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The loonery that is going on in the United States is really getting out of hand. This article does contain some good news as a Professor of Education has managed to keep her job despite stating the ‘heretical’ fact that human beings are sexually dimorphic species.
Let that one sink in a bit as you contemplate your stance on ‘woke politics’. Especially if you happen to believe that the woke agenda is harmless or an overblown threat to society as you know it.
“University of Southern Maine officials announced Monday they would not replace a professor who allegedly told her class that only two biological sexes exist, despite demands for her removal from the majority of her class, Bangor Daily News reported Monday.
Education professor Christy Hammer and a single student allegedly said “they believed only male and female biological sexes exist” during a September 7 required class in the university’s Portland campus’ Extended Teacher Education Program for public teacher certification, according to the news outlet.”
Yes, this actual occurrence. You can get in trouble with the faux-progressive set for stating the basic facts of the reality we all share.
“A free-for-all discussion erupted over both social gender and biological sex identifications…the rest of the class maintained both biological sexes and social genders are on a spectrum,” according to the paper. The discussion continued to the next class on September 14, during which “nearly two dozen students walked out in protest,” according to a September 29 article in the Bangor Daily News.”
Pretty much par for the course when dealing with gender ideologues because their arguments are mostly fatuous hyperbolic emotive bafflegab and therefore they can’t debate – instead they activate their inner activist and PROTEST. That is one of the best parts of this ideology – actions are much more important that any sort of grounding in the material reality we all share.
“Following that episode, a “majority of the class” sent a letter to the Department of Education and Human Development “asking for a restorative justice meeting with Hammer,” according to the October 3 article.
During the meeting, the student who had maintained the two-sex distinction repeatedly apologized. But Hammer stayed firm, “saying non-binary biological sex designations are merely variations on male and female,” according to the September 29 article.
Students declared Hammer’s remarks “inaccurate and transphobic,” according to the news outlet.”
With no arguments moored in reality, the only option is to silence the heretic, in this case an Education Prof for her crime of stating biological fact. Thought crime is officially a thing, especially in Universities apparently.
Take a second and reflect on this if you are moored to reality and a free thinker you will eventually be in this situation. The faux-progressive mob will call for your excommunication – what will you do? To maintain your integrity, the very minimum you can do is not replicate the lie.
“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
“We don’t want to go back to the classroom with Christy Hammer,” student Michael Lombardi told the paper.
The school responded this week by declaring that it will not replace Hammer, but will make an “alternative, identical class available,” according to the Oct. 3 story.
“We have developed an alternative plan for this class and will be opening a new section of this course for those students who would like to move,” university spokesperson Gina Marie Guadagnino told the Bangor Daily News. “The original section taught by professor Hammer will continue for any student who wishes to remain in that class.”
Can you imagine this? Making a whole new section with a professor that won’t challenge the beliefs of students? What are Universities for if not for challenging ones beliefs? What kind of funhouse reality are we in right now? Student feelings are not more important the facts of the matter, especially when it comes to education. Do we really want ideologues who crumble and cry and then burn the heretic at the first sign of opposition teaching our children?
This is just one example of the faux-progressive movement tearing at the fabric of our society. Actual progressive people and those who care about the next generation have duty to speak out against this pernicious ideology.
How is this even a thing?
Score one for the kids on this one, they can tell that something abnormal is going on here. This is deviant behaviour has no fucking place in a school. Where is the Administration on this one?
Jfc.
The Admin are standing behind the teacher who thinks its okay to be around students presenting like that. All it takes, apparently, to do perverse shit in the Ontario Public school system is to declare they are transgender and no rules apply to you anymore. Do you think that for one second a real woman, in similar attire, would be allowed to teach class?
This tearing down of normalcy and the values of the majority of Canadians hold must stop. Pandering to mental illness and abdicating child safety in the name of what exactly? Inclusivity?
Newsflash – Some behaviours/lifestyle choices should *NOT* be included in public education milieu.
In Alberta our current government is off the rails. They are enacting austerity programs that are targeting the public sectors of our society during a pandemic. The quarrel with Alberta doctors over their working conditions during this exceptional time exemplifies the negligence of this UCP government.
This same radical right United Conservative government laid off thousands of Educational Assistants and support staff during the pandemic as well. The pattern is clear. The UCP are starving each of the public sectors of our society of the funds and people necessary for them to function efficiently. The next round of bullshit will be point out how these same gutted public sectors are not doing a good job and therefore must be replaced with private, more efficient, systems of delivery.
