Students will learn about “how to raise your kids homosexual” together.
Students will be asked to consider “whether technology may be made homosexual” in a course offered by Yale University this trimester.
You facial recognition technology truly identify gay people, asks the training description? Why is everyone so drawn to queer birds? For that matter, how did knowledge come to be the right tool for defining and knowing sex, sex, and gender at all”?
The class, titled” Queer Science,” will be taught by Joanna Radin and Juno Richards ( pictured, right ) and will provide” a background in the evolution of sex science, from evolutionary arguments that racialized sexual dimorphism to modern technologies that claim to be able to get at bodily truths that are supposedly more real than identity.”
Richards, who uses” they/them” pronouns, and Radin ( pictured, left ) have not responded to requests for comment on queer science as a field of study, their qualifications for teaching a course on the subject, and their responses to criticism of the course’s academic relevance. In the past two days, The College Fix has sent two letters, but neither could be reached by telephone.
In contacted responses to The Fix, an education plan professional criticized the program.
It is dangerous to equate intellectual perspectives on female with actual science, according to Jonathan Butcher, a research fellow in education policy at the Heritage Foundation, specifically for “young people—minor-age children who have been encouraged in some cases to assume they were born in the wrong system.”
The adults who are socially affirming small children who are unsure about their sexual are hurting these young people, according to Butcher, by pursuing hormone treatments, puberty blockers, and even surgery to completely change their bodies. Research indicates that the sex conflict in most young people self-resolves as they pass puberty and enter adulthood.
Students will engage with the tools, methods, and theories of both STS and queer studies that emphasize the constructed and political underpinnings of scientific thought and practice, according to the course description.
However, Butcher thinks the course lacks the academic standards that are typically associated with academic rigor.
He said,”‘ Gender’ is a fluid, abstract concept—and advocates describe it as such. Judith Butler’s writings and Gail Rubin’s work, for example, do more to link gender to Marxism and radical feminism than to clarify what, exactly, queer theory is”.
” This ambiguity about what “gender” actually means creates more uncertainty than academic value,” according to the author.
According to Butcher, “queer theory encourages false information on the subjects of sex, biology, and mental health. He claimed that accepting a “generic” that does not correspond with your biology does not improve mental health.
” Attempts to change from a male to a female are irreparable harm to your body. It is impossible to change.”
Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow at Heritage, said,” Fortunately this year’s course will waste the time and tuition of no more than 15 Yale students”, referencing the class’s enrollment cap.
MORE: UMinn report says to hire trans scholars to help environment
We will examine the politics of generative AI as it relates to Queer Science, according to the” Academic Integrity” section of the syllabus, and we want to make sure you take it as a subject of study before using it as a tool for research and writing.
While the syllabus did not necessarily contain the readings that will be used for the 2025 semester, it included a “representative” syllabus from when the course was last taught in 2021.
Some of those readings included” Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body”,” Transvestism, Transsexualism, and Homosexuality”, and” How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay”.
However, the syllabus cautioned against making essentializing claims about bodies and identities that are likely to be similar to some of our own. If the subject “feels too personal,” students could use the participation credit in another way.
One lecture was called” Queer Cyborgs” and included readings such as” A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” and” My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage”.
Another lecture was titled” Disarming the Nuclear Family” and asked” How have scientific ideas about reproduction been shaped by heter]o ] normative , assumptions? How does letting go of those presumptions” change the nature of science” that is possible?
Other lectures included” Speculating Sex and Gender Beyond Science”?,” Sexing the Human Body”, and” Classifying Queerness”.
The College Fix previously reported that Yale is offering a course this semester that will “interrogate the stakes that underwrite Black women’s relationships with White women” with brutal honesty.
MORE: Boston U. offers ‘ queering health’ course
IMAGES: Yale University/YouTube, Juno Richards/X
Follow The College Fix on Twitter and Like us on Facebook.
