free thought – Analogical Thoughts

Kneel Before Ze/Zir

7 December 2018 / Culture, Ethics

A report from the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

WEST POINT — A Virginia high school teacher was fired Thursday for refusing to use a transgender student’s new pronouns, a case believed to be the first of its kind in the state.

After a four-hour hearing, the West Point School Board voted 5-0 to terminate Peter Vlaming, a French teacher at West Point High School who resisted administrators’ orders to use male pronouns to refer to a ninth-grade student who had undergone a gender transition. The board met in closed session for nearly an hour before the vote.

[…]

Vlaming, 47, who had taught at the school for almost seven years after spending more than a decade in France, told his superiors his Christian faith prevented him from using male pronouns for a student he saw as female.

The teacher took the approach I recommended here, but it wasn’t enough:

Vlaming agreed to use the student’s new, male name. But he tried to avoid using any pronouns — he or him, and she or her — when referring to the student. The student said that made him feel uncomfortable and singled out.

I imagine Mr. Vlaming now feels uncomfortable and singled out, but apparently that’s a price worth paying.

“I can’t think of a worse way to treat a child than what was happening,” said West Point High Principal Jonathan Hochman, who testified that he told Vlaming to use male pronouns in accordance with the student’s wishes.

Really? The principal of the school can’t think of a worse way to treat a child than not using the child’s preferred pronouns? Frankly, these are not the words of someone who is anchored to reality.

To highlight the pitfalls of strict rules against “misgendering,” Vlaming and his lawyer pointed out that Hochman used the wrong pronoun for the student during his testimony.

As Hochman described his conversation with Vlaming after the incident on Halloween, Hochman said he told Vlaming: “You need to say sorry for that. And refer to her by the male pronoun.”

Oops! I guess we’re all tiptoeing through the minefield now.

You can be sure that we’ll being seeing more and more of these cases in the days to come. But transgender activists are doing themselves no favors here. You can’t win people over by bulling them, and eventually reality will bite back.

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You Will Be Made to Lie

A while back I addressed the question of how to deal with people who claim to be transgender and ask us to use different names and pronouns to refer to them. Whether my proposal was a reasonable one or not, I was assuming at least that we have some freedom to choose between different approaches. Unfortunately, not everyone has that luxury:

CINCINNATI – Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a federal lawsuit against Shawnee State University officials Monday on behalf of a professor that the university punished because he declined a male student’s demand to be referred to as a woman, with feminine titles and pronouns (“Miss,” “she,” etc.).

Although philosophy professor Dr. Nicholas Meriwether offered to use the student’s first or last name instead, neither the student nor the university was willing to accept that compromise, choosing instead to force the professor to speak and act contrary to his own Christian convictions.

Read the whole thing.

I believe it was Erick Erickson who, in response to growing secular illiberalism, coined the line, “You will be made to care.” Well, it’s worse than that for some folk now. When it comes to sexuality and gender, you will be made to lie.