How Gender Ideology is Degrading Medical School Teaching at an American university

From an anonymous Medical Student at American University (an excerpt from a longer article):

IDD64 @IDD64 asks: “What happened to “nobody’s saying sex isn’t real”?”

This is actually what compelled me to speak out about this practice in the first place. Well-intentioned non-medical people often assume that medical schools are teaching something like, “Gender identity can be fluid and varied, but biological sex is real, binary, and relevant in medical contexts.” This idea is around five years out of date in the most progressive of institutions. I have been told multiple times in several classes that biological sex is a social construct – not just gender. Granted, I can speak only for my institution, but this change has been frustrating and disturbing to witness.

Robert Woolley @RandomlyBob asks: “Do any of the required textbooks also avoid using those words? If not, might you ask those professors if they think the books are either inaccurate or offensive?”

Our curriculum is constantly subject to revision. Around two-thirds of our written materials have been updated with this new language. For the one-third that has remained out-of-date, our class has received multiple apologetic, itemized emails from course instructors in which they provide corrections, beg for forgiveness and patience, and avow to “do better”. In class, we have been given multiple histories in which the patient’s sex has been deleted, even for cases involving disorders which can manifest differently between the sexes. The words “female” and “male” are being erased and replaced.

Continue ReadingHow Gender Ideology is Degrading Medical School Teaching at an American university

Asian-American Parent at Thomas Jefferson High School Expresses Grievances to School Board re Critical Race Theory

Asra Q. Nomani, who identifies herself as a first generation immigrant, an Asian-American woman, delivers three minutes of grievances to the school board at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. This school has carried the distinction of being the highest ranking public high school in the U.S. She delivers three intense minutes (and not a second more) describing how Critical Race Theory is uprooting the TJ's incredibly successful approach to education.

John McWhorter's comment: "Everybody should listen to her. A model for the only way we can get past what The Elect are doing to education nationwide." McWhorter's new book on "The Elect" can be found at his substack website.

Continue ReadingAsian-American Parent at Thomas Jefferson High School Expresses Grievances to School Board re Critical Race Theory

Public Schools Should Stick to their Educational Mission

What does it mean to be informed? At bottom, it means to respectfully listen to a diversity of opinions. To have viewpoint diversity.  In my view, viewpoint diversity is by far the most important type of diversity.  I make it a habit to reach out to people with whom I disagree.  That is my personal mission and that is the mission of Heterodox Academy. 

Many public schools are straying from their core educational mission and this has ramifications for families back home. This core mission of education is to teach traditional subjects.  It means taking each child as he or she is and teaching those subjects. This mission does not include diagnosing, evaluating or attempting to change a child's "gender," much less cheering on a child to change his or her "gender."  The core mission of schools never allows a school to hide important information about a child from the child's parents.

I think it is important to consider much more than the driving narratives of the left-leaning legacy media on these issues, where you will never read anything like the following. I am writing these words as someone who is left-leaning on many issues.  I don't agree with every position taken by PEC, but it's important that we listen to people who are hurting as well as people who are exuberantly riding the modern wave of transgenderism.  Truth is a mosaic.

The following excerpts are from Partners or Ethical Care, an first-hand account by a mother titled "As Mother's Day 2021 Approaches."

Here’s how I am this week, as Mother’s Day approaches again.

I’m exhausted, and frustrated, and scared.

I pulled all of my kids from public school after one announced a transgender identity, and all the teachers, administrators, and counselors began lying to me, using my child’s made-up name and fake pronouns behind my back, and undermining my husband and me to our child with words like “unsupportive” and “inappropriate.”

That child desisted and came back to reality after we cut off all the trans juice flowing from the school and the GSA club and social media and woke neighbors. So I know pulling my kids from public school and homeschooling them was the right decision.

. . .

I’m angry. I want someone to answer for what they’ve put our family through.

I want this to end.

But I’m the mom, and I love my kids, and this is what I have to do, for as long as it takes. I cry more than I should have to. I’ve given up my own life to save my children’s.

But the culture says I’m abusive and hateful and bigoted.

This is how Mother’s Day finds me this year.

Maybe next year will be better.

Continue ReadingPublic Schools Should Stick to their Educational Mission