The College Fix

Boston University recently hosted “How To Bring Your Kids Up Gay” workshops, billed as “freewheeling” discussions on the topic.

The theme for the talks, held last week, was drawn from Eve Sedgwick’s 1991 essay “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys.”

“This short, accessible text focused attention on the alarming rate of suicide among gay and gender non-conforming youth, and critiqued the failure of psychotherapists in the US to address this crisis with queer-affirmative interventions,” BU’s website states. “[T]hese sessions aimed to foster intellectual community among students across the university, while also bringing together students and faculty members with shared intellectual interests outside the context of the classroom.”

But not everyone believes the discussions were innocuous or academically sound.

Journalist Robert Stacy McCain, a critic of feminist theory, offered his own take on the talks in a post on his blog The Other McCain titled: “The Queering of Feminism: Why Does ‘Equality’ Require Promoting Perversion?”

… Sedgwick assumes as her premise that any psychiatric problems (including suicide) experienced by homosexual or “gender-nonconforming children” can only be explained by society’s homophobia. According to Sedgwick, the psychiatric community’s “pathologizing diagnosis” of homosexuality as a mental disorder prior to 1973 was nothing but an expression of anti-gay bigotry and, in 1991, Sedgwick perceived a “danger” that psychiatry might continue to view “the effeminate boy” in this way. …

Feminism’s ironclad grip on academia means that parents who pay $48,436 a year to send their sons and daughters to Boston University can be certain that their children will never be exposed to any perspective on “sexuality and gender” that contradicts the “feminist and queer theory” …

Professors at Boston University, like practically every other university and college in America, reject “the very notion of sex as a biological given.” No American university student is ever exposed to any cogent analysis of human behavior based on the premise that males are naturally masculine and females are naturally feminine, and that family formation on the natural basis of heterosexual pair-bonding serves any legitimate or useful social purpose. Achieving feminism’s goal of “equality” means that “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay” is now the essential task of parents who want to abolish the “socially constructed institution” of heterosexuality that “maintains male domination.”

Thank God, I can’t afford $48,436 a year. Maintaining “male domination” isn’t always easy, but it’s a lot cheaper than “equality.”

Read McCain’s full post.

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