Crowd-Pleasing AbsurditiesAn inside look at the insanity of the 2022 Sexual and Gender Minority Health Symposium, hosted by Duke University.
By John D. Sailer
April 7, 2022
“The saddest thing about injustice in America is that it has to be proven to be believed.”
Elle Lett is fired up. A transgender woman and statistician-epidemiologist, Lett expresses disappointment with a newly proposed data collection tool from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The tool, Lett believes, is not sufficiently inclusive, as its creators deferred to proven methods.
“The way we have to prove y’all’s stuff is a direct output of white supremacy,” Lett says before concluding: “This is going to be uncomfortable, but the trans people who are defending this are trans masculine people, white trans masculine people.… Y’all live this world very differently.”
It is the first session of the 2022 Sexual and Gender Minority Health Symposium, hosted by Duke University and co-sponsored by its academic medical system, Duke Health. Following pre-recorded opening remarks from HHS’s Admiral Rachel Levine, Lett’s freewheeling comments set the stage for the rest of the two-day online symposium. Throughout, the proceedings took on Lett’s tone, emphasizing the primacy of granular intersectionality, the prevalence of identity-based oppression, and a flurry of faculty-lounge neologisms.
“We have to begin to decolonize gender,” notes media content creator Sir Lex Kennedy. “We have a very colonized belief of what gender is, and that’s because of imperialism and colonization.”
“How many women of color were at that national championship?” asks Penn State kinesiologist Jaime Schultz, commenting on the “really ugly” protests over Lia Thomas’s NCAA victories.
“All a penis is, is just a large clitoris,” opines Marci Bowers, celebrated as the first person to have delivered more than two thousand babies and performed more than two thousand vaginoplasties.
In a session on “Queer Experiences of Autism,” “neuroqueer theorist” Nick Walker rails against “tame puppet autistics who have made their career by parroting the dominant discourse” and warns that autism is “being weaponized” by the “anti-trans” movement in the U.K. In the same session, Maxfield Sparrow (“astrologer,” “facilitator of creativity and community,” “metagender, transgender, and queer”) notes that “it’s really important to rebel against those restrictions of who one is allowed to be.”
At the end of the first day—for those who could make it through five hours of the above—Duke University Provost Sally Kornbluth closed out: “We live in a society where it’s become too easy to dismiss people we disagree with, or those who challenge our beliefs and assumptions. But that’s not how progress happens. We have to be as willing to hear others’ perspectives as we are to advocate for our own.”
* * *
Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/crowd-pleasing-absurdities/
