Only two sexes?
Pshaw.
There’s transgender, non-binary, genderfluid, agender, bigender, polygender, intersex, neutrois, androgyne, intergender, demigender, greygender, maverique, novigender, dyadic, and more. If all that confuses you, there’s even something called “gender apathetic,” defined by one website as “when you really do not identify nor care about any particular gender.”
But a Denver Post columnist recently had the audacity to say there were just two sexes, male and female. And he says that got him fired.
Jon Caldara, president of the libertarian Independence Institute, announced on Facebook that he was canned by the Post after his column appeared.
In his piece, headlined “Colorado Dems should let sun shine on their hospital fees and sex-ed curriculum,” Caldera makes a case for government transparency, especially in health care. Then the columnist weighs in on school curricula:
Democrats don’t want transparency in hospital billing and they certainly don’t want education transparency when it comes to their mandate to convince your kid that there are more than two sexes, even if it’s against your wishes.
Among the most controversial laws that passed last year was the comprehensive human sexuality education mandate which ripped local control away from your neighborhood school board. Now if your school district wants to teach even basic sex ed, the teacher must also teach the “health needs” of LGBT individuals.
And in the anti-free-speech style that the left now embraces, the new law bans discussions that “employ gender stereotypes,” or any language the state’s new oversight board of LGBT activists consider “stigmatizing.” In case you hadn’t noticed, just about everything is stigmatizing to the easily triggered, perpetually offended.
He also notes that “some parents weren’t thrilled a couple of years back when during school their little ones in Boulder Valley School District were treated to videos staring a transgender teddy bear teaching the kids how to misuse pronouns or when Colorado’s ‘Trans Community Choir’ sang to kids about a transgender raven.”
After saying in his Facebook post that he was fired, Caldera defends his piece.
“My column is not a soft voiced, sticky sweet NPR-styled piece which employs the language now mandated by the victim-centric, identity politics driven media,” he said in his post. “What seemed to be the last straw for my column was my insistence that there are only two sexes and my frustration that to be inclusive of the transgendered (even that word isn’t allowed) we must lose our right to free speech.”
Caldera says he employs “plain talk that doesn’t conform to the newspeak law of ‘use only the words mandated by the perpetually offended.’ So, it is labeled as ‘mean spirited’ and banned. If conservatives and libertarians are granted a voice in the mainstream media, they must use the language of their ideological opponents. That is, they are not allowed to have their own voice.”
But he goes on to say he supports gay rights.
What seemed to be the last straw for my column was my insistence that there are only two sexes and my frustration that to be inclusive of the transgendered (even that word isn’t allowed) we must lose our right to free speech.
To be clear I am strongly pro-gay marriage, which has frustrated many of my socially conservative friends. I have friends, family and employees from the LGBT community. I don’t care who uses whose bathroom, what you wear, or how you identify. People from this community have rights which we must protect.
And he hit liberals for trying to squelch the voices of anyone who thinks differently from them.
There was a time when the liberals in the press fought hard to protect free speech. Now they fight hard to mandate speech because, heaven forbid, someone be offended or have their feelings hurt. It’s okay people get offended. In fact, I encourage it. It means we are being challenged. It’s not hate speech. It’s speech. It used to be the press was all about.
I believe the reason so many people distrust the news media is the lack of intellectual diversity in it. My column is the most read column on the editorial pages. Perhaps it’s because people hated it so much. Who knows?
One reader summed it all up in a comment beneath the column.
“Apparently we now live in a nation where the most foolish, sensitive and worthless of our citizens are now catered too simply because one party (democrats) is very interested in gathering their votes as long as their uneducated and ignorant emotional needs are met,” the reader wrote.