Speaking of violations of freedom of speech by colleges, here’s a letter to the “faculty community” of Mount Holyoke College (a high-class women’s liberal arts school), telling professors that they have to report certain types of speech. Note that these violations, however, are apparently in line with the Biden Administration’s recent rewriting of the Title IX guidelines, so federal money could be withheld from schools who don’t comply. In that sense, it’s the Biden administration itself who is responsible for policing “hate speech” and creating these new—and in my view mostly harmful—regulations (Note that as a private school, Mt. Holyoke needn’t abide by the First Amendment, but, like all nonreligious and nonmilitary schools, it certainly should.)
The new rules are laid out in this email sent to the Mount Holyoke faculty by the College President and another administrator, with the text taken from a tweet by Steve McGuire (bolding is mine):
Dear Faculty Community,
Welcome to the start of another academic year at Mount Holyoke College! As you may have learned in President Danielle R. Holley’s email communication on August 20th, the College has created a new compliance department as of this past summer. To ensure that Mount Holyoke is a safe and inclusive campus for our community as well as compliant with ever-changing regulations, two new positions were created: Assistant Vice President for Compliance and Director of Civil Rights and Community Standards.
Some of you recently heard from the Assistant Vice President for Compliance, Shannon Lynch, regarding your responsibilities as Mandated Reporters at the College. Per our Sex Discrimination and Sex-Based Harassment Policy, all College employees who are not designated as Confidential must disclose to the Title IX Coordinator when they have information that may reasonably constitute a violation of the Policy.
On August 1, Title IX Regulations expanded to include misgendering, deadnaming, and mispronouning as prohibited acts and thus expanded the set of prohibited activities of concern to mandated reporters. Because faculty have a unique role in creating classrooms as spaces of mutual trust, respect, and concern—a role that lives alongside their responsibilities under Title IX—we would like to provide some guidance regarding faculty observations of misgendering in their classrooms. It is the expectation of the College that faculty report when misgendering occurs in the following ways:
when the misgendering has created a hostile environment;
when there is open mocking of our Pronoun Policy or an individual’s choice of pronouns;
or when a student reports being misgendered, deadnamed, or has been subject to incorrect use of their pronouns.
Shannon will follow up with all parties named in a report, offering resources and support, as well as procedural options if the policies’ definitions and standards have been met.
The scope of Title IX has shifted, but Mount Holyoke’s overarching commitment to education, care, and support of our gender diverse community of students, faculty and staff remains unchanged. Faculty can continue to look to the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, as well as the Teaching and Learning Initiative (TLI) for additional resources and support. We also want to highlight the upcoming TGNC10 programming, which will provide opportunities for education, discussion, and community related to our 10 years as a gender diverse campus. [Although Mt. Holyoke is a women’s school, about a decade ago they decided to allow transgender women to enroll.]
Additional resources related to our Title IX policies can be found here. You may also visit the College Title IX webpage to learn more about our policies and procedures, as well as support and resources available to our campus community.
Should you have any questions or concerns regarding your responsibilities listed above, please contact Shannon Lynch at shannonlynch@mtholyoke.edu for more information.
Thank you and we wish you a successful semester ahead! =
Shannon Lynch
AVP for ComplianceLisa M. Sullivan
Provost and Dean of Faculty
Mount Holyoke College
You can see how Title IX has changed for the worse under Biden, which, beyond changes highlighted above, also removed protections for students accused of sexual harassment or assault when their cases were being adjudicated by colleges. These protections, like the right to cross-examine witnesses, are inherent in the legal system when sexual harassment or assault is judged in the courts, and were reinstated by Betsy DeVos, but dismantled again by the Biden administration. The protections afforded students when they are judged in college hearings are far weaker than when they’re judged in the courts.
And there’s more, but they’re saving these changes until after the election, presumably because they’ll be unpopular:
Absent is a proposal on transgender participation on specific men and women athletics teams, which is anticipated after the November election.
You can read about that rule at the link to the WaPo article above, which describes a proposal apparently applying to all secondary schools through high school:
[The rule] would outlaw blanket state bans but gives schools a road map for how they can bar transgender girls from competing in certain circumstances, particularly in competitive sports.
