By Jenna Ware, MSW, LCSW
Co-founder, Joseph F. Ware, Jr. Advanced Engineering Laboratory, “Ware Lab”
College of Engineering, Virginia Tech
Speaking as an Individual
July 4, 2020, after the CEOD stopped.
On Hokie Pride and Prejudice
Two Opposing Views at Virginia Tech, Duking it Out
How this Came About at Virginia Tech—Chock Full of Repeated Mixed Messages
We Are All Trans People, Our Sexuality, Together, Being Slammed
Transphobia
Effects of Not Owning Ourselves in Society
If You List Who You Accept, You Exclude Who You Don’t
Prejudice and Valuing Real Diversity
Gender Supremacy; Gender Bigotry
Joe Ware’s Example
Neil Gorsuch and the USSC, Supreme Court Diversity Decision
Virginia Tech’s Exclusion is Like Religious Suppression
Virginia Tech and Society
Since 2017, I have openly advocated at Virginia Tech for inclusion of diversity, even with our sexualities.
Both sex and gender exist. They are separate things, even different kinds of things. The APA knows this, Virginia Tech knows this.
Regarding trans people, if I say that society wants to deal with gender because it can be changed, and doesn’t like to deal with sex because it can’t be changed, people readily agree and are happy with me.
But it’s not true; that’s a false characterization. Really, between the two, society is dealing with what it hates least (gender) to avoid what it hates most (T sex)—and if I mention that, they deny it, yet will flee the topic like it’s a spider about to bite.
There is a schism at VT not unlike that which exists in society at large: Most people don’t like trans people and T sex issues in particular, but some don’t mind and are willing.
Virginia Tech gives mixed messages on transsexual and transgender sex issues, sometimes in favor with scientific precision, but more often against in collusion with the transgender paradigm which says to make us about a gender role in society, while rather de-sexing us. VT has published this conflict since 2018, not covering it up, as it’s part of a growth process we need to undertake both at VT and in society.
It is through discussions like these that we may find a road to acceptance for all diversity, even sex-and-gender non-binarism, even for conflicting ideals.
Too often, social idealism intimidates science and education, diverting us from reality. See my comments in this peer-reviewed, scientific journal of sex research.
LGBTQ+ is about accepting diversity, and transgenderim is built on being included as you identify—but both at VirginiaTech and in society in general—that same grace is decreasingly afforded people who identify as transsexual. We are rejected by LGBTQ+ and pressured to accept what other people think we should be.
That is not acceptance of diversity.
On Hokie Pride and Prejudice
We just went through “Pride Month.” I should feel a sense of support that I’m okay as I identify, as transsexual, that I am or should be included as much as anyone else, but I don’t. Instead, I feel slapped.
People in society are divided about whether it’s okay to acknowledge and include trans person sex issues as well as gender issues, or whether the narrative must only be about gender and play down sex issues as unimportant or offensive. LGBTQ+ are as guilty of this as others. These are two, conflicting ideologies. One of them celebrates diversity, and the other suppresses diversity, is sex-negative.
But there is a way to coexist. That’s the goal, here: Both of us, diverse even conflicting views, existing together. I will touch base on that from different perspectives throughout this article and on this website.
Virginia Tech has published, and previously allowed me to publish, that they are sharing both conflicting views on transsexual and transgender issues at the same time, yet in a way that excludes transsexualism and T sex issues from non-discrimination and general LGBTQ+ campus narrative. They say T sex issues are real and distinct—true—but they with knowledge exclude them from non-discrimination. Look at this.
The VT university statement isn’t complete; there is more that could be said. But as far as they went, they laid out some core issues clearly. Thank you, Virginia Tech. I admire the people who took the initiative to make this happen, to at least to go this far, because I am someone for whom trans sexuality is itself vital, the need to be the other binary, even if biologically unable as of yet.
