Remember when libraries were all about books? The most a librarian would say to you would be “Shh!” if you were too noisy. Well, at the University of Kansas librarians are now virtue signaling to social justice warriors (SJWs) about how inclusive they are.
Now, KU’s libraries have launched a “You Belong Here” campaign targeted at undergraduate students who may feel unwelcome on campus, particularly transgender students, according to LJ World.
Indeed, staff members of the school’s several libraries are invited (but not required) to wear nametags displaying their preferred gender pronouns, and are in turn asked to provide such nametags to any interested students.
“We’ve told all of our front-line employees, if a student asks, give them a button,” said Rebecca Smith, KU libraries executive director of communications and advancement, noting that her staff has had to reorder at least once to keep up with popular demand.
A sign located in one of the libraries advertises the gender-pronoun nametags as an important step in preventing the “misgendering” of students, which can “have lasting consequences.”
“Because gender is, itself, fluid and up to the individual,” the sign contends, “each person has the right to identify their own pronouns.”
If each person has the right to identify his or her own pronouns, then “him/his” are no longer sufficient for me. Henceforth, since I identify as an M1A2 Abrams main battle tank, I expect to be referred to as “His Tankness/Your Tankness.”
Hey, why not?
The annoying thing is that Kansas taxpayers are funding this, at least in part, since the University of Kansas is a public university.
Look, inclusion is all fine and well, but when you’re an institution pulling money from the state’s taxpayers, you don’t really get to have political opinions in an official capacity. As bad as Bryn Mawr College was with victim blaming a conservative student, at least it is a private college. The taxpayers aren’t funding any of that. The University of Kansas doesn’t get that excuse.
The social justice warriors can claim all they want that this is good and right, but as Thomas Jefferson once said, “To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” While it’s unlikely the diehard SJWs will care, that doesn’t change reality.
It’s one thing if someone who was born a male presents himself as female. It’s easy to figure out what he identifies as, and most folks will go with the flow because, well, so few really get that worked up over it. The problem is that so many people have decided to be male one day, female the next, and maybe identify as a Mexican fruit bat the day after that.
So now we have libraries, where you should be able to go for actual truth, lecturing us about how you should address people who don’t even seem to know themselves what they identify as.
I can’t imagine why the days of not taking colleges seriously are coming to a middle.
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