Ohio professor Nicholas Meriwether is going to court to fight for their right to misgender their students based on their extremist views about gender identity.

Please note, I am tempted to use “their” in the gender-neutral, singular sense to refer to the professor throughout because a.) they’ve irritated me and b.) my own view on gender identity and language is that, if anything, “they/them” should be a default to ensure that each individual gets to opt into gender identity rather than have it be assigned. Seem wrong to you? It is. So I’ll revert to “he/him/his.”

Point is, each person’s choice of pronoun is profoundly important to their identity; using the appropriate pronoun isn’t any harder than remembering someone’s name. You may stumble, but that doesn’t mean you give up and tell your friend you’re just going to call them something else.

Flipped around, can you imagine introducing yourself to someone only to have them just call you by the name they feel best suits you based on their views? That’s pretty much what’s happening when someone rejects something as basic as a pronoun, the way another person wants to be spoken to and referenced.

I haven’t tried running this logic by Meriwether, a professor of philosophy, but it’s doubtful it’d have any effect on his thinking. After all, any number of students he’s traumatized and internal university actors who’ve responded have yet to budge him. Instead, he doubled down.

Meriwether has teamed up with the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a far- right hate group that instigates and cultivates lawsuits with the aim of expanding the made-up concept of “religious liberty” as a positive right. Real religious freedom, you see, is a negative right—it’s the right to practice your religion free of interference. What Meriwether and his band of merry bigots are fighting for is the positive right to act on their “religious beliefs” even when it violates others’ negative rights, like the right to be free from sex discrimination.

Poster Comment:

Trnasfreaks have no rights.