EDITORS' CORNER
OPINION: UCLA student paper editors say First Amendment ‘crucial,’ but ‘non-gender-affirming language’ should be punished
A month ago, The College Fix reported on Defending Education’s lawsuit against the University of California system for allegedly requiring the use of “preferred pronouns.”
The lawsuit asserted that a student “who uses ‘he’ or ‘him’ when referring to a biological male who identifies as a female will be punished for ‘misgendering’ that student.”
Defending Education Senior Legal Counsel Sarah Parshall Perry noted colleges certainly can act to prohibit true harassment — “targeted, severe, and pervasive conduct that interferes with a student’s education” — but can’t “weaponize vague harassment policies to regulate viewpoints on matters of public concern, such as biological sex and gender identity.”
Like the UC Sexual Harassment, Anti-Discrimination, Prevention and Education training, for example, which states “[i]ntentionally calling someone their name used before transition, as opposed to their lived name, is called dead-naming, and may be a form of sexual harassment.”
UC Diego even teaches that disagreeing with transgender ideology creates a “hostile environment.”
Perry said — correctly — that “any sort of dissenting speech,” in this case “biologically accurate pronouns or expressions of disagreement with gender ideology,” aren’t harassment but First Amendment-protected speech.
But the editorial board at the UCLA student paper Daily Bruin — students who eventually may end up working at The New York Times, CNN and the like — last weekend offered up an oh-so-typical We believe in the First Amendment BUT in opposition to the Defending Education lawsuit:
The First Amendment is a crucial part of University campuses. The Editorial Board holds that UC campuses must remain centers of productive and authentic discussion and collaboration. The Defending Education lawsuit fails to consider that tolerating non-gender-affirming language would be corrosive to that ideal.
The editors, led by Editor-in-Chief Alexandra Crosnoe (pictured), cite a 2022 UCLA nationwide study which showed a third of transgender individuals “reported unfair treatment” by university personnel, as well as “a federal administration that targets their rights.”
MORE: Editors quit at feminist journal that compared transgenders to Rachel Dolezal
They don’t specifically say what transgender “rights” the Trump administration is “targeting” other than noting the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (emphasis added) “abruptly closed its gender-affirming healthcare program last year in response to federal pressure.”
Similarly, the study of the “small, but representative group” of transgender people doesn’t much elaborate on what actually constitutes “belonging,” “bullying,” “harassment,” etc.
Of course, getting in a transgender student’s face and persistently yelling derogatory names/terms at them is harassment. But not an occasional utterance of an “incorrect” pronoun or “deadname.”
But you can bet the UC system will try punish those who do say such. Again, look at UC San Diego’s policy — questioning such creates a “hostile environment.”
The editors at the Daily Bruin don’t really care about the First Amendment. If UC is allowed to punish students for debating basic sex/gender science, then what prevents officials from disciplining, say, climate change skepticism? There are still people out there who want to imprison you if you question the alleged consensus on the topic.
Not to mention, look what happened during the COVID years … the inanity of which recently was exposed.
Consider, too, the UC system has pushed K-12 lessons comparing the January 6 Capitol riot to the KKK, appointed an “anti-racism” scholar who “endorsed ideas such as the existence of white supremacy in math classrooms” as its education dean, had a law professor claim moderate former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy had advanced a “white nationalist” agenda, saw its faculty union demand free tuition for black and indigenous students in the name of “anti-racism,” and featured a PhD candidate in a student paper who claimed supporting Israel and the police are white supremacist.
And that’s just for starters. Politically correct harassment is embedded in the UC system’s very culture.
I don’t recall the Bruin ever being worried about (as it says in its latest editorial) “a lack of basic decency” in the above instances, and I doubt Crosnoe and her current editors ever would offer up one.
It’s classic “oppression studies” philosophy 101, which gives zero hoots about the First Amendment (or much else of the Constitution). But since the Bruin staff technically are editors, they have to at least try to make it look good.
MORE: Harvard student paper editorial rips ‘deplorably disrespectful’ transgender critic Riley Gaines
