Content note: This entire post is going to be in reverse chronological order. Feel free to read it backwards.
The Oklahoma Senator from my adoptive hometown brought the President of Oklahoma Wesleyan University (OWU) to the State of the Union address yesterday. As one might well expect, this pair of highly conservative men were fairly unimpressed by the content of the President’s speech:
The emperor has no clothes and clearly doesn't know it. #delusion #denial #POTUS #StateOfTheUnion https://t.co/LiS8COPSFn
— Dr. Everett Piper (@dreverettpiper) January 13, 2016
#POTUS presented an alternate reality of a growing economy & declining terrorist threat. Okies don't share his rosy optimism #LastSOTU
— Sen. James Lankford (@SenatorLankford) January 13, 2016
If the name Everett Piper looks familiar to you, it may be because he is something of a notorious cissexist, who openly brags of promoting anti-trans policies.
Oklahoma Wesleyan President's Anti-trans Policy Denounced as 'Despicable' by HRC: Oklahoma Wesleyan University… https://t.co/BnGSwTOjRa
— Gay News Feed (@GayNewsFeed) January 6, 2016
Title IX Exemption and I’m Proud of It | Thoughtful post by by Everett Piper https://t.co/VVKHlWnMK7
— Sean McDowell (@Sean_McDowell) January 6, 2016
That last tweet links to an article in which Piper seeks to justify OWU’s felt need for a religious exemption to federal anti-discrimination policy with respect to trans students in particular. Here is the key passage therefrom:
Oklahoma Wesleyan reserves the right to discriminate between those who are male and those who are female. To do otherwise would seem to contradict the very premise of Title IX which calls upon us to differentiate female students from male students and to thereby give women the same access to programs as men. If we didn’t “discriminate” in such a way, how in the world would it be possible to comply with Title IX?
. . . At Oklahoma Wesleyan University we believe that sexual identity is a scientific fact not a human fabrication and we refuse to degrade men and women by suggesting otherwise. Yes, we were granted an exemption and we are proud of it.
If OWU has some scientific evidence which suggests every student will fall neatly into a binary classification scheme (in terms of either sex or gender) they really ought to have mentioned where that research came from. So far as I can tell, it doesn’t actually exist. I don’t expect a lot of scientific credibility from an institution whose only mention of Darwin is a book promoting intelligent design, but surely they can do better than this. Unless, of course, Dr. Piper is not basing his arguments on science, but on faith.
The rabbit hole gets deeper and stranger when you stop to consider which particular policies OWU is proudly exempting themselves from, available here in full. For example:
Title IX’s sex discrimination prohibition extends to claims of discrimination based on
gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity and OCR accepts such complaints for investigation. Similarly, the actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity of the parties does not change a school’s obligations. Indeed, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth report high rates of sexual harassment and sexual violence. A school should investigate and resolve allegations of sexual violence regarding LGBT students using the same procedures and standards that it uses in all complaints involving sexual violence. The fact that incidents of sexual violence may be accompanied by anti-gay comments or be partly based on a student’s actual or perceived sexual orientation does not relieve a school of its obligation under Title IX to investigate and remedy those instances of sexual violence.
Now maybe I’m being too optimistic here, but surely it is not too much to ask that investigations of alleged sexual violence be treated in an evenhanded manner, regardless of the victim’s sex or gender identity. Not even a devout Christian would argue that certain victims of sexual assault deserve less consideration than others, right?
Right?
