This Turning Point USA post has racked up 36 million views in 4 days.
Samatha Fulnecky, the daughter of a conservative lawyer who represented J6 defendants, was told to write an essay on "gender" (because of course) and her professor was a transgender grad student named Mel Curth (of course).
The essay prompt wanted students to read an article on the concept of "gender" norms in society, then respond with a 650-word reflection that was "a thoughtful discussion of some aspect of the article."
Fulnecky decided to respond by arguing that the erosion of "gender" roles in society is the problem, and that articles like the one for the assignment are attempting to do that. Instead, she said, what we call "gender" norms are simply the outworking of God's design for men and women.
Her essay is not the most well-written piece of prose (I would personally expect much more from a 6th-grader, let alone a college student), but the teacher gave her ZERO points for this essay and attacked her for being ideological. 👇
Again, rough.
The issue is not that the teacher penalized her for a, frankly, poorly proofread and structured essay.
The issue is whether the teacher failed her (again, zero points on the assignment) for her "offensive" ideology:
Professor Curth has a problem here. He (yes, he) is relying on ideology just as much as Fulnecky is.
Every major psychological, medical, pediatric, and psychiatric association in the United States acknowledges that, biologically and psychologically, sex and gender is neither binary nor fixed.
Not only is this false, but it is also a fallacious appeal to authority that is based entirely on the ideological idea - born from Marxist and leftwing thought reaching back to Rousseau and beyond - that humans are malleable widgets without a defined nature or "instruction manual."
You will notice I've been using the word "gender" in quotation marks this entire time. That is because "gender" is not the historical equivalent to biological sex. "Gender" comes from the Latin word genus, which we use to scientifically classify creatures and elements of the natural world (the French word "genre" is also related to this). The root of the word genus is gene, from which we get the words "genetics" and "genesis," referring to the birth and substance of something or someone.
"Gender" was historically applied to grammar, indicating the feminine and masculine endings that disappeared in English (thanks to the Norman invasion) but are present in many other languages. The idea of gender applying to men and women did exist, but it did not replace the idea of biological sex.
As "sex" became a dirtier word in the 20th century, however, proponents of leftwing ideology co-opted "gender" to wrap up their idea that human nature is endlessly changeable, ending in our modern-day lessons to kindergarteners that gender and sexuality are "fluid" (but also that people are "born that way") and that the greatest sin one could commit is disrespecting someone's "personal pronouns."
The fact that the "expert" class has used their expertise to led scientific validity to this religious belief system does not mean that it is any more empirical than Fulnecky's Christian faith that teaches that God made us male and female in His own image (Genesis 1:27).
You will notice that Professor Curth, while instructing Fulnecky to use "the methodology of empirical psychology" also wrote...
I implore you apply some more perspective and empathy in your work.
...which is an emotional appeal to, you guessed it, ideology.
Can you guess which ideology Professor Curth belongs to?
A second professor wrote to validate Curth's perspective. If this had been the only response, it would be doubtful that Fulnecky would have any claim for wrongdoing on the professors' parts.
Though this too is loaded with ideology (notice the pronouns in the professor's bio and the assertion that Fulnecky's expression of basic Christian teachings are offensive), it doesn't stray as far into the religious precepts of the leftwing gender cult.
Fulnecky maintains that she was wrongfully discriminated against, and Curth was removed pending an investigation.
From the New York Post:
A graduate assistant was removed from her [sic] position amid investigations into a contested discrimination report filed by a disgruntled student who repeatedly referenced the Bible in an essay response to an article about gender stereotypes — for a course taught by a transgender instructor.
You'll notice here that the New York Post accepts the same truth premises as the woke professor, calling him a "her."
As a math professor once told me, even in mathematics, you will come to different answers with different starting premises, even though mathematics is empiricism in its truest form.
This is true for everything in all of life. Science is science, but how that data is interpreted does not, as much as the secularists like to preach, rely on empirical evidence alone.
Empiricism teaches that we can understand everything through observation, and yet the Founding Fathers did not run tests to conclude the "truths we hold to be self-evident." Their conclusion that "all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights" was based on the rationalistic idea that we have an innate nature and can deduce things based on inner common sense.
In other words, Data is useless without Reason, which has Belief at its root.
As Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am."
Or, in his letter to Christians in Rome, the Apostle Paul expounded on the biblical idea that, being made in God's image, humans are given a conscience that follows God's understanding of right and wrong, even if they do not follow their consciences because of sin (Romans 1:18-20, Romans 2:14-15).
The 20th-century Christian writer C.S. Lewis explains that while cultural norms may differ (including "gender" expressions and human sexuality), they are startlingly more alike than you would expect were human nature truly, as the woke liberals claim, malleable. In his 1943 book "Abolition of Man," he wrote:
Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to — whether it was your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.
Likewise, in Mere Christianity, Lewis puzzled over the fact that humans everywhere have always had an innate sense of justice, even if it gets warped in different ways.
But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it?
The question for the University of Oklahoma (I bet you forgot this story was happening in a deeply conservative Christian state and not California or New York!) is whether Fulnecky's professor discriminated against her by pitting his religious beliefs against hers, then using his authority to academically penalize her.
Here's the statement that the university gave after the news went viral:
And here's a statement from the governor of Oklahoma:
We'll let you know what happens!
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