But allowing transgender females to compete against biological women isn’t a popular view, and so the administration, in an act of duplicity and mendacity, put it off:
. . . . Nonetheless, issuing such a rule risks injecting the issue into an election year in which President Biden faces a close contest with former president Donald Trump, who has promised to ban trans women from women’s sports if reelected.
“Folks close to Biden have made the political decision to not move on the athletics [regulation] pre-election,” said one person familiar with the administration’s thinking. “It seems to be too much of a hot topic.”
Seriously, how is it okay to adopt a policy that’s unpopular with the public, but not publicize it or put it into force until the three-month period between the election and the inauguration of a new administration?
At any rate, I agree with Mt. Holyoke’s first point above: misgendering should not be allowed to create a hostile climate for a given student by repeatedly harassing that student directly, although criticizing the general notion of going along with someone’s pronoun preference is simply freedom of speech to criticize compelled speech.
Ditto for “open mocking of our pronoun policy”, which again prevents someone from criticizing a policy that is debatable. That mockery, too, is in line with the First Amendment. Finally, deadnaming or pronoun “misuse” not used to harass a student directly seems to me in line with the First Amendment as well. (Still, if a student simply hears about it and reports it, that too has become a violation.) I suspect that if this issue gets to the courts, some of the provisions of the new Title IX provisions will be struck down.
Here’s a tweet about this from Nicholas Christakis, who along with his wife Erika had their own speech run-in at Yale University:
A college that prohibits “mocking” a policy (not a person) simply does not have academic freedom nor understand freedom of expression. Who are these administrative apparatchiks overrunning our universities? https://t.co/zV3PrBEc4G
— Nicholas A. Christakis (@NAChristakis) September 5, 2024
RE Jerry writing [bolding added]:
I strongly urge Jerry and everyone else not to refer to transidentifying males as “transgender females.” Let’s not give away the word “female” as well.
Agree. “Trans-identified males” is more accurate, given that these individuals are neither female nor women. I realize this creates a problem for a women’s college that admits only a certain class of men rather than all men but that is its problem, not ours. I’m sure the college has a policy to suppress its being raised anyway.
I think that transidentifying male is preferable to transidentified male, because it is the male who is doing the identifying.
Yes, agree, for the reason you give. I’ve just seen “trans-identified” more frequently and my eye skipped over the difference.
That, though, seems to put other people in the position of having to conform to something they don’t believe. Is it rude to refer (since pronouns are third-person) to an man who wants to be treated as a woman as “him”? I used to think it would be polite to refer to Loretta as “her”. I have reached the point, though, where I am disinclined to put up with the charade. Which is the harassment? Not going along with the Emperor’s new clothes or being forced to?
Looking back with nostalgia to my university days (1969-73) when misgendering, deadnaming and mispronouning were not even words.
In fact iPhone autocomplete does recognize two of them (it does recognize deadnaming). It thinks the last one is a misspelling of “mispronouncing.”
Your iPhone has misidentified “mispronouning”, and is thus guilty of mocking Mount Holyoke’s pronoun policy. Luckily, if you don’t work for Mt.Holyoke, they can’t sentence you to a struggle session, or your iPhone to re-education camp.
The survey evidence on whether the public thinks that male athletes should be allowed to compete in the sex category of their choice:
IPSOS LGBT+ Pride Report 2024. A 26-Country Ipsos Global Advisor Survey. June 2024
https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2024-06/Pride-Report-2024_2.pdf
The survey question was (see page 37 of the report):
The data was collected in Feb/March 2024 (see page 57 of the report).
For the USA (results for Canada were very similar) (see page 37 of the report), 21% supported “transgender athletes competing based on the gender they identify with,” 52% opposed it. 27% had no opinion on this. Of those who had an opinion on this, 52/73 = 71% opposed transidentifying male athletes competing in the sex category of their choice.
Note that the question cited was asked in 26 countries (though in a few country the sample was not representative (see page 57 of the report, where the methodology is explained).
