The College Fix

But men don’t menstruate 

Oregon State University has joined the small but growing list of universities distributing menstrual products to men. The decision, which was spurred by a student government initiative, was undertaken because, in the words of one student government rep, “not all students who menstruate are female-identified.”

That may be so. But it is most certainly the case that every student who menstruates is female, whether or not they identify as such. And so it is worth asking why the university would consider indulging in the delusion that a woman could somehow “be” a man simply by “identifying” as one. That is not something an administration should be in the business of encouraging.

Transgenderism, which has found strong purchase on college campuses thanks to their insular, overwhelmingly progressive environments, rests largely on a semantic lie: Activists claim that there is a quality called “gender” that exists apart from sex, and that the former is entirely determinative of one’s being a man or a woman. “Gender,” of course, doesn’t exist as a scientific qualifier; it exists only as a completely subjective experience—as a feeling. Yet it draws its substance from objective scientific material: It takes the terms “man” and “woman,” which refer to human males and human females, respectively, and reduces them to idiosyncratic signifiers. It would be a bit like a short person deciding to “identify” as a tall one: It’s only possible by abandoning the meaning of both terms altogether.

That’s how you get student activists claiming that men can have periods: By tossing out all pretense of objective reality in favor of purely individual interpretations of everything. This has become a hugely popular idea on campuses across the country. That should tell you a few things about our campus culture, none of it good.

MORE: Harvard’s free tampon program highlights the absurdity of gender theory

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