The UCP of Alberta are taking plays from the very first page Disaster Capitalism’s playbook. They are pushing through reactionary anti-education, anti-worker, anti-public health, reforms in the legislator at a marathon rate with essentially no debate. Albertan’s will be waking up to a very different set of ground rules in society, and most of said rules will be making their lives marginally worse.
Speaking of marginally worse, the contract for Alberta Teachers is up on August 30th. There will be no joy at the negotiating table this year, let me assure you. Austerity will be the only option – while we generously fund pipelines to nowhere – for Alberta Teachers.
Plastic shields for students? Netherlands is doing it. Alberta is not.
Concomitantly, Teachers will be asked to perform their duties under conditions that are directly hazardous to not only their students’ health, but theirs and their families as well. No additional funding for pandemic measures is on the table for the opening of the school year. No PPE, no classroom caps of 15, no additional cleaning personal or cleaning routines will be available. Teachers will be expected to take up the pandemic slack, as do ‘the best they can’ with the dangerous circumstances mandated by the UCP government.
This is unacceptable. Teachers should not have to unreasonably risk their lives and the lives of their families working in unsafe conditions. Is it just to expect teachers to be responsible for the death of their aging parents, or young children because of the government’s mandated unsafe working conditions in the schools?
Alberta teachers will not get, as in the previous agreements, another cent more in wages. Cost of living be damned. We expect that, especially with this government that is so completely beholden to private sector; especially Oil and Gas. The continued existence of the white elephant Energy War Room more than proves this egregious bias, the fact that it continues to exist during the pandemic will be one of the darker stains on this government’s legacy.
Wages aside, it is not reasonable for Alberta Teachers to risk their lives (and their families) to perform their duties. We are being set up to be the at the very nexus of the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. The situation, as currently mandated, is a untenable situation.
We must seriously consider a strike because our government seems unwilling or unable to adequately protect the students and teachers of this province. We should also consider coordinating with healthcare professionals because this government is serious about dismantling our public systems, and we need to present a united front that is too big to fail and cannot be punitively,and in piecemeal, legislated back to work (which will happen).
We let this happen at the ballot box, and now the grave consequences of voting in a American style government with a unhealthy privatization fetish, are here. We cannot sit back throw up our hands and somehow think that students and teachers dying at school because of the malfeasance of the government is in anyway okay. We are better than that as a teachers and as Albertans.
Signed,
A very concerned Alberta School Teacher.
@albertateachers
@rachelnotley
@albertandp
@ucp
@edmontonjournal
@adrianalagrange
How not to run an academic institution. My Alma mater is demonstrating some worrisome (read batshit fucking stupid) decisions regarding firing female staff for having the absolute gall of teaching the ‘unorthodox’ view that biological sex is important to women and their struggle against patriarchy.
Her feminist views are apparently causing a small segment of students to feel unsafe and thus because if we are not walking on eggshells around entitled gender deluded males one must be doing the whole academic thing wrong.
“Something very wrong has happened at the University of Alberta. A professor has been fired from part of her academic job for views on sex and gender that break with current orthodoxy.
In late March, Kathleen Lowrey, an associate professor at the University of Alberta, was asked to resign from her role as the Department of Anthropology’s associate chair, undergraduate programs, on the basis that one or more students had gone to the University’s Office of Safe Disclosure and Human Rights and the Dean of Students, André Costopolous, to complain about her without filing formal complaints. All Professor Lowrey has been told is that she is somehow making the learning environment “unsafe” for these students because she is a feminist who holds “gender critical” views.
Apparently, Lowrey’s very openness about her views is a problem. Should a course have gender or sex as a central theme, on day 1 she offers a summary of her views along with the declaration that no student need agree with her about any of it, as she did this year with her course “Anthropology of Women.” As she cleaves to a feminism that asserts the continuing importance of biological sex and feminist projects of resisting patriarchal oppression, her views put her out of step with much current thinking about the nature of gender, which from the seminal work of Judith Butler forward takes sex to be a social construct. Lowrey also posts statements related to her views on her office door — something she is entitled to do. She contends that in asking her to resign from her service role the University is endorsing ideological conformity.
