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Gender-bending at Southern Oregon University

In the midst of conservative, rural southern Oregon is the People's Republic of Ashland, a picturesque university town that has long been a hotbed of left-wing nuttiness and social experimention. Which tends to be the norm for small university towns. If recent developments at SOU are any indication, the next generation of college graduates isn't going to be friendly. Behold, America's future leaders:

Kevin Tomita says that in his four years at Southern Oregon University, he has noticed a sizeable effort by administrators to make the campus more gender-neutral.

"I noticed a really large push, actually," said Tomita, referring to more than a dozen gender-neutral bathrooms installed across campus since his freshman year.

Tomita, who works as a staff manager at the campus' Queer Resource Center, said the school's administration has been very supportive of the QRC's ideas.

"As a whole, I think this is a really accepting school," said Tomita. "And the administration are really supportive."

At least 15 gender-neutral bathrooms were created over the past few years, either by changing the signs on the doors or by gutting old bathrooms and reconstructing them, such as in the gender-neutral floor of Diamond Hall in the Cascade dorm complex.

The school spent $45,000 in fall 2009 to convert the open floor plan of the former women's restrooms into four separated, locking bathroom and shower rooms.

Diamond Hall, the first gender-neutral hall on campus, received a fairly warm welcome from the campus community, except for one incident of graffiti.

In spring 2010, two male SOU students were arrested after scrawling homophobic graffiti with markers on the walls of the gender-neutral floor.

The students later apologized for their actions, saying they didn't know they were on a gender-neutral floor and didn't intend to victimize anyone.

The changes across campus — particularly the bathrooms — were a welcome addition for Amiko-Gabriel Stocking, a student who chooses not to identify with a gender of male or female.

"I got kicked out of men's and women's bathrooms before," said Stocking, who said it is a huge relief to feel comfortable in a bathroom.

"I certainly became less anxious about my own gender identity," said Stocking, 27. "I create my gender as I go."

Stocking said various other cultures allow people to identify with one of as many as seven different genders.

"Sometimes gender in other cultures has taken on a spiritual role," said Stocking. "Gender varies across the globe."

Stocking, who is finishing a major in human communication and sociology this year, is working on a senior project to create a gender-inclusive training manual for the Lotus Rising Project, a youth-led social justice organization in Southern Oregon.

The manual describes gender-inclusive language that encourages people to focus on an individual rather than gender, omitting words such as "he" or "him" whenever possible.

"I create my gender as I go." Sweet. Now if that isn't the perfect synthesis of radical individualism and practical egalitarianism, I don't know what is.

Comments (14)

This kind of gender-bending is, and can only ever be, a kind of avant-garde moral posture reserved for a tiny minority of the decadent elite. There isn't a snowball's chance in hades that this sort of thing will gain widespread acceptance in the culture at large, or that it could become widely institutionalized in without massive amounts of Soviet-style coercion and deception. There is simply an upward limit to what functional, neurotypical human beings will tolerate, and I do not expect this to ever gain a cultural foothold outside the never-never land of certain academic precincts. In other words, this sort of nonsense has a built-in demographic ceiling, and that ceiling is pretty low.

In spring 2010, two male SOU students were arrested after scrawling homophobic graffiti with markers on the walls of the gender-neutral floor.


If these were to keep quiet, the very walls would shout out.

“I create my gender as I go.” Hmm. Sounds like somebody isn't entirely thrilled about having a body.

Granted, it's *possible* that this person is in the tiny minority of folks who actually have physically ambiguous sexual characteristics. But the odds are that this is just another confused post-adolescent who is getting no help from the academic gnostics.

Peace,
--Peter

"Seven different genders"? I don't want to know.

Untenured is certainly right about widespread acceptance. I feel sadly bound to say this, however: An extremely radical "orientation" ordinance passed two years ago in my not-terribly-large city. It included "gender identity" and allowed people to use any bathroom of their choice. After it passed, I heard about an incident of what can only be called harassment of a young clerk at a local J.C. Penney (I think that was the store) by two customers, both male (or should I say "male-bodied"?) who insisted that one of them must go into the women's dressing room and tried on a skirt, and who then asked the young lady, "How do I look in it?" No doubt her worried employers would have fired her had she made an appropriately tart reply to this act of baiting.