These are key issues, specifically, that are almost always euphemized or excluded in the current, “transgender” umbrella social movement, in education, and in research, and which should be okay to say outright:
- The need to be the other physical sex, male or female;
- The identity of that sex (“sex identity“); and
- The needed sexual response of the other sex, male or female (who you’re in bed as, not who you’re in bed with).
This is Virginia Tech to people like me:
We acknowledge you,
but we exclude you.
We publish openly that transsexualism separately exists by needed sex difference, but we favor transgenders and refuse to include—this per
- non-discrimination statements, and
- the campus narrative that relates to trans people, such as the web pages of the campus LGBTQ+ organization.
Two Opposing Views at Virginia Tech, Duking it Out
Is Virginia Tech trying to say that they embrace transgenders and it’s okay to reject transsexuals—distinct by an opposite sexuality?
That is what they’re saying, outright. Plainly. Openly.
But on a deeper level—interpreting—I think something more is going on.
After 6 decades living with this, 4 decades in role, 2.5 decades of involvement with VT and quite a bit of advocating since 2017 on this specific issue, talking with many different staff at VT from Title IX compliance to Admin, to Commission members, their lawyers and professors, I think I see it.
I think the two views are NOT Virginia Tech making one combined statement, but two different ideologies at work, behind the scenes,
- one vying for co-existence of real diversity,
- the other vying for conformity of T diversities under one, gender-not-sex ideology.
How This Came About at Virginia Tech
I’ve been strongly associated with Virginia Tech for a long time, and through family, in Blacksburg for two and a half centuries. Traveling there in the mid-1990s, Joe and I saw the need and founded the Ware Lab in 1998 along with professor Hayden Griffin, there. Joe and most of his family graduated from VT. Joe taught math there. His father was a professor there and was Commandant of the Corps of Cadets. Joe is buried there in Westview cemetery. I will be buried beside him when that time comes. And we have family buried near him going back to the Revolutionary War.
It distresses me that VT strenuously asserts they will not say they won’t discriminate against people like me.
In 2017, I asked for T sex issues, somehow, to also be included in non-discrimination, and for transsexualism and core issues to be included in campus T narratives where they discussed trans people. I’m being brief, here. I was told by a Vice President of Inclusion it would have to be handled by governance via the Commission on Equal Opportunity and Diversity (CEOD). And it was—until it wasn’t.
2/26/18, it was officially rejected by the CEOD, and I was officially notified. Their letter to me indicates they did not understand what I was saying.
So I advocated more—and then 5/8/18, the CEOD issued a unanimous statement, without my asking for this particular statement or even knowing it was coming:
“With regard to sex and gender, we recognize that the terms gender identity, gender expression, and transgender are not synonymous with the terms sex identity, sex expression, and transsexual, nor is one set of terminology a subset of the other set.”
I call this “The Wonderful Statement,” it is such a breath of fresh air in today’s T sex suppressive climate. The Office of Inclusion published this on their website—with VT still and at the same time maintaining their published exclusionary non-discrimination statement and campus T sex-narrative web pages.
The Office of Inclusion said I could continue advocating and that the CEOD could revisit their rejection of inclusion—so, particularly since they’d rejected-then-accepted, in that order, I advocated for them to reconsider transsexual and T sex exclusions in the areas noted above.
Then, surprisingly, the Ware Lab tried to muzzle me / the topic of T sex non-inclusion at an event that I wasn’t even going to, so—with VT approval—I published the matter in the college newspaper. Twice. In the fall of 2018.
The message—are transsexuals or T sex issues welcome or not—goes back and forth at VT, over and over.
Imagine people struggling to avoid including other minorities; in this area, they do that at Virginia Tech. The larger sentiment at VT of exclusion hits me hard; I feel like the lowest of the low.
The result is VT may appear to be scientifically able and accepting of diversity yet at the same time rejecting and excluding of diversity they don’t like—and almost completely unwilling to deal with T sex issues for what they are.
Kinda like society at large.
Overall, I think the camp of gender-not-sex for trans people at VT, gathered itself after The Wonderful Statement in May of ’18 and pushed back.