Lowrey refused to resign from her service role and insisted that if the University wished to dismiss her from it, it would need to put its reasons for doing so in writing. She subsequently received a letter from the Dean of Arts Lesley Cormack dismissing her from her service role without offering any specifics as to why. The letter simply declares that the Dean believes that “it is not in the best interests of the students or the University” for Lowrey to continue in it.”
This is unbelievable. Exactly what part of a healthy part of academic debate does this help?
“The University of Alberta takes the position that Lowrey had to be dismissed from her service role “for the good of the department” because at least one student claims that for the University to let her continue in the role would be for it to run the risk of the department losing students to another field of study. The argument, in effect, is that Lowrey could not be allowed to let the Department suffer a financial penalty for her views. (In the University of Alberta’s budget model, government funding “follows” students to the departments in which they take their courses.) With its worry that Lowrey’s views will have financial consequences for the Department of Anthropology, the University of Alberta lets an unfortunate development of the academy over the last few decades, in which students have become tuition-paying “customers” upon whom universities rely for more and more of their revenues, come into direct conflict with academic freedom principles. This is a very serious problem. No department at any university in Canada should be taking the position that it has to concern itself with how a professor’s intellectual views may affect a department’s bottom-line.
Finally, the University of Alberta takes the position that it had to dismiss Lowrey from her service role because if it did not do so students would feel that the University “cared more” about “supporting” the professor than it did about them. This is a terrible line of reasoning, which pits students against a professor when what ought to be of paramount concern to all is the commitment to intellectual engagement and critical scrutiny of ideas as fundamental to the University’s flourishing. Quite simply, at a university, unorthodox or controversial views must be actively debated, and never suppressed, if the university is to meet its societal obligations.
The University of Alberta needs to restore Professor Lowrey to her role as associate chair, undergraduate programs, in the Department of Anthropology, and university administrators elsewhere need to make sure that they do not fall into the University of Alberta’s mistake. It is essential that our universities never become homes for orthodoxy of any kind. “Dogma is bad for people,” writes UBC professor emeritus William Bruneau elsewhere on this blog. But for universities dogma is much, much worse. It is anathema to the academic mission.”
Kathleen Lowrey needs to reinstated yesterday. This sort of totalitarian anti-academic thinking has to stop.
Oh and email the Dean about this travesty – artsdean@ualberta.ca
This of course is anecdotal, but perhaps an concerning insight into the culture that exists for school children for my neighbours to the South. As a school teacher one of touchstones I strive to establish is the idea that the classroom that we are in is a place of safety and comfort. Good things and the good feelings that go along with them happen in class along with, hopefully, some learning.
I find it difficult to relate to the experience described below, as Canada does not have a gun culture like the US, and if this is typical, I hope we never will.
How do you solve a problem? Look at the root causes and address them. Laurie Halse Anderson writes in Time:
“How do we reduce the horrifying amount of sexual violence in this country?
We talk to our boys. Parents, family members, educators, clergy and other leaders have the opportunity and responsibility to model and teach consent from the time kids are old enough to walk: “You don’t touch anyone without their permission.” Families and schools should regularly share facts about bodies and sex appropriate to the developmental age of the child. Cultural leaders — writers, musicians, film producers, artists, advertisers, professional athletes, actors and social media influencers — have the power to accurately portray how sexual assault happens, providing information that will save lives.
I know it’s hard, but if we don’t figure out how to have tough conversations, we will sacrifice another generation of victims. It is time to not just inspire those who have been hurt to tell their stories — but to find our own courage to have open conversations about these complex subjects.
We need to teach our boys about healthy sexuality. We need to be crystal-clear about the laws and moral code surrounding consent. Our children must be aware that not only is there a federal definition of consent, but that states have their own, additional definitions. This is particularly significant for people younger than 18. “Close-in-age exemptions,” which permit some types of sexual contact between consenting minors, vary widely. RAINN has a State Law Database, to help you sort out the details.
We need to ask our boys questions so that we understand what they think they know about sex and intimacy. Sharing books, movies and TV shows are a great way to open these conversations. Discussing the choices made by fictional characters paves the way for more personal conversations.
We need to tell our own stories to make sure our boys understand that these things happen to people they know and love. We need to give them the tools required to navigate relationships in a positive way.
Our boys deserve information and guidance. The only way they’ll get it is if we speak up.”
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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