I sat in on the city council meetings, some of them in rather small rooms, some of them in larger rooms, and was astonished to see both the size and the influence of the gender-benders in my own community. At one point it emerged that the ordinance as previously drafted actually (shocka!) still permitted an employer to retain gender-distinguished bathrooms and to decide which one employees must use. The gender-benders raised objections to this from the floor. They even insisted that it was not enough to allow a previously male person to use the women's restroom *after having surgery* and getting his legal identity changed. That should not be required. He must be permitted to use the women's room during "transition" when he was still simply externally dressing and identifying as female. The city council members listened to this and changed the wording of the ordinance--against the advice of council, I might add. The City Attorney was raising questions as to whether this radical addition would be upheld in court, but they were determined to do what was "fair." Forcing employers to recognize gender-bending (presumably including employees who make up their gender as they go along) was considered the only fair thing to do.

So, yes, as with so many other agenda items, we have leaders, even leaders at the small, local level, who are determined to force other people to go along with this kind of thing. That Soviet-style coercion can happen on any level and may well become widespread.

There is simply an upward limit to what functional, neurotypical human beings will tolerate, and I do not expect this to ever gain a cultural foothold outside the never-never land of certain academic precincts.

I don't know, Untenured. I hope you're right, but the same was said about homosexual "marriage" in recent memory, and now we have a majority of the population supporting it:

http://tinyurl.com/3zbopz3

See Lydia's comment for an example of how this plays out in the minds of otherwise normal people who perceive this as an issue of fairness. I agree that the number of gender-bending individuals will always be miniscule, but those who want to make the world safe for all manner of perversity are legion, and this plays right into their agenda.

I agree that the number of gender-bending individuals will always be miniscule, but those who want to make the world safe for all manner of perversity are legion, and this plays right into their agenda.

Sometimes I wonder if Christians wouldn't be more effective if we made Crowley's famous maxim the foundation of the legal system for a decade. Perversity has utility, insofar as it can allow some to fulfill their only discernible purpose in life (namely serving as a warning to others).

I create my gender as I go.

I am hoping some enterprising individuals will learn from this and start employing the (at least) 360 different genders for some real benefits: you are in line at the airport security, and the Nazi-gestapo gropers of the TSA single you out for a quick feel. You politely inform them that you insist that the groper be the same gender as yourself. When they ask you what gender that is, you tell them that you are a

(1) Partially (you decide) bodied
(2) Incompletely stressing male emotional expressive modes
(3) Strongly emphasizing hetero-female attractions
(4) for physical acting-out on Thursdays
(5) with a mostly (some other sex) bodied person
(6) who also enjoys Mozart and Led Zepelin and Lady Gaga.

There, that's your "gender". If they can't find a groper with that gender, of course they cannot touch you.

Jeff, I disbelieve those statistics. Gays have never yet won a state-wide referendum for gay "marriage". The stats were based on phone surveys, and there is simply no possible way that you can guarantee that the answerers (as opposed to those called) were randomly distributed. A 9% change in one year is not believable. It is just as likely that normal heteros would not answer a stranger on the phone truthfully out of fear of persecution.

"I create my gender as I go." Sweet. Now if that isn't the perfect synthesis of radical individualism and practical egalitarianism, I don't know what is.
He's 27 and still a "student"? But, of course he is, for it is his life's goal to be unemployable and living off the labors of those who do work and generate wealth.

What amazes me is the ease with which people leap from "sexual behaviors form a continuum" to "there are no fixed sexual categories". I don't see any analogous push to "deconstruct" the categories we use to classify other psychological and behavioral traits. For example, using the same basic logic as the LGBQT fanatics, we could easily argue that the distinction between obese individuals and healthy individuals is arbitrary and oppressive, because individual appetites and metabolisms form a continuum, and there is no "fixed, cross-cultural boundary" between the obese and the healthy. We could then drop in some sophomoric anthropological data about how certain Pacific Islanders regard fatness as a sign of vitality and sexual prowess, contrasting that with the evil repressive dietary superstructures of white western society.

It is trivially easy to play this little game, and yet indulging in it is viewed as the mark of an enlightened intellect in most quarters of academe. Parroting these arguments the line that "Sex is biological, but gender is a social construct" will earn you a cookie in any humanities department you so choose.

Good point, Untenured. One of the biggest changes even in my own philosophical beliefs in the past twenty years has been the realization that continuum arguments don't usually show anything very interesting.

