In today’s essay, to illustrate a point, I defend a fictional professor named Stephen Amos. Dr. Amos is a tenured faculty member who refuses to use students’ preferred pronouns when they conflict with their biological sex. For dissenting from a queer rule, the university brings disciplinary charges against Dr. Amos.
Dr. Amos is a composite drawn from a universe of real-world examples. His specific discipline is irrelevant to the case; his PhD may be in any field; expertise has no bearing on the fundamental rights to conscience and thought that I defend in this essay. I tell Amos’ story to illustrate the totalitarian desire lying at the heart of compelled speech. Amos is the true victim of discrimination, not the students who wish to compel him to misgender them.
The essay begins by summarizing the facts of the case against Amos. I then clarify civil rights law. Here, in addition to defending Dr. Amos’ right to conscience, I must also contrast the objective, immutable nature of biological sex as a protected characteristic with the ideological foundations of gender identity. I argue that true anti-discrimination protections shield individuals from coercion based on inherent traits; they do not empower one group’s contested beliefs to override another’s right to speak and think on the terrain of observable reality.
Finally, I expose the circular, fallacious appeals to institutional authority, revealing how censors use the ruse of expertise to justify suppressing dissent and free speech. The fictional university cites various organizations to establish as “fact” the “truth” of gender identity. But these citations have no legitimate bearing on Dr. Amos’ case, not merely because authorities have established no truth, but because Dr. Amos is not obligated to accept the citations as true in a free society.
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As a tenured faculty member, Amos enjoys rights beyond those recognized by the US Constitution. He appeals to academic freedom, which allows him to question the objective basis for a demand that he use preferred pronouns. Amos also refuses on First Amendment grounds; he cannot be compelled to obey the university’s arbitrary rule that faculty must misgender students and colleagues.
The university defines transgressing these rules as “misgendering.” Dr. Amos argues that actual misgendering involves using pronouns that do not correspond to a person’s sex, which he (correctly) asserts is an objective, unchangeable reality, one determinable through independent observation and objective confirmation. It is wrong, or at least inaccurate, he argues, to address a man using feminine pronouns, since doing so denies the person’s actual identity.
The demand for preferred pronouns assaults the integrity of truth. The practice essentially requires—he cites George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to make his point—that he affirm that two plus two equals five.
Charged with unlawful discrimination, Dr. Amos readily admits that civil rights laws protect groups with distinct or inherent characteristics. Protected classes identified in US statutes and precedent—defined by sex, race, religion, national origin, disability, or age—shield individuals from unfair treatment, harassment, or exclusion based on traits, whether innate or acquired, fundamental to their identity.
The purpose of antidiscrimination law and policy is straightforward: to prevent denial of opportunities or rights based on intrinsic or socially recognized characteristics. Dr Amos insists that he has denied no opportunities or rights to trans individuals. He recognizes their existence and treats such persons the same way he treats all students in his classes—as individuals.
Dr. Amos clarifies that membership in a protected class does not obligate others to adopt the behaviors, beliefs, or practices associated with that class. He uses his go-to example: Neither an atheist nor a Christian is legally required to affirm the truth of Islamic doctrine or participate in Muslim religious rituals because religion is a protected class. One is only obligated to tolerate them.
Refusing to affirm beliefs does not constitute discrimination, the professor continues, since discrimination occurs when someone is treated unfairly because of their class membership. No discrimination occurs when outsiders decline to endorse or perform beliefs or practices associated with that group. Protected status guards against coercion; it does not grant the state the power to compel conscience and speech from those outside the protected class.
Forcing atheists or Christians to affirm Islamic doctrine or ritual is a violation of their civil rights. (For the record, Dr. Amos is an atheist.) By the same token, so is forcing them to affirm a chosen gender identity. A transwoman is still a man, just as is a Muslim man.
Dr. Amos’ arguments notwithstanding, the university pursues their case against the professor, claiming that his refusal to use preferred pronouns amounts to misgendering and therefore discrimination.
Dr. Amos sues, arguing that compelling him to use language that contradicts his understanding of biological reality violates his freedom of conscience—a constitutional right that supersedes university policy. It also violates the principle of academic freedom established by his employment at a university, where the freedom to dissent is essential to the progress of knowledge.
