A recent article in the Financial Times captured the gender confusion at Smith College:
“Signing up for a beginner’s Italian class is usually a simple enough task, but for Sebastian, a second-year student at Smith College in the US, it proved complicated. Smith has always been a school for women, which is what Sebastian was when he began a bachelor’s degree there in 2001. But since then, he has become a man. At least that is how she thinks of herself. Himself. That is how his friends think of him, too, but it isn’t necessarily how a new Italian teacher would see him. And since Italian is such a gender-specific language, Sebastian needed to let the teacher know before the semester began that there would be a new studente in class, not a studentessa.”
The FT article isn’t available without an expensive (but almost worth it for this one story!) subscription, but to summarize: More and more women who attend Smith College are becoming transgender students. But you know the whole enterprise lacks seriousness — or why to they remain at a women’s college? Or maybe the whole thing is being taken too seriously…
As the American Thinker notes in a wonderful article on this priceless piece:
“Smith was founded to be exclusively for women, but now is taking seriously the claims of maleness of sexually confused people with two X-chromosomes. They must be addressed as males, a class of individuals not admitted to the college. Issues of bathroom usage, and even the proper form of gender-specific languages like Italian, rile the campus. The mental gymnastics involved are formidable, and the problems endless.
“My favorite paragraph (among many hilarious examples) in the article reveals the utter self-absorption and lack of perspective of those who go off the ideological deep end:
“Just as Herbert Marcuse’s theories were important on campus in his day, gender theory is important now,” says Paisley Currah, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and a board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute.
“Earth to Professor Currah: if you want your theoretical obsessions to be taken seriously, don’t choose to compare them to those of a man who has already returned to his default position of well-deserved obscurity. Marcuse is a joke to all but a handful of feverish radicals. The comparison is apt, given that future generations will scratch their heads in amazement as to how transgender theory could ever have been taken seriously, just as they today do over the onetime popularity of Professor Marcuse’s ‘repressive tolerance’ theories, which, come to think of it, just might apply to transgenderism in a way you do not intend.”