A college student receives a failing grade for using the word “biological women,” a high school student is banned from graduation and loses his job for saying “guys are guys,” and yet it’s the LBGT community that claims they’re in a “state of emergency.”
While conservatives have been busy celebrating the success of boycotts against Bud Light and Target, two companies that recently pursued excessively woke marketing strategies to the horror of their customers and shareholders, progressives have been busy continuing their wokeward march, completely unconcerned about any potential backlash. If there was any doubt, 200 LGBTQ groups recently demanded that Target restock their shelves with tuck-friendly and wide-crotch swimsuits for children along with other merchandise designed by a self-avowed Satanist. “When it comes to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion, there is no such thing as neutrality,” the coalition declared while also demanding the company ensure the safety of employees despite not a single instance of violence and release a statement “reaffirming their commitment to the LGBTQ+ community.” Target must comply with these demands within 24 hours or suffer some unspecified punishment. The message could not be more clear: You are either with them or against them, the same as George W. Bush’s famously misbegotten description of the War on Terror only this time being with “them” means you believe six-year old boys should be able tuck their penis in a special holder if they want to pretend they’re women at the beach or pool. Any one who has any qualms about whether children should be sexualized in this manner – much less be permanently altered via gender “affirming” surgery – is not on the right side of history, or whatever, and must be stopped. Putting this another way, you can support gay marriage, anti-discrimination in the work place, insurance coverage for adults to transition, and even men competing in women’s sports, but if you draw the line at children’s wear with a special trans-friendly crotch, you are the enemy.
The coalition making demands of Target does not have the power to force their will upon the company, but there are more than enough “allies” willing to use positions of authority to punish those who disagree. Two troubling stories from the academic world over the past couple of weeks illustrate this sad fact more than well enough. First, a college student at the University of Cincinnati received a failing grade on her proposal for a paper simply for using the phrase “biological women” in the abstract. Olivia Krolczyk, 20, was asked to pick a topic related to feminism for a class on Women’s Gender Studies in Pop Culture. She proposed researching the challenges women have faced in sports throughout history up to and including being forced to compete against men in some cases. It certainly seems a reasonable topic given the battle for equal access to sports that resulted in Title IX and the recent controversies over swimmers like Lia Thomas who previously competed as men dominating women’s competition. The professor actually agreed that was the case, calling it a “solid proposal,” but failed her anyway because “biological women” is an “exclusionary term.” The professor’s precise words were, “Olivia, this is a solid proposal. However, the terms ‘biological women’ are exclusionary and are not allowed in this course as they further reinforce heteronormativity. Please reassess your topic and edit to focus on women’s rights (not just ‘females’) and I’ll regrade.” Of course, the professor’s feedback is impossible to implement, which seems to be part of the plan. The use of modifiers for gender terms is both widespread and required to analyze any situation with potentially competing interests. We have “women of color,” “black women,” “trans women,” “lesbian women,” and a host of other adjectives to clearly identify the groups we are referring to. If you cannot use “biological women” then there is also no such thing as “trans women,” making it impossible to discuss their impact on the broader category of women’s sports in particular and feminism in general. George Orwell couldn’t have put it better: You cannot talk intelligently about what you cannot name, and you will be failed if you try to name it.
The second story comes to us from a high school in Idaho of all places, where a senior was banned from his own graduation ceremony for having the temerity to state plainly that “Guys are guys and girls are girls. There is no in-between.” Travis Lohr said this as part of an activity where seniors offer advice about their high school experience with underclassmen and women. “I didn’t direct it at any groups or anything like that; it was just something I chose to say in the moment,” Mr. Lohr explained. “There was a short pause, and then an uproar of cheers.” The leadership at the school, however, was less than enthused. Principal Dan Davidian promptly informed Mr. Lohr that he would not be allowed to walk with the rest of the class to get his diploma at graduation the following Saturday. In response, over 100 students gathered outside the school to support Mr. Lohr the next day. The gathering included a bus driver, Dakota Mailloux, who decided to support the students on his own time. He arrived waving an American flag in support of free speech, but before the protest had even concluded, he was pulled into the principal’s office and fired on the spot with no reason given. The school leadership wasn’t done yet, either. They dismissed all students for the day at 10.45 AM, canceled classes, and then indefinitely postponed the graduation, blaming “outside groups and agitators” for the sudden change in plans, claiming they were threatening the safety of students, staff, and families without any evidence. All this because a single student dared to voice an opinion that would’ve been non-controversial barely a few years ago, and where Kellogg, Idaho is not exactly the center of the progressive movement. The town is a small mining community and there are less than one thousand total students in the entire school district. It’s as far from New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, and the other woke centers in the country as could be imagined, and yet school officials still feel the need to enforce their will on anyone, punishing anyone who disagrees with no regard whatsoever for the First Amendment.