At his hearing before the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities, he compares the demand that he participate in the rituals of the gender identity doctrine to being forced to avoid pork because Islamic law declares it haram. He asks the committee whether a sociologist of religion would be punished for noting the fact, attested to by Islam itself, that Muhammad married a child and consummated the marriage when his bride was eleven.
Noting a sociologist sitting in judgment of him, Dr. Amos points out that Muhammad’s relationship with a prepubescent minor is pertinent to critical inquiry; it prompts discussion of normative variability across cultures and history. Religion is, after all, a social phenomenon, which differs over time and space. Would a student complaint accusing the sociologist of blasphemy cause the university to file charges against the professor for discrimination? Could justice be obtained by having the sociologist apologize to his students and affirm that Muhammad was the most perfect man in history?
Such things are hard to imagine, Dr. Amos suggests. It runs afoul of religious liberty. Likewise, returning to his own case, to affirm the construct of gender identity and observe its pronoun rules is tantamount to forcing him to subscribe to a belief system he rejects and participate in rituals he abhors. He is no more obligated to the rules of the gender identity doctrine than he is to the blasphemy rules of Islam.
Predictably, the university counters that gender identity is not analogous to religion because the distinction between sex and gender is grounded in medical science. It is not a belief system but a material fact (here, they confess to the qualitative differences among categories protected under civil rights law). To be sure, sex, they admit, refers to objective biological characteristics—chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs—that categorize individuals as male, female, or intersex. And gender, by contrast, refers to behaviors, expressions, and an internal sense of self that may or may not align with biological sex. But the university maintains that both are real: sex is material and independent of society; gender represents a genuine psychological and sociological reality.
For those who suspect I am constructing a straw man, I am actually steelmanning the university’s position. The subjective construct of gender identity is reified by the doctrine the university accepts as true. Gender identity is not merely real; it is more real than sex. How could it otherwise impose itself on the reality of sex? The biological category must yield to the psychological and sociological reality.
Dr. Amos rejects this framework. He argues that, by the doctrine’s own logic, gender as defined by the queer worldview is not an objective category in the same verifiable sense as sex. Its boundaries and rules are established by ideology rather than universally observable evidence. If one accepts that gender is distinct from sex, it is by definition a different category, one not organized by objective traits, but based on individual assertion, sometimes affirmed by a medical professional (although, according to activists, this is unnecessary).
As such, gender identity cannot generate the kind of civil right that would justify punishing an individual for refusing to affirm it. It falls into the same category as religion or other deeply held convictions. The rights of others are at stake, Dr. Amos points out.
He asks the committee to note a contradiction: if gender identity doctrine is allowed to shape institutional arrangements, would it not have men entering spaces exclusive to women, thus violating the right of both sexes to sex-exclusive spaces? What of their rights? Should a belief system upend an equitable system based on the fact of sexual dimorphism? Must a right established on a material fact bend because of the subjective claims of individuals? How could a man believing he is a woman justify violating the rights of women to the exclusive spaces established based on objective differences between males and females?
“But transwomen are women,” the committee objects. Dr. Amos responds that his fate cannot depend upon a contested claim. Certainly not on a falsifiable one. Compelling him to speak and act according to this ideological framework under threat of discipline is a form of compelled belief—precisely the sort of coercion civil rights law was meant to prevent, not enable.
Punishing him for objecting to the reorganization of institutions or modification of his personal speech acts to align with the gender identity doctrine violates his freedom to speak and publish as determined by the dictates of his conscience. He is not a subject in a kingdom where the truth is determined by the monarch. He is a citizen in a free society. His rights come not from government or men, but from laws of nature, as affirmed by the Declaration of Independence and specified in the First Amendment.
This is the stuff of foundational law. The authority of the law is not imposed by an ideology, but by an external truth, one determinable by induction from observation, as well as by deduction from first principles. Even if he appealed to the transcendent authority of God, that appeal itself is a liberty protected by civil rights. If the institution makes a similar appeal, that won’t fly. The First Amendment protects individuals, not institutions. At least not public ones.