The Trans Link With Biden
Andrew Gold: Why Dumb Celebrities Transition Their CHILDREN – Interview with Malcolm Clark | heretics. 79, Aug 5, 2024, 57 mins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSKxTrlMA4o
Description: Malcolm Clark is a gay Emmy-nominated [Scottish] tv writer & producer and science journalist who has taken a stand against trans ideology [and puberty blockers]. We discuss how celebrities are using trans children as a fashion accessory, and the problems with the gender ‘industry’. Included are segments on David Tennant, Jamie Lee Curtis and RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Clark’s substack is called The Secret Gender Files
https://malcolmrichardclark.substack.com/archive
He tweets at https://x.com/TwisterFilm
@33:15 there was this wonderful picture, wonderful in a bad way, about four years, three years ago.
the two people that the Biden Administration sent to celebrate Bastille day in France were the nonbinary atomic expert Sam Brinton who was later charged with stealing women’s underwear from airports
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Brinton
and Rachel Levine the assistant Health secretary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Levine
and so there’s this amazing picture
oh yes, who looks like a bloke in a dress. I mean there’s nobody who looks at that guy and thinks … Bloke in a dress, bloke in an admiral’s uniform. Has never done a day’s service in his life, really
and is advocating giving, it was later discovered, only a couple of weeks ago*, that they [Levine] had been arguing within WPATH [World Professional Association for Transgender Health], to remove all the [age] limits at which children could be given hormones so they could be given hormones at any age which is appalling so you could give a six-year-old girl male hormones I mean it’s just absolutely appalling and that’s the Assistant Health Secretary of the United States arguing for that
Gold: whoever made that appointment must be senile
34:55 you would think, well no, they would be senile now [Biden], but also have very close family friends who are trans
yes, I’ve written before about, the trans link with Biden is intimate and deeply personal, because his son Beau, who died of cancer [in 2015, at age 46], the person who worked in his office was a trans activist, who is now a senator, who became a senator, after Beaux died, the guy who said he’s a woman came to work for Joe Biden. they’re close family friends and he has taught, the transwoman has taught, about how they bonded, the Biden family, Jill and Joe Biden bonded over the death of Beaux. so they are so captured by the whole trans ideology
The photo that Malcolm Clark referred to, showing Sam Brinton and Rachel Levine, the two people that the Biden Administration sent to celebrate Bastille day in France (a few years ago), is here:
https://x.com/Epperson4Bob/status/1566772562453045248/photo/1
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“[Although Mt. Holyoke is a women’s school, about a decade ago they decided to allow transgender women to enroll.]”
So it’s a mixed sex school, NOT a women’s school.
As Peter commented, referring to ‘transgender women’ is confusing to many. When speaking plain English, that’s an adjective and a noun meaning a woman who is transgender, ie transman. Many now use the term trans identified man (TIM) or trans identified woman (TIF). That is the reality of the situation and doesn’t give words for one sex to the other.
It seems they want to force students to lie, which is a shocking thing for a university. ‘Misgendering’ only exists if you believe in trans ideology. It’s like trying to force atheists to pray to a nonexistent god.
Making mispronouning an offence is laughable. People often make mistakes with names from other languages. Any sane student should change their name to something in the Hadzane ‘click’ language, Dutch or Arabic. I bet they’d have trouble with Scottish names like Ruiraidh Naughtie too.
RE: “It seems they want to force students to lie, which is a shocking thing for a university.”
Remember what happened at Harvard University, whose then-president Claudine Gay told the US Congress (some committee thereof) last year that Harvard was “deeply committed to free speech” (while also placing dead last in FIRE’s free speech rankings of US universities and colleges)? :
With the institutionalization of DEI lying has become commonplace and de rigueur (considered necessary for acceptance in fashionable society, Oxford English Dictionary) in US higher education.
We seem to be turning into a progressive police state. If a professor refuses to use the grammatically incorrect “they,” but instead—to avoid misgendering—uses “it,” would that be a violation? Would the professor face career-damaging sanctions? I suppose that the outcome would have to be decided in court. This seems to be where we’re headed—court cases on the use of “they” vs. “it.”
The daughter of a friend recently graduated from Mount Holyoke. I find her insufferably doctrinaire, rigid and arrogant. I’ve been wondering if the school molded her – I barely knew her before so maybe she was always this way.
‘Twas not always thus. My wife graduated from one of the Five Sisters and is now a middle-aged centrist like me (who went to State U.). She remembers that many of her classmates were conservatives who went into finance (and would have become tech bros today).
But I guess it’s a different world now, and elite American colleges have a lot of insufferable, rigid, arrogant, doctrinaire high schoolers to choose from.
