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Claim about ‘misgendering’ challenged by expert
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student fees will go to presentations on “queer glitch art,” a speaker who says using someone’s correct sex is tantamount to violence, and numerous racially exclusive groups.
The information came via a public records request for recent funding decisions by the Student Appropriations Committee, which doles out more than $200,000 in student fees.
In total, 88 different groups received grants from the committee.
On November 11, the group called Decode plans to spend $550.00 on guest speaker Micah Alhadeff, who will present on “queer glitch art.”
The virtual event includes a presentation by Alhadeff, a digital artist who specializes in “queer theory” and “glitch aesthetics,” according to his personal website.
Another event, hosted by ColorLit: A Coalition for POC Culture, received $1,000 to host a workshop with writer CJ Scruton.
Scruton is a poet and an assistant professor of writing and humanities at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Scruton also claims to be non-binary and transgender.
In a 2023 blog post, Scruton wrote about the violence of being misgendered: “It’s hard to describe how bad being misgendered feels. Hard, in part, because there are so many physical, material violences that get enacted against people in this community that the occasional linguistic violence feels almost like luck, like the price you have to pay and be happy with.”
Scruton’s other work often deals with the occult, transgenderism, and cultural theory, and the professor recently published a volume of poetry: “Suite for Hallucinated Voices.”
The College Fix reached out to Scruton to ask about the claim that speech constitutes violence, but the professor did not respond to two emails in the past weeks. Stacey Steinberg, a spokeswoman at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, initially responded to a voicemail request for Scruton. However, she ultimately did not respond to further questions sent in the past two weeks.
Responding to Scruton’s claims, a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said: “Speech is not violence, though conflating the two is a common tactic used to try to suppress speech.”
Cultural commentator Nathanael Blake told The Fix that “in this case, and in others like it, the assertion that ‘misgendering’ is a form of violence is deployed to squelch speech that is based on biological reality rather than gender fantasies.”
Racial groups cash in on student fees
Around 13 percent of the funds went to 15 different cultural or race-based groups like Association Latinos Professional for America at UWM, the Maghreb Student Organization, and the Minority Media Association at UWM.
Eleven of these student organizations appear to be racially exclusive, such as the Latinx Student Union, the National Society of Black Engineers, and ColorLit: A Coalition for POC Culture. These groups received $19,841.97, or 67 percent of the funding for cultural and race-based organizations.
Another $13,482.48, or six percent, went to four different religion-based groups, including Panther Catholic and the Muslim Student Association.
Other groups received substantial funds, including the Chess Club ($9,000), Ceramic Art Students Association ($2,609.35), and various musical groups, such as Percussion @ UWM ($12,691.84).
