Students and administrators pile on political scientist Scott Yenor for his scholarship.
At Boise State University, in deep-red Idaho, a group of students is demanding that the university fire political scientist Scott Yenor for his scholarship on the intellectual history of feminism and the transgender movement. Even worse, some administrators are piling on.
The spark that lit the powder keg. On June 30, Yenor published a report for the Heritage Foundation: In “Sex, Gender, and the Origins of the Culture Wars: An Intellectual History,” he argues that today’s transgender movement arises logically out of the ideas of modern feminism. Both movements, he shows, insist that human identity need not be grounded in one’s body or one’s biological sex.
Several of the most important feminist thinkers thought that for women to be truly free, the family “must be abolished,” in the words of Simone de Beauvoir. Other feminists envisioned what Yenor calls a rolling revolution to ensure that, for women, anatomy would be not destiny. Among their goals were the erasure of all sexual taboos; the cultivation of the same temperament, status, and roles for men and women; and the achievement of economic and emotional independence of women and children from the natural family.
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