Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.
The focus this time: Biological reality it H8 speech!!1!
First, a little castrato mood music:
Carrying on…
The University of Minnesota seems to realize that you can’t go too fast in imposing your wokeness on others…
“Students and faculty senators at the University of Minnesota will vote in May on a gender pronoun policy.
“A previous version of the policy proposal would have punished the incorrect use of gender pronouns with anything up to and including expulsion or termination of employment, as Campus Reform previously reported. However, UMN scrapped the punishment aspect from this policy in February.
“…
“The University teaches students that ‘mispronouncing someone[‘s pronoun] is a microaggression’ and that students should not “refer to [their] pronouns as ‘gender pronouns.’ ‘Pronouns are not gendered and do not directly correlate with a specific gender,’ it states.”
Other universities, are not so hesitant to attack thought criminals…
“A professor at a public university in Ohio is suing the school, claiming he was punished for not calling a student by their preferred pronoun.
“Shawnee State University philosophy professor Nicholas Meriwether declined to address a transgender student as a female, according to a lawsuit filed by Christian conservative nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) in federal court.
“The professor called on the student in class, saying ‘yes, sir.’ The lawsuit states that Meriweather ‘has always used the titles and pronouns that refer to a student’s biological gender’ and that he ‘has never knowingly used feminine titles and pronouns to refer to men or masculine titles and pronouns to refer to women.'”
Or, just ignore that differences exist at all!
“[W]hile removing all gender pronouns may seem drastic, Google might not have had much choice. Product manager Paul Lambert said the company tried several solutions that kept pronouns, but none of them worked well. The only surefire way was to play it safe, he said. The restriction should affect less than one percent of Smart Compose suggestions, so the potential for headaches is relatively small.
“The move isn’t surprising given Google’s attempts to be more inclusive of women and the LGBTQ community. At the same time, it’s also a defensive move for a company whose dependence on algorithms has caused trouble in the past. It had to tweak its autocomplete suggestions in 2016 when the search engine suggested anti-Semitic queries, for instance. If Google didn’t put limits on Smart Compose, there’s chance an everyday user could have encountered the problem and created much more of an uproar.”
TTFN.
