Philosophy and Gender

In other courses that I have taught, I have intentionally made space at the beginning of the semester for students to express their pronoun preferences to me and the class and made a point of sharing mine. My reasoning was that I wanted to avoid unintentionally misgendering students myself, having students misgender each other, and to acknowledge (although I wonder if I was ever successful at this, without saying it explicitly) that trans and non-binary folks are welcome members of our community who deserve respect. Reading  Dembroff and Wodak's (2018) article "He/She/They/Ze"  has generated some questions for me about the wisdom of this practice. In this article, the authors defend what they label as the  Radical Claim , that "We have a duty not to use gender-specific pronouns to refer to anyone, regardless of their gender identity" (372). I found the arguments the authors make in section 4.2 regarding privacy particularly compelling. By using gender-specific...

I am fascinated by the list of 100 Skills Every Man Should Know from the Art of Manliness. The list, we are told, is for "modern man" who "must be both a warrior and a diplomat, a woodsman and a scholar". Some of the skills on the list include: survive a bear attack, fix a leaky faucet, recite a poem from memory, sew a button, change a flat tire, change a diaper, grow your own food, open a bottle without an opener, speak a foreign language, write in cursive, pick a lock, give a good massage, and my favorite, number 84: make a logical argument. Great skills, right? My initial reaction is, why aren't these skills that every modern human should know? Most of them sound useful and/or fun. I like backpacking in the wilderness and want to survive bear attacks! The authors don't tell us that non-men should not know these skills, or that these skills are only for men. I have a lot of these skills and would like to learn many of the others that I don't current...

Google's instructions can be found  here , or simply Navigate to blogger.com Click the "Create your blog" button Sign in using your school Google account (xxxxx@siena.edu), you can make up a display name  On the left menu click the little down arrow Click "New blog" Title your blog, click next Choose a blog address, click save If you like, you can customize the layout and theme of your blog You can also add profile info in Settings  To make a post, navigate to Posts in the left menu and click the orange circular button with a plus sign on it