skipping over them for an graduate’s kid. Both are unfair. And neither should ever happen. A alumnus or donor or professor’s child should have the same odds as anyone else.
If schools like Harvard are truly interested in creating a diverse class, they should be trying to diversify the last names of their students by dumping special legacy considerations. Undoubtedly, doing so would open the door for more first-generation graduates and underprivileged kids.
Harvard fought all the way up to the Supreme Court to maintain their race-conscious admissions process, claiming it’s critical to creating a diverse class.
But, in all reality, getting rid of the special status they confer on kids who know the right people would help achieve that same goal.
In fact, the researchers found that “removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students, with the share of white admits falling and all other groups rising or remaining unchanged.”
The fact that we have a meritocracy and not an aristocracy underpins the American dream. Anyone can make it here with hard work and grit.
But schools like Harvard, which are churning out generation after generation of elite graduates from the same rich families, are manufacturing an American aristocracy.
It’s time for that to change.
https://nypost.com/2023/06/21/dont-stop-at-affirmative-action-end-college-legacy-admissions-too/
******************************************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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