STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT THE PRONOUN MADNESS.

Social construction ought be considered a provisional hypothesis, not received wisdom.

The basis for gender ideology is confused and contradictory. The doctrine that underlies these and similar developments on campus is an elaboration of the idea of extreme human plasticity. It is, however, not a single dogma but a confluence of several. Sometimes it emphasizes that each individual has the capacity from an age in early childhood to “decide” his gender; sometimes instead of “deciding,” the individual is said to “discover” his gender as something latent in his psyche; and sometimes the emphasis is placed not on the individual at all but on “society” as either inhibiting decisions and discoveries by imposing a rigid two-sex template on manifold human diversity, or by privileging one or another path of gender development.

These are speculative ideas that have emerged over the last several decades from both radical feminist theory and radical “queer” theory. That they have become suddenly popular among students, faculty, and college administrators is worth remark, but it is not NAS’s chief concern. The remark we would make is that the theories call for a revolt against common human understanding across all history and culture. One might think that an insight as profound as “gender plasticity” would have registered in human consciousness in a more extensive way before the current generation if it were as compelling as it is now treated. But whether valid or not, its novelty strengthens the case against institutionalizing this idea merely because its advocates are committed to it.

The NAS doubts that the academic examination of the concept of gender plasticity or its myriad variants (transgenderism, gender fluidity, gender queer, etc.) deserves the enormous emphasis it currently receives, but the academy should remain open to investigation of such ideas provided that they are held to the same standards of intellectual scrutiny that apply to all provisional concepts. The trouble is that the concept of gender plasticity is no longer treated as a hypothesis advanced in opposition to many well-established facts, but as a settled doctrine. Disagreement with that doctrine is now commonly met not with arguments about its utility but with censure and, in some cases, career-ending punishment.

The NAS strongly rejects the practice by colleges, universities, and professional societies of treating these novel concepts as established facts and turning them into policies that are imposed on whole academic communities. Treating these concepts as self-evidently true or as sufficiently plausible to warrant their being enforced as official policy is educational malpractice.

We are aware that our support for intellectual freedom in expressing the ideas associated with the concept of gender plasticity is liable to be abused by some faculty members who will persist in treating the concept as indubitably true. But universities can take strong steps to prevent such abuses from becoming normative. Such steps include rejecting the insistence of gender ideologists that those who dissent should be punished and holding the gender ideologists themselves to proper standards of argument, evidence, and intellectual openness.

Exactly.