I will say this in support of Jeff's forboding: I truly believe that the liberal powers-that-be are poised and quite ready to impose the "trans rights" agenda at whatever human cost, and they may well succeed. I've brought up the following scenario briefly here at W4 before:

Joe is an employer who hires Bob, an unquestionably biologically male individual, to work in his office. After five months of doing his work well and getting along with people, though perhaps seeming a tad strained, Bob shows up one day in a skirt wearing makeup and demands to be called "Diane." Bob explains to everyone that he "really is a woman" though presently "male-bodied," that he is now "going through transition" (he brings a doctor's note to that effect) and eventually hopes to have gender reassignment surgery after an intermediate period of living as a woman. He now insists on using the restroom the female employees use (since this small business has no "gender-neutral" bathroom), and expects everyone to play along with his self-attribution of femininity. Joe, being a neurotypical human being, is annoyed at this, including at the way that it is interrupting the functioning of his business. So he tells Bob, "We're not going to do that. We're not going to call you Diane. I'm not going to make my female employees use the bathroom that you are also using. You're a man, and we're not going to play along with your pretense of being a woman. Moreover, you're disrupting business and distracting and creeping out everyone else, and if you don't knock it off, we won't require your services anymore." On the liberal view, this should be an offense against the law, punishable _at least_ by a fine and possibly by heavy civil damages. There should be a local board to which "Diane" can complain about this "discrimination" and "harassment" and set in motion the procedures for punishing Joe for this wrong-doing.

Now, when I've brought up (again, in less detail) this type of scenario before here in comments at W4, our local liberal commentators have taken it completely seriously. They haven't agreed that it's a reductio at all. They've obviously believed that, if Bob is "really" a "transgendered person" rather than just someone trying to play a prank on Joe for the fun of it, Joe and everyone else should take Bob's new gender identification with full seriousness and accede to all his demands.

Insanity? For sure. But the wave of the future. I was much struck during our fight two years ago by the fact that homosexual rights are so nineties. Trans rights are the new black, in more senses than one.

And it won't stop there, Lydia. There is no logical limit to the continued deformity and depravity of humans once they leave off the shackles of rationality. Marriage to animals and lifeless objects, and then to abstractions ("love", or "unity"). Creating whole new categories of identity to insist as their core identity: Well, yes, I am male-bodied, but my identity is that I am a scrapbooker, and you have to grant me state-borne privileges like pension and health-care rights from my co-scrapbooker's employer." If Anthony Kennedy's dictum in Casey is right, nobody can object to this. It will only come to a head when some knucklebrain tries to insist on brand new rights that run directly afoul of the liberal special victim groups.

What amazes me is the ease with which people leap from "sexual behaviors form a continuum" to "there are no fixed sexual categories".

Personally, I find it even more interesting that beastiality, necrophilia, pedophilia, etc. are not considered "orientations" by mainstream liberals.

I was just building an archive following the gender-inclusive hall project and stumbled upon this page. Here is some feedback at the source.

1. If it is a gender-inclusive bathroom, then you don't need 7 different versions of it. (Gender-inclusive is the term SOU students are using. So, they are for everyone.)
2. SOU is not pushing for gender-inclusive measures. Students are asking for it, and the administration has been receptive.
3.Regardless of what people do or do not believe about gender, inclusive restrooms are beneficial to several groups, not just one. These include care-givers working with clients who are differently gendered or just perceived to be differently gendered. The same for guardians with small children. Many of these bathrooms are also wheelchair accessible.
4. The state allocates a certain amount of funding each year for building renovations. These funds cannot be used for anything else, including SOU salaries. Some of the bathrooms at SOU need to be renovated for various reasons, why not make a bathroom that accommodates more people while SOU is at it?

If you want gender-theory, that's a topic for another day. ^_~

Um, Amiko (he, she, or it, whatever we are to call you, based on your opinions as given in the quoted article), I don't notice anybody in the main post or in this thread (I just did a search) criticizing your plans for society on the grounds that we would need seven different versions of the bathrooms. So, that's what we in the "logic community" call a "red herring."

As for all the rest of your points, they are irrelevant. Let's be blunt: If someone thinks your whole set of ideas about "creating your gender as you go" and eliminating gender and all the rest of it are insane, destructive, and perverse, then we *don't want to go along with your agenda*. There is no point in pretending that we should go along with it because it will have some other alleged minor practical benefit. Separate male and female bathrooms have been made handicapped accessible long ago. Parents have been dealing with what bathroom to take the little kid into for decades, and we *don't need* and *don't want* your gender-bending agenda in order to deal with wheelchairs and little kids. It is an insult to our intelligence for you to speak as though we are going to smack our foreheads and go along with the creation of a non-gendered public world, go along with literally writing in stone your ideas about the non-existence of gender, because you throw us some kind of pragmatic baloney about making bathrooms gender-neutral for people with small children. We are just not that foolish.

So, please don't waste our time. Really, please don't.

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