Quodlibet
Transgenderism: What the Biology Professor Must Say
Whatever political pressures the university may bring to bear upon it, biological science proceeds on the premise that sex is binary, genetic, and ineradicable. When a human being does not identify with his or her sex, it is a matter of personal desire and imagination, not of science.
The object of science is the attainment of universal knowledge, so to demand or coerce assent to subjective "personal realities" is to require its suicide—or that it in some way go into hiding to avoid eradication.
A school's requirement that all those connected with it admit into the world of knowledge—truth as science can perceive it—personal, subjective realities with regard to sex, will doubtless make those who demand release from scientific dealing with reality feel the happy comfort of "inclusion." But the price that must be paid for this policy in a university is ruinous, being nothing less than its death as an institution devoted to the universal. It now becomes, by the instrument of its inclusion policy, a mass of competing ideologies, with no compass except that provided by the greatest will to power.
In such a context, as we should have learned from watching the universities under the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, an academic community not only quarters itself in the Shinar Plain to serve a politically inspired idol, but academic freedom, as we have known it, is gone.
S. M. Hutchens is a Touchstone senior editor.
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more on education from the online archives
26.5—Sept/Oct 2013
The Perils of Pragmatism in Christian Attitudes Toward the Liberal Arts by Robin Phillips
27.2—March/April 2014
Higher Education Should Advance the Glorious Liberty of the Sons of God by Anthony Esolen
more from the online archives
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
The Alternate & Alternative Worlds of H. P. Lovecraft & C. S. Lewis by C. R. Wiley
32.5—September/October 2019
on the Inhuman Transformation of Transgenderism by Anthony Esolen
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