Things were a lot easier when I went to college in the 70s. There were two genders (male and female) and two sexual orientations (straight and gay/lesbian). Being that one of my majors was Theater and a straight male, I was very much in the minority. In the four decades in the interests of political correctness, colleges have attempted slice and dice the population so many ways that everyone is a minority.
At my alma mater, the State University of New York (SUNY), the beginning of this school year saw a brand new classification system. Now there are seven gender choices available man, woman, trans man, trans woman, genderqueer/gender fluid, questioning, and unsure (seems surprising they don’t have all of the above as a choice). And for sexual orientation there are eight different options; straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, queer, questioning, and unsure, plus a write-in option for each category. Call me crazy but I have no idea what some of the above mean, and can some explain the difference between unsure and questioning? When one counts the choice of writing in your own sexual orientation, SUNY students get to pick from 72 possible gender and sexual orientation combinations to self-categorize.
According to the SUNY announcement:
Governor Cuomo said. “With this new Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policy, we are once again sending a strong message that the Empire State is a national leader and a beacon of inclusion for all students.”
“As the public university system serving one of the nation’s most diverse states, it is essential that SUNY adapt to the evolving needs of all students,”said SUNY Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher. “Diversity is interwoven throughout our strategic plan, and now, as we implement a Completion Agenda with the goal of awarding 150,000 SUNY degrees per year by 2020, our commitment to diversity must be stronger than ever before. Thank you to the Board of Trustees and to all those who contributed through the Diversity Task Force for ensuring that SUNY will continue to be a national leader on important issues of equality.”
Perhaps it’s me, but in promoting diversity, isn’t the state promoting divisiveness by identifying people by gender and sexual orientation? Do students now introduce themselves to their fellow scholars by their chosen gender and orientation? “Hi I am Pat, I’m an unsure pansexual (you figure that out). I taught my kids to judge people by what is in their heart long before they judged what was in their pants and how they use it.
And how many freshmen filling out these forms for the first time actually know what each of these classifications mean (and how many of their parents get it)?
This goes beyond “diversity, equity and inclusion,” its part of the progressive strategy which says the smaller the categorizations and labels one places on people the easier it is to control them. And it’s not just happening in New York.
At Constitution.com, Bethany Blankley gives an example of the attempt to divide secondary students into 25 categories:
A British city council distributed a gender survey to every secondary school in the cities of Brighton and Hove, England, according to The Argus, asking teens to choose from 25 categories.
The government-sponsored Children’s Commissioner for England devised the survey specifically for 13 to 18-year-olds to discover “how gender matters to young people.”
At issue was Question 13, which asked, “How do you define your gender?” These were the options from which students were instructed to select:
- Agender
- All genders
- Androgynous
- Bi-gender
- Boy
- Demi-boy
- Demi-girl
- Female
- Gender fluid
- Gender nonconforming
- Genderqueer
- Girl
- In the middle of boy and girl
- Intersex
- Male
- Non-binary
- Not sure
- Other/s (please state)
- Rather not say
- Tomboy
- Trans-boy
- Trans-girl
- Tri-gender
- Young man
- Young woman
Teens were told to check “as many as they wanted” for their answer.
According to one Brighton columnist, the city council and school system was “unnecessarily making all teenagers question their basic identity.” A Daily Mail editorial labeled the question “frankly bizarre,” suggesting it would create, “uncertainty and distress in the minds of all-too-vulnerable adolescents.”
Doesn’t the above look like one of those tough SAT questions? How does a middle-school student (or anyone else) discern between a girl, female, and young woman? Is a tom-boy a gender? When I was growing up that just meant a girl who liked to play sports and could beat up some of the boys. Heck my wife tells me she was a tom-boy, and take my word for it there is no doubt about her gender or sexual identity. And if someone picks Demi-girl does that mean they used to be married to Bruce Willis and Ashton Kutcher?
Come on folks, this is getting a bit ridiculous. Most middle-school and even college kids have trouble choosing between the many different flavors of ice cream at Baskin and Robbins, why force them to identify between genders and sexual orientations that they don’t even understand!
As Deputy Director Simon Calvert of the British think tank, The Christian Institute remarked:
“We must not intrude on childhood by deliberately confusing school children about what makes a boy a boy or a girl a girl just to satisfy adult political agendas. We must protect children from being made to feel that passing phases of confused feelings about themselves — which many go through — must be turned into life-changing moral and political decisions.”