« When it comes to America's food supply, leftist ideals clash with reality | On her last day, Jen Psaki lies about Abbott's baby formula »
May 14, 2022

A Wisconsin school charges three 8th-graders with sexual harassment

By Andrea Widburg

The Kiel Area School District (KASD), a small district in Wisconsin, made national news on Friday for a very bad reason: the middle school filed a Title IX sexual harassment claim against three eighth-graders for the "crime" of refusing to use the "they/them" pronouns that one of their classmates demanded.*

Before going farther, let me make my position clear: there have always been people who wished they were members of the opposite sex.  The more extreme ones claimed that they were, in fact, members of the opposite sex.  Up until recently, it was understood that people in this second category were mentally ill with a syndrome called "body dysphoria."  Another form of this mental illness is anorexia, which sees a healthy person insist that she is morbidly obese.  We do not put people with anorexia on diets.

Unfortunately, because the lunatics have taken over the asylum, we now have a societal insistence that we accept as true that people with body dysphoria tied to their sexual identity are correct rather than mentally ill.  There's no evidence that this is true.  However, a massive, money-sucking, power-hungry industry has grown up around so-called transgenderism, with schools, clinics, hospitals, therapists, surgeons and of course Planned Parenthood, dedicated to convincing children that flights of fantasy or longings or the normal discomfort of puberty mean they were born in the wrong body — and then assuring them that they can remedy this situation through hormones, surgery, and forcing people to recognize their imaginary "gender" by honoring "their pronouns."

Again, let's be clear: pronouns have developed over centuries to streamline English so that we don't constantly have to say a person's name.  Thus, "Peggy went to the store to buy Peggy's self some milk so that Peggy could share Peggy's milk with Peggy's father."  Thanks to the wonders of pronouns, we get "Peggy went to the store to buy herself some milk so that she could share her milk with her father."  And if Peggy and her friend Paul go, plural pronouns simplify things still further.  "Peggy and Paul went to the store to buy themselves some milk so that they could share their milk with their father" is infinitely easier than saying those two names at every juncture.  We even have pronouns for singular creatures (e.g., dogs or cats) that are not human: "it."  "It" also works for humans who claim they are neither male nor female.


Image: Kiel Middle School.  Twitter screen grab.

Pronouns are not a matter of personal preference; they are a matter of common usage to increase our ability to communicate clearly and with accuracy.  That's how we avoid ludicrous sentences such as this one, from a horrific article about a man who used his own daughter in graphic homemade BDSM movies (emphasis mine):

A transgender mother who forced the seven-year-old daughter she fathered to engage in child pornography at her New Jersey home has been jailed for 25 years without parole, along with three accomplices.

The fact that there are well over 100 "pronouns" and counting, with a person capable of changing pronouns according to mood and day of the week means that these aren't pronouns at all.  They are verbal narcissistic tics.  Case in point:

What all this means is that the "evil" act of "misgendering" does not exist.  Other than the extremely small subset of people who are genetically intersex, everyone else is either male or female, man or woman, boy or girl, he or she, him or her.  Some people cleverly disguise themselves as the opposite sex and enjoy the fact that no one is the wiser, so they get the benefit of the wrong appellations, but that doesn't change their biological reality.

Please keep all of this in mind as you consider that the KASD has charged three eighth-graders with sexual harassment under Title IX because they refused to refer to a classmate by its imaginary pronouns.  According to the school, this violated the school's prohibition against bullying and harassment.  But of course, if anyone was being bullied and harassed, it was the three students who were on the receiving end of the school's bullying demand that they violate both logic and the English language when speaking of a mentally ill classmate.

The Wisconsin Institution for Law and Liberty (WILL), which is representing the three students, points out that the students are engaged in speech protected under the First Amendment and, therefore, cannot be compelled to make statements that they do not believe.  Moreover, says WILL, neither Title IX nor district policy holds that using biologically correct pronouns constitutes sexual harassment.  Instead, the focus is on genuinely egregious conduct, such as rape, physical assault, stalking, etc.

The only quibble I have with the letter is that it fails to identify by name the music teacher who started this whole process.  Everyone involved in leftist bullying needs to be named and sued.

_____________________________

*For reasons that are not entirely clear, the elementary school principal, Chad Ramminger, was the moving force behind this initiative.  He boasts in the "principal's message" that "we are first and foremost about kids."

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com