I was at  lunch decided to wander through Twitter and look for some interesting articles. That is when I found this article:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4021894/Oxford-University-says-students-use-gender-neutral-ze-place-he.html

Now, first thing that must remain clear: I really don’t care about the whole gender thing. I really think there are far more important things to be worried about. As long as my life is not affected, people can do whatever they want. Remember: I’m a Libertarian. So if it won’t hurt others or society, all’s good. Now, that might be a simplistic thought process and I may not be fully aware of the “issue” but I figure it is quite irrelevant compared with terrorism, war, a bad economy and the immigration problems.

When I read this article, I just shook my head. Several thoughts passed through my head.

First, if I were a parent and was dropping $60,000 a year in tuition, I would be pretty upset that my kids are wasting their time on something that really is not that important. I am pretty sure Bill Clinton, Elena Kagan, Stephen Hawking and T.S. Eliot were probably doing a little more than making up pamphlets on why it is so bad to use the words “he” or “she”. I may be a tad too establishment for the average Oxford student (after all, I did only go to Cal State Northridge, Go Matadors!) but I would think these guys should spend their time, I don’t know, inventing something or creating something that will get them a job after college. I wonder how much time Margaret Thatcher spent thinking about what she could do not to set someone off with a “trigger” word like “he” or “she”.

Next, I had a hard time justifying the changing of a language for, what must be, a very small population.The question I had is how small is the transgender population? In all of Europe, there are an estimated 1.5 million transgender people. Divide that by 743.1 million in population and that comes to .002%. Problem with that statistic is that some countries (like Russia) do not recognize transgender people. I decided just to focus on the United Kingdom (that’s where Oxford is) though it will still be a rough guess.  There are 65.3 million people in the United Kingdom. The transgender population is .3% of the population or 196,000 people. That is not a lot of people to justify changing a language.

But let us go a step further. Let us just look at the possible transgender population at Oxford (could not find stats on that). There are 11,603 undergrads, 10,499 postgraduates, 500 other students and 1791 faculty. That makes the total population at Oxford at 24,393. Multiply that with .3% and the total transgender population at Oxford would be about 73. I think even Stephen Hawking would say those stats do not justify the trouble of making twenty-four thousand people change the way they speak as not to offend 73 people. By the way, I know a transgender person and she (ze?) doesn’t get hurt no matter what pronoun I would use (she would gently remind me if I slipped up).

I think colleges have lost their way. The goal should be to open minds for the betterment of civilization (and getting a job). To create. Our students should not be wasting time on garbage like political correctness. Because, in the long run, the world is not politically correct. The world just moves forward and it does not care who it offends. Education is suppose to teach us and prepare us for that.

References:
www.topuniversities.com/student-info/choosing-university/oxford-or-cambridge
www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/05/this-is-what-transgender-rights-in-europe-looks-like
www.dailywire.com/news/6079/exactly-how-many-transgenders-are-there-number-amanda-prestigiacomo
www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford

Pictures courtesy of:
www.sbs.ox.ac.uk
www.snopes.com
pinterest.com
wikipedia.com