Leading College Faculty Union Says Belief in Only 2 Genders is Based on "Ideology"

“One of America’s leading college faculty unions is decrying attempts to define gender as ‘binary,’ and claims that the Trump administration and the ‘religious fundamentalists’ who support such a definition are moved by ideology, not fact. The American Association of University Professors, which has 500 chapters and 39 state associations, released a statement last month titled ‘The Assault on Gender and Gender Studies.’ The statement, which was created by AAUP’s subcommittee of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the Committee on Women in the Academic Profession, railed against the Trump administration for considering a plan to define gender as a ‘biological, immutable condition’ defined by a person’s sex at birth. The plan stoked fears that the word ‘transgender’ could be ‘defined out of existence.’ The AAUP statement also condemned Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán for issuing a decree prohibiting gender studies courses from being taught in universities throughout the country. The statement also went after administrations in Poland, Brazil and Bulgaria for ‘attempts to refute the scholarly consensus that gender identity is variable and mutable.’ AAUP claims that those ‘authoritarian efforts’ lead to a justification of ‘racial, class, and sexual policing that disciplines forms of kinship and homemaking.’ ‘Politicians and religious fundamentalists are neither scientists nor scholars,’ the AAUP statement asserts. ‘Their motives are ideological. It is they who are offering “gender ideology”, by attempting to override the insights of serious scholars. By substituting their ideology for years of assiduous research, they impose their will in the name of a science that is without factual support. This is a cynical invocation of science for purely political ends.’ Despite accusing politicians and religious fundamentalists of having ideological motives with no ‘factual support,’ AAUP failed in its statement to provide any sort of citation to the ‘biologists, anthropologists, historians, and psychologists’ it relies on to form its own argument. Although the AAUP statement wants to present politicians and religious fundamentalists as the main purveyor of the argument against beliefs in mutable gender, doctors and academics are also calling on the Trump administration to define gender as a ‘biological, immutable condition.’”

​“Leading College Faculty,”Christian Post, Dec. 12, 2018

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