Texas Tech using taxpayer money to propagandize faculty and staff in relation to sex changes
by Jon Cassidy for Pratt on Texas © 2017
Just before last semester ended, the faculty, staff and students of the Department of Mathematics at Texas Tech University were called to a meeting with one topic of discussion: one of the professors was getting a sex change, which nobody was supposed to call a sex change.
“Surgery does not change one’s sex or gender, only genitalia,” a PowerPoint slide read. The correct term, so to speak, was said to be “gender affirming surgery,” as the folks who parse out gender truths have decided that the surgeon’s knife is merely correcting a mistake of sorts.
The proper term for public discussion, participants learned, is “gender transition,” which may or may not involve snipping, which is still considered a matter of some delicacy.
The university sent three representatives to handle the presentation – a human resources administrator, a counselor, and a recent hire whose specialty is this sort of thing. That would be Jody Randall, or, as she presents herself: “Jody Randall, M.S., Administrator, she/her/hers.”
An image from the TTU office’s website.
Hired in December 2016 from Murray State in Arkansas, Randall is the head of Tech’s new Office of LGBTQIA – one of the more advanced acronyms known to academia. At Texas A&M, for example, such matters are handled by an office that doesn’t even deign to recognize persons of the Q, I and A persuasions by name.
Randall has jammed a full nine identities into her office’s title, forcing some of the letters to pull double duty.
“We use the acronym LGBTQIA at Tech to stand for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, (questioning), intersex, asexual, and (agender),” she says on her web page.
Randall’s hire came amid a move to improve the university’s reputation for homosexual-friendliness. In April and September 2016, the noted provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos had given talks at Tech, prompting some faculty members to object by signing a letter.
Randall oversees a small office staffed by student workers and volunteers, most of whom appear to be plain old boys and girls, rather than one of the exotic new phenotypes. Randall’s position is budgeted at $21.63 per hour, a relative bargain next to the six-figure salaries that diversity administrators at UT pull in.
For Randall, the April 26 math department meeting was just the sort of thing she was hired to handle.
“Assisting with educational presentations at the request of employees, students, offices, etc. is one of the ways” her office fosters inclusion, Randall said. “An employee in the Texas Tech Department of Mathematics and Statistics contacted Human Resources to inform them of their plans to transition genders. With the employee’s approval, Human Resources reached out to the Office of LGBTQIA for support in preparing a transition plan, identifying resources, and informing the employee’s co-workers.”
To make her point to 100 or so scholars who deal in matters of nearly unfathomable complexity and precision, Randall presented a cartoon figure of a gingerbread man, or rather, person.
This gingerperson’s head had a brain labeled “Gender Identity,” a heart labeled “sexual orientation,” and then there was something between his and/or her legs resembling that symbol once used by the artist known thitherto as Prince – this was the biological sex. And the whole person was called “Gender Expression.”
The main point, however, as delivered though her slides, was one of etiquette. Don’t stick an “-ed” on adjectives such as “transgender.”
Also, avoid using the adjective as a noun. “‘Jake is a transgender’ is not only grammatically incorrect, but can be offensive,” she cautioned.
One wonders if she has considered the grammatical correctness of the inventing and changing of pronouns to accommodate her alphabet-soup movement.
For anyone who wanted to know more, she offered several books as resources, although she may have undermined her point about adjectives and nouns by recommending one called, “Working with a Transsexual.”
It wasn’t immediately clear whether she offered a trigger warning for the noun in the title.
I am just glad we got his all straightened out. When I was at TTU, the worries were “will the new law school get off the ground” and “who wrote what on THE FENCE” and “will the the cowboys egg the Hippies at the peace protest tonight?” Life has just become too simple.