Student suspended for being rational
There is a growing movement to punish people for not believing the deeply solipsistic and irrational notion that a man becomes a woman because he says so and a woman becomes a man because she says so. I don’t become a dolphin because I say so. I can certainly desire to be a dolphin and pretend to be a dolphin and people can affirm that I am a dolphin, but that doesn’t make it so.
There is something extremely bizarre about this political movement for me because I actually support people making the decision to perform whatever surgeries or go through whatever hormone treatments they want to transform their bodies into something they feel most comfortable with. If a business were to fire a person because they felt they were not the same sex they were born with or they decided to go through with those procedures I’d oppose the business’ decision and support a lawsuit against the business. I personally don’t have any attachment to my own “gender” and find gender norms to be absurd archaic restrictions on individuality. I’d find it to be a delightful experiment and adventure to explore the possibility of being an actual woman; but such a power of yet does not exist.
However, punishing people for not affirming an ideology that a person has strong rational grounds to reject is a form of religious persecution. In this case, the religion is the Church of the Awoken. It simply hasn’t established itself officially as a religion, and thus their behavior doesn’t seem to be covered by the restrictions of the first amendment.
If I were a student in an education program at a state college and declared on my social media that I think the notion of a man being resurrected from the dead was absurd and that pretending to drink the blood of a godman was gross, I’d be protected by federal law from persecution by that state college on the basis of my statements about those religious topics. If they suspended me because I didn’t properly affirm Christian doctrine they would be violating the first amendment.
There really isn’t any difference with regard to post modern transgender philosophy (I consciously distinguish postmodern because not all transgender philosophy suggests that a man can in fact become a woman by simply declaring it) and Christian philosophy with regard to the rational foundation. It is faith based, not reasoned based. And people should not be punished by the state because they do not affirm a faith based philosophy. We should be protected under the civil rights act of 1964. I hope he brings the school to court. And I hope people start realizing that supporting transgender people doesn’t require submitting to the most irrational elements of some authoritarian transgender activist philosophy.