Dr. Amos argues that sex is a protected class precisely because it is an objective, immutable reality grounded in anatomy, chromosomes, and reproduction. This is the paradigm of a civil right since it rests on material grounds; it is not a social construct but an observation. Using pronouns that accurately reflect a student’s sex cannot, therefore, constitute sex-based discrimination; it’s an affirmation of the very characteristic the law exists to protect.
Gender identity doctrine, however, demands the opposite: that the professor deny biological sex in favor of an internal sense of self that he regards as (indeed is) ideological rather than factual. In effect, the university is asking him to violate the civil rights protections attached to sex to uphold a newly invented civil right attached to gender. The university is effectively demanding that Dr. Amos misgender his students.
Here, we need to emphasize the importance of distinguishing between classes in civil rights law. Sex is not analogous to belief. Sex is mind-independent. A man is not a man because he is defined as such. Words have no power to create reality unless the desires they provoke yield technology that can change material circumstances. No technology capable of changing the sex of a mammalian species exists. The truth is that a man is an adult male human. He, therefore, cannot be a woman. The iron law of noncontradiction prevails.
Humans belong to a mammalian genus (and, like all mammals, are sexually dimorphic) that exists not because of words but because of natural history. Words used to describe what a man is are only valid when they accurately classify him. One cannot simultaneously affirm sex and a contradictory gender identity and remain rooted in reality. If sex and gender are the same objective reality, then gender identity is not a separate protected class at all. Admitting to this means the entire doctrine unravels. And it should be admitted to.
Compelling Dr. Amos to pretend otherwise is not anti-discrimination, but its opposite. The university is discriminating against Dr. Amos. They are, moreover, demanding that he engage in sexual discrimination by treating men as women; equity demands recognition of the objective difference between the sexes and protections based on those objective differences.
Proponents of gender identity insist that individuals use preferred pronouns because gender identity is a real and objective phenomenon backed by medical and scientific consensus. Of course, the university cannot have it both ways. Either gender is essentially synonymous with biological sex, rendering the modern distinction unnecessary, in which case the entire edifice of “gender identity” as a separate protected category collapses, or it functions like an ideological or religious construct and doctrine, in which case Dr. Amos cannot be compelled to participate.
But the university will try to have it both ways nonetheless by attempting to escape the dilemma. They will do this by appealing to authority. Thus, a major part of the dispute will almost certainly come with a fallacious appeal that eschews logic and rejects science. Dr. Amos must be prepared to show why the appeal is fallacious.
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As noted above (I have written about this extensively over the last several years—see my recent essay Lesbians, Men, and the Homophobia and Misogyny Underpinning Queer Theory and its embedded URLs), the terms gender and sex have been used interchangeably for centuries. Only recently have some—and I emphasize some—insisted on a sharp distinction. The insistence is driven by queer politics.
When challenged, advocates routinely invoke “medical consensus” or “science.” But this raises an obvious question: consensus according to whom? Not all medical professionals and scientists accept the distinction. In biology, “gender” is still used to describe reproductive roles. Moreover, even if every scientist or medical professional in a given area accepted the doctrine, it wouldn’t make it true. Truth has its own integrity, and it is corrupted by men.
Ideology is a powerfully corrupting force. As observed during the Nazi period, science and medicine were subordinated to party ideology in ways that subverted truth. Remember when, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci declared that criticism of him amounted to a rejection of science? Same thing. Maintaining a free mind requires rejecting appeals to scientific or medical authority.
Those who subvert popular consciousness know that the fallacious character of appeals to authority is largely unknown to the masses. The authorities don’t really teach logic and critical thinking in the nation’s schools—or when they feign it, it’s a cover for indoctrination (“media literacy,” “scientific literacy,” etc.).
Taking advantage of imposed ignorance, those prosecuting Dr. Amos cite professional organizations such as WPATH (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health) and the American Medical Association. Yet this appeal reveals the circularity inherent in their strategy. Dr. Amos will call them out on it.
