(OPINION) University of Colorado Boulder has published a pronouns guide that advises students to assume others are transgender or nonbinary unless individuals say otherwise.
According to Fox News, The school’s Center for Inclusion and Social Change, which is under the Division of Student Affairs, published the guide on its resources page.
The guide asks students to refer to others with gender-neutral pronouns unless they are explicitly told otherwise — including unusual pronouns, like “ze/zir” and “hir.”
“If someone tells you their pronouns, use those! If you don’t know someone’s pronouns, don’t assume gendered pronouns and use gender-neutral ones, like they or ze,” the guide reads.
“Sometimes people just don’t want to share their pronouns and that’s fine,” the page adds. “Usually it’s safe to use they/them/theirs unless that person tells you otherwise.”
These are just some of the directions from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Inclusion and Social Change, which also claims that terms like “ze” and “zir” are legitimate ways to refer to people. Boulder is the flagship University of Colorado campus and also the largest, with more than 36,000 students.
The university’s instructions largely echo language guides from pro-transgenderism groups like the Trevor Project and Human Rights Campaign, which are now commonplace in academia, medicine, and even K-12 schools.
University of Colorado Boulder’s guide reflects academia’s increasing devotion to radical gender ideology, as well as its attempts to rewrite rules of language for the public. The university also offers cross-sex hormone therapy, voice-training, and surgical sex changes, in addition to “all-gender” restrooms and locker rooms, where male and female students shower in the same facilities.
While a University of Colorado Boulder spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon that the site “was created by students, for students,” the site gives no indication that students created it.
The pronoun guide is under the heading of the university’s “Pride Office,” part of the Division of Student Affairs. The webpage for the guide includes a “Meet the Team” link to bios for Pride Office employees, none of whom are students.
The spokesman also said the university “recognizes that misgendering people, whether intentionally or not, can cause harm and feelings of disrespect and exclusion.”
The spokesman did not respond to follow-up questions about why the webpage does not indicate it was written by students and about whether the guide represents the university’s position. The webpage also encourages students to get comfortable with the “newer” pronouns like “ze” and “hir,” and gives guidance on how to pronounce them.
If you’ve never heard of “ze” and “zir” because you’re too busy getting ready for classes and haven’t boned up on the pronouns guide yet and you meet zir and don’t know what pronouns to use, you may be guilty of perpetrating violence and causing harm. That’s not according to me–that’s right from the Pride Office, which now runs the show. The university is more stressful these days than it used to be.
And to those of you who are thinking that campuses are always cults of crazy, I would remind you that we all live on campus now. This isn’t just universities–our governments have the same policy.
And if it seems insane to you that a public university released a guide telling students to assume those that they meet are transgender unless they are told otherwise, I remind you that this policy isn’t nearly as insane as other proposals.
One trans activist, for example, recently suggested that because not all children have chosen their gender yet, we should put all kids on puberty blockers until they’ve worked out what their gender is. In other words, you haven’t seen anything yet.
