In the second semester of my doctoral studies, I took a course on Learning and Cognition. It was a simple class with readings, videos, and written responses. The homework was the same every week. As the third quarter of the semester approached, the module I had noticed earlier "Sex and Gender" was upon us and the mundane and boring week-to-week routine was disrupted. For the module, I read the chapter in "Brain Rules" by Medina on some of the differences in men's a women's brains and it all sounded credible. But then I started to view the videos the teacher had cherry picked from around the web on the sex differences in brains. All of a sudden, I was fired up. In one video, the speaker went on and on about how allowing young children to identify as a gender different from their genitalia was potentially traumatizing and confusing, I kind of lost it. I honestly thought it was a joke and he was getting at how this was hateful and contrived. On the contrary, when I posted in the threaded discussion that I found this material offensive and short sighted, he responded in defense. I couldn't track down his exact response but I did find one of his comments in response to another assignment in the module that is remarkably defamatory:
From a brain and cognition and point of view, males and females are definitely different sexes and not interchangeable. From a brain perspective, you don’t wake up one day and think “I’m a man” and the next day decide, “I’m a dolphin” any more than one can decide that today they are 39 years old and tomorrow they are 17 years old. There are a teeny, tiny number of people born intersexed, but that is an incredibly small number of folks. Gender, on the other hand, is how people “feel” and is often socially influenced. Nonetheless, just because people are different, doesn’t mean in any way that some are more valuable than others. As teacher’s it is not our job to pretend everyone is the same; instead, I believe it is our moral obligation to recognize that each student is different, and teach each accordingly as best as we can given our highly constraining “stack ‘em deep and teach ‘em cheap” school systems. In any event, it is our burden and our privilege to teach these students—and based on your answers, I wish my grandchildren were able to have you for a teacher! I'm glad you pointed out the example of girls in Africa. And, in terms of the military, I"d speculate that this is mostly due to the suicide rate problems that are already inherent in the military....it is dangerous to put people who are already prone to suicide in a suicide inducing environment if you don't want people committing suicide in the first place. In our next module, we’ll move back to talking specifically about using what we know from the science of learning in designing learning experiences and environments that really work for our students.
Nevermind the typos and mansplaining that always drove me nuts (can a professor mansplain or is that their job), this guy literally said, "it is our burden and our privilege to teach these students." He even defended the US military's anti-trans legislation! Foucault has called attention to the false narrative that science has conveyed throughout recent history in efforts to control populations. This includes throwing out outlier data that might point to similarities in the sexes. Looking back on that class, I wish I had done something and reported this. Is it too late?
Below, see the videos that are still up on YouTube. I should emphasize that the video that got me the most worked up was taken down due to hate speech!!!! Also, here's a link provided by the professor to a post about sex differences.
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