WPATH traces its origins to the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, founded in 1979 by advocates already committed to the concept of gender identity as distinct from biological sex; the organization—later rebranded—emerged from the very ideological framework it seeks to legitimize through institutional authority. Its standards of care and statements are not independent scientific verdicts; they are the product of a community that presupposes the truth of the ideas it promotes.
This pattern is not unique to gender issues. As I have shown in previous essays (see, e.g., Dianetics in Our Schools; Arwah, Thetans, and Other Deceits), L. Ron Hubbard did not merely propose the idea system he named Dianetics; he built organizations—the Church of Scientology and the Citizens Commission on Human Rights—to wrap those ideas in the cloak of legitimacy.
Per Hubbard’s needs, Scientology portrayed evolving rules and standards as virtues: Scientology was advancing through discovery and refinement. In reality, the doctrine was adapting to challenges to maintain its legitimacy. Putting the matter bluntly, it was adapting its claims as it went along to control those under its sway.
Similarly, medical associations issue statements on contested practices only to face internal disagreement or later clarification. The AMA’s positions reflect institutional priorities and member debates rather than settled, universal truths. The paradigm of this problem in the medical field is the American Psychiatric Association (see my recent The Glass Man is a Man: Negating Delusions by Making Everybody Delusional).
Appeals to such institutions obscure the reality that genuine disagreement persists within the medical and scientific communities. Thus, even if we accept the premise of a changing field of knowledge, which we must in light of discovery and refinement, we must also examine how and why the field is changing. Indeed, how and why any given association exists in the first place must be grasped.
Citing an organization’s stance does not resolve the underlying questions of truth or justification. Institutions are composed of individuals with perspectives, incentives, and sometimes conflicts of interest. Their pronouncements deserve scrutiny, not automatic deference.
Yet the mere existence of a formal body—especially one invoking health, science, or human rights—creates an impression of settled authority even when the underlying claims remain contested, and the organization originates from within the same belief system it defends. The “standards of care” to which practitioners appeal are often shaped by ideological desire and financial imperative rather than genuine medical-scientific progress.
The appeal to circular authority by Dr. Amos’s institution is thus fallacious. The legitimacy of the case against the professor is illusory.
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Rather than treating Amos’s refusal as unlawful discrimination, I have argued in this essay that compelling the professor to affirm the gender identity doctrine through mandated speech violates his freedom of conscience and inverts the very purpose of civil rights law. Compelled speech is unlawful under the First Amendment, which recognizes Amos’s unalienable right to freedom of conscience, speech, and publishing.
In the end, Dr. Amos’s refusal highlights a profound problem in a social order governed by experts and ideologues: no one should be compelled by the state or its institutions to affirm beliefs they do not hold, especially when those beliefs rest on contested ideological foundations rather than demonstrable, objective reality. The most fundamental civil rights protections exist to shield individuals from coercion based on inherent traits, not to empower one group’s worldview to override another’s conscience.
Even when civil rights rules protect those devoted to religious beliefs, they do not warrant universal devotion to doctrine and ritual. When universities—or any authority—demand speech and action that contradict observable biological reality under the banner of “inclusion,” speech and action that violate civil rights themselves, they invert—and subvert—the very purpose of civil rights law.
Appeal to authority transforms a shield against discrimination into a sword of compelled belief and the systematic violation of rights. This reveals the totalitarian desire of the gender identity movement—and the reason why the First Amendment is so central to human freedom.
True tolerance and intellectual integrity require us to distinguish between protecting people from harm and requiring others to endorse contested ideas or take up practices contrary to personal conviction. Institutions gain organic legitimacy not by fiat or self-reinforcing structures, but through transparent evidence and reasoning that can withstand independent scrutiny. That doesn’t happen without people like Dr. Amos.
Until the proponents of gender identity doctrine demonstrate such grounding (which they never will because the premise is plainly false) that might compel its affirmation—whether in the classroom or the courtroom—the practice of preferred pronouns remains an unjustified assault on freedom of conscience. And even if the ground is recognized by most, forcing a man to walk upon it may still violate his conscience.
Individuals must retain the right to evaluate claims on their merits, guided by evidence rather than institutional pressure. Only then can society preserve both genuine civil rights and the liberty of thought and speech that make those rights meaningful.