Since this story broke, it has only gotten more disturbing. The canceled graduation ceremony was held in secret last weekend, and Mr. Lohr learned that the US Forest Service has rescinded their job offer to him. “I wasn’t able to walk at graduation. My offer to work for the forest service was rescinded,” Mr. Lohr told Fox News’ Rachel Campos-Duffy. He only learned about the rescinded job offer, one where he would spend his days risking his life “fighting wildland forest fires,” not exactly a woke activity, when he went to complete his final paperwork. Believe it or not, it gets worse: The Idaho Tribune identified the man who rescinded Mr. Lohr’s contract as John Heyn, head of North Idaho Type III Incident Management Team with the U.S. Forest Service’s Coeur d’Alene River Ranger District. As it happens, Mr. Heyn is married to a teacher at Kellogg High School, meaning this is purely personal retribution of the most vindictive kind perpetrated by adults acting in collusion against a teenager simply for exercising their First Amendment rights. Incredibly, Mr. Lohr is keeping a positive attitude, “That’s part of life, as I am learning, and I am going to continue to grow from here. I’m not going to dwell on it,” he said while also pointing out the obvious. “I don’t believe I would have been punished at all, personally, if I had said ‘black lives matter.’” “For this to happen over what I said, it’s just controversial…If people speak up like I did…it seems frowned upon. You can be punished for it, obviously, like I’m being punished,” he added. I would not be so sanguine: Mr. Lohr should sue every single individual and organization involved. Everyone, and I mean everyone from the school leadership to Ms. Heyn to her husband to the Park Service to President Joe Biden himself should be made to suffer as he has, even worse. Speech is protected in the United States of America, and there is no conceivable standard where an anodyne statement can be grounds for this type of punishment. The American people as well should see every single communication between the various parties, and demand the immediate firing of every person involved in this travesty. I am not exactly holding my breath on this outcome, but it needs to be said.
Fortunately, there are at least small glimmers of hope amid the march to a woke utopia. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Norway’s Healthcare Investigation Board concluded that encouraging puberty blockers and sex-change procedures for young people was based on scant medical evidence and therefore should be restricted to research settings only. “The knowledge base, especially research-based knowledge for gender-affirming treatment (hormonal and surgical), is deficient and the long-term effects are little known,” the UKOM, an independent government watchdog over Norway’s healthcare system, explained in their report. “This is particularly true for the teenage population where the stability of their gender incongruence is also not known.” I would venture to guess that Norway in general is more woke than Idaho, offering at least some hope that a trend which includes everything from sexualizing children to permanently altering them for the rest of their lives is cresting and will potentially recede. At the same time, it seems equally unlikely that progressives invested in this radical ideology, one which exists in defiance of all available evidence and human experience, will relent. If I had to guess, this will get worse before it gets better, and sure enough CNN chimed in with an editorial claiming there is a “state of emergency” in the United States for LGBTQ people. “Despite immense progress on rights for gay, lesbian, trans and other minority groups in the United States,” wrote Jill Filipovic, “we are in the midst of an expansive and ugly right-wing backlash to those rights, and it’s imperiling transgender and other gender-diverse Americans and their families.” What is this ugly backlash? In her own words, the number one issue was that sixteen states “now have laws either fully banning or tightly restricting gender-affirming care for minors,” leading her to declare that “This is the stuff of nightmares.” In other words, unless children can permanently change their gender on a whim (and of course purchase tuck-friendly swimsuits to hide their penis in the meantime), there will be a war on the LGBTQ community. This is how sick these people are and they must be stopped.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 