I really hope Title IX’s recent revisions are challenged in the courts. Including “gender identity” with sex for purposes of non discrimination ignores the fact that they clash.
Well, they already have been challenged.
Supreme Court refuses DOJ request to partially reinstate new Title IX rule. August 16, 2024
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4832117-supreme-court-denies-title-ix-doj-request/
The Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision denied the Biden administration’s emergency request to partially reinstate its new Title IX rule.
Kara Dansky (Aug 17, 2024): All 9 [Supreme Court] justices agree that the lower courts were right to block the new [Title IX] rule’s redefinition of sex to include “gender identity.” The sole disagreement is about the scope of the injunctions and whether the redefinition is severable. This is a big deal.
https://x.com/KDansky/status/1824799066271715632
One of my concerns with these regulations is that I am forced, as faculty, to report to a Title IX administrator issues that either I can deal with myself as the teacher of the class, or that the student should be able to determine if they wish to escalate to the college admin.
Years ago I worked for a rape crisis center. One of our policies was that the victim of assault should decide who and when they share their experience. It was not our job to insist they call the police; after all, they were adults. I agree with that position.
These federal regulations mean faculty must report incidents that they witness or that a student describes to them. This treats adult students like juveniles and faculty like enforcers. A student should be able to share a sexual assualt or trans bullying event with me without fear that I will escalate to a bureaucrat without their consent.
Is it just me who thinks “Assistant Vice President for Compliance” sounds Orwellian?
It definitely sounds Orwellian.
Ugly neologism of the week, from their Pronoun Sharing and Disclosure Policy (linked to above):
“What if Someone Makes a Mistake and Mispronouns Someone Else?”
I used to think well of Mt Holyoke, but no longer. Just another pomoblojo (my own contribution to ugly neologisms).
MH’s Reporting of Campus Bias, Insensitivity, and Discrimination Incidents page links to their (or should that be xir?) online Nondiscrimination Incident Report form. The categories of “discrimination, harassment, and/or bias” include “insults” and “mockery”.
So, pointing out that someone is being stupid (an insult, particularly when true) is now an Insensitivity offence, and maybe also a Bias offence against the Stupid community.
And using sarcasm is now a mockery offence. I’m so impressed (oops).
As outlined in Lionel Shriver’s new novel “Mania”, which is bitingly funny, and seems a little over the top (for the moment).
Thanks for the recommendation. I’ve requested it from my local library.
In 2022, Colin Wright wrote this excellent article on the topic of pronouns:
When Asked ‘What Are Your Pronouns,’ Don’t Answer — A seemingly innocuous question masks a demand for conformity with a regressive set of ideas.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/asked-your-pronouns-dont-answer-lgbtqia-sogie-gender-identity-nonbinary-transgender-trans-rights-sexism-misogyny-feminism-11643992762
Here are a few gems from Mr. Wright:
While being subjected to constant rituals of pronoun exchanges may seem silly or annoying at best and exhausting at worst, in reality participating in this ostensibly benign practice helps to normalize a regressive ideology that is inflicting enormous harm on society.
The clear message of gender ideology is that, if you’re a female who doesn’t “identify with” the social roles and stereotypes of femininity, then you’re not a woman; if you’re a male who similarly rejects the social roles and stereotypes of masculinity, then you’re not a man.
So when someone asks for your pronouns, and you respond with “she/her,” even though you may be communicating the simple fact that you’re female, a gender ideologue would interpret this as an admission that you embrace femininity and the social roles and expectations associated with being female. While women’s-rights movements fought for decades to decouple womanhood from rigid stereotypes and social roles, modern gender ideology has melded them back together.
Participating in pronoun rituals makes you complicit in gender ideology’s regressive belief system, thereby legitimizing it. Far from an innocuous act signaling support for inclusion, it serves as an implicit endorsement of gender ideology and all of its radical tenets.
The redefining of “man,” “woman,” “boy” and “girl” around sex-related stereotypes has serious real-world implications. The rejection of these stereotypes is now commonly viewed as a medical condition (gender dysphoria) to be treated with puberty blockers (for children), cross-sex hormones and surgeries that result in permanent sterility and consign patients to a lifetime of medical bills.