Arabic does some funny business with gender: Persons (rational) get masculine and feminine sound plurals; nouns that aren’t persons (nonrational) get broken plurals, but they are all gendered either masculine or feminine. But when a nonrational noun that is masculine in the singular gets a broken plural, it doesn’t take masculine plural like you’d expect—it gets feminine singular agreement with adjectives and verbs. There’s even more fun with the number words, which up to ten take the feminine ending when they’re masculine, and minus that ending when feminine—but it reverses for numbers above ten. The feminine ending is also used to make a masculine collective noun into a feminine singular instance of said noun. Arabic is a trip.
This actually sounds plausible. I don’t believe any invented pronouns will catch on either, but a new word or phrase for ‘they’ might arise naturally.
I use ‘eir’ for the possessive. I can’t decide how to pronounce ‘es’, so I don’t use it.
Note that I only tend to use these pronouns in the context of the science fiction website Orion’s Arm, which has been using these pronouns for twenty years; many individuals in this imagined future have indeterminate or flexible gender, and sometime we use variants such as ‘ve’ for virtual and ‘xe’ for alien, and so on.
As a trans woman who presents pretty feminine, if someone referred to me as they/them I would think they were either unsure of my gender or doing it intentionally to not acknowledge my gender. I use they/them when they prefer to be referred to as that (such as non-binary or genderqueer) or I’m unsure of the person’s gender, simple enough and works pretty well.
Bumped.
Interesting… I guess the question arising out of that is: how do we think change should best be achieved. it’s fairly obvious change is necessary; uncontrolled change can be chaotic and not very productive (and could potentially lead to a genuine slippery slope of the non-fallacious variety, or enough fallacious accusations of slippery slopes so as to make it hard to see the wood for the trees), but control of change often impedes that change in a way that is undesirable, quite possibly unfair to those who need it.
I guess I’m asking: must it always be a fight?
Can someone explain how it was initially decided he lacked standing?
Seems to me that he should be able to sue. And that he should lose the case. I doubt claimed religious beliefs trump Title IX protections. Claims that their religious belief require them to express hate speech (be it anti-Semitic, anti-Asian, racist, transphobic, or any other) does not mean that a college must allow them to create a hostile environment for students.
So far as I know, there was no ruling that he lacked standing. the district court granted a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim for which the law offers a remedy. The lower court was saying “You have no legally recognized complaint against the university.”
CNN then has it wrong?
Looking for more I find this:
And the actual ruling of the appeal court here.
If I read it correctly (and I most certainly am not a lawyer) it seems like CNN does have it wrong, but really parsing it out is hard for me. It seems like the Appeals court believes that misgendering is not creating a hostile environment, that Merriweather calling all students by their last names only would an undue burden upon him, and that his free speech and free exercise was being restricted, at leas to the degree that dismissal was unfounded?
Yes, I believe they have it wrong. They confused lack of standing with failure to state a claim.
It’s not the appeals court’s place to reach these conclusions. All they did was say that he has a claim for infringement of his right to exercise his religious rights under the First Amendment. All that means is that he gets a chance to prove the elements of his claim.
It may not be there place but their ruling still seems to say such pretty strongly.
It’s going to be a tough fight to mandate speech at a public university.
Even public universities can make rules mandating respectful forms of address from their employees toward their students.
If I were a student at Shawnee State, for example, and I got married to Cecil Adams (hey, a gal can dream, right?), and I chose to keep using my maiden name “Ms. Kimstu” in my studies, I don’t think a professor could legitimately insist on a constitutional right to call me “Mrs. Adams” instead.
It wouldn’t matter how sincere the professor was in his personal belief that married women are morally obligated to be called “Mrs. Husbandname” instead of “Ms. Maidenname”. He still wouldn’t have the right to overrule my choice of name in his communications with me in his official capacity as professor, just because I was female and married. That would be discriminatory treatment.
Likewise, it appears from Shawnee State University official policies that it is forbidden to discriminate against transgender students:
IANAL but it seems to me possible that discrimination against transgender people might be even less permissible at a public university, in the wake of the recent Harris v. EEOC Supreme Court case, than at, say, a private sectarian university that can plead a religious-freedom exception to nondiscrimination requirements.
In terms of mandating that speech by a professor does not create a hostile learning environment? It already is. A professor does not have a free hand to call Jews in the class kikes, nor to comment on female students breasts.
The issues are whether or not intentional misgendering and otherwise othering a transgender student is similarly creating a hostile environment (to me that is a definitely yes), and if such hateful speech is protected as a religious belief (which seems like a no to me).
I have yet to read it through thoroughly, but the point is that even if it did say or imply that, it can’t rule on that at this point. The issue of whether misgendering creates a hostile environment wasn’t before it, only whether there is a plausible claim that the university’s policy infringed on the professor’s free speech rights.
My impression has always been that posting “public content” means the content is directed at EVERYONE. Did the individual in question explain why, exactly, they feel so important as to believe that the entire universe should be constructed in a way that pleases them? Sorry, but that annoys the hell out of me.
Okay, I just gave the opinion a quick skim.
From my reading: It concludes nothing about hostile environment. I think it’s a question even whether the hostile environment question is before the court, given that the university’s final disciplinary action was taken based on equal treatment, not hostile environment.
The appeals court judge does seem to heavily sympathize with the professor, but that language isn’t legally significant.
The legally significant portions are these:
The district court … held that a professor’s speech in the classroom is never protected by the First Amendment. We disagree: Under controlling Supreme Court and Sixth Circuit precedent, the First Amendment protects the academic speech of university professors. Since Meriwether has plausibly alleged that Shawnee State violated his First Amendment rights by compeling his speech or silence and casting a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom, his free-speech claim may proceed.
[T]he academic-freedom exception to Garcetti [which says that government employees don’t have free speech rights in the context of their jobs] covers all classroom speech related to matters of public concern, whether that speech is germane to the contents of the lecture or not. Theneed for the free exchagne of ideas in the college classroom is unlike that in other public workplace settings. And a professor’s in-class speech to his students is anything but speech by an ordinary government employee."
And that use of pronouns is a matter of public concern that isn’t overriden by the university’s need to operate the public services it performs thorugh its employees efficiently.
So the appeals court is not ruling that there is no hostile environment, or even that there is no unequal treatment, in this case, or that these things don’t exist as problems.
It is saying that a professor’s academic freedom to speak on the controversial issue of gender identity and to express a particular opinion is protected as free speech and free exercise of religion.
Now this is on a Rule 12(b)(6) motion, so all the appeals court is saying is that if everything the professor claims is true then he might plausibly be entitled to a remedy under the law. It doesn’t rule on whether anything he says is true. And it doesn’t reach any conclusions regarding the comparison between misgendering and using racist or sexist language in the classroom.
I’m keying in on pg 28 paragraph 1. Questioning how the misgendering or other othering plausibly creates a hostile educational environment.
Yeah, their view was that neutral terms were inclusive of gendered terms, so people who think of themselves as ‘he’ or ‘she’ should be OK to accept them as a (superior) alternative.