Over the next two years, I faced considerable difficulty in my effort to advocate, talked with people some of whom couldn’t even bring themselves to state T sex issues, who bent Title IX requirements to fit, even when VT says it’s not bound by Title IX (just below)—never mentioning except once from one lawyer on campus that there is no law that prevents including other things you want.
It surprised me that distaste for T sexuality was that strong at Virginia Tech.
Note: The Wonderful Statement is controversial at VT. It has, to my count, been taken down 3 times and put up 4, so as of this writing, it’s still up. I cannot predict when it’ll be there or not, but it still is, as of this writing. If it is ever taken down or altered away from its current clarity, it will be clear that for trans people, gender advocates are suppressing T sex issues yet again.
2/18/20. Finally, after two years being lead along—feeling a pit in my stomach that VT says my transsexual issues must be excluded—a new CEOD with a different makeup and a stated gender-not-sex preference for personal reasons, different leadership…said the CEOD wasn’t even supposed to consider requests from individuals—in spite of the fact they had twice before and the VP said they could again—and that they’d hence forth block my emails.
My advocacy was effectively shut down, I believe in a biased, unethical manner.
It was officially left to stand that Virginia Tech accepts transsexualism, sex identity and T sex issues as real and separate phenomena, but that they were to be excluded from the non-discrimination statement and campus narrative of such as the LGBTQ+ center.
If this were a kind of thing done to other minorities, we would hear a righteous outrage. But in this day and age, it’s considered okay to do these kinds of things to transsexuals or people for whom T sex issues are paramount. I do not know how to see this other than willful exclusion, a slam, an insult, part of an overall system of institutional suppression that oppresses non-binary sexuality.
It was promised by the VP in 2018 that T sex issues would be included in campus education, but though I have tried, I have been unable to verify any of it.
We are All Trans People, Our Sexuality, Together, Being Slammed
We are all trans people, sex / gender non-binary, who need acceptance for our diversity and should be as valued as anyone else. But that should also include T sex issues and transsexualism, as without it, these issues and people are being suppressed, and that harms all trans people.
The CEOD is supposed to create equality for diversity, and it hasn’t. Not in this area. I hate to say it because I love Virginia Tech, but acceptance of diversity at VT is hypocritical, a sham, capricious and insisting on suppression and conformity. Its inclusion is partial, depends on what ideology is preferred and who is in charge, it seems—going with ideologies and social movements rather than acceptance of actual diversity.
Pride Month—the very thought of it brings painful tears to my eyes—is still supposed to include people like me, even when leaders refuse to say so. Trans person variation and identity are too broad to all be painted with one gender brush. Recognition must allow for open acceptance of diversity, including sex issues, including as one identifies.
Virginia Tech, both in Student Affairs and the Culture and Community Center, worry about mental harm to non-binary people with mis-references, such as the dichotomy of “he” or “she” and the need for gender neutral terms so as not to hurt by offending—
“…Accordingly, gender neutral pronouns have been created and are used in the interest of greater equality, dignity, and inclusion. This is an important aspect of our deep commitment to our students’ mental health and well-being”
—but one is primarily about T sex issues, it is okay to mis-term? Mental health no longer matters there?
I have stood with trans people, transgenders, transsexuals, queer, LGB…whomever…arm in arm, and asked for equality and inclusion. Would again. I’ve been at this since 1977, more deeply involved than people realize, known movers from Christine Jorgensen to Caitlyn Jenner, spoken in universities…and I’ve learned the need for us to accept ourselves in society.
After 63 years at this, I’m tired of being put down by people who insist on writing their own narrative about my life. I’m tired of being defamed by people, threatened or even hurt by people who think they’re doing the right thing. There is nothing negative about my sexuality, nor is there of transgenderism. Nor LGB or Q or +. Nor S nor I nor A nor any other alphabet letters I could put there.
People are people. We vary. Strict sex / gender / orientation conformity—even to the transgender paradigm—is false, fiction, a fantasy, and people who say that only through that conformity can we be considered okay are—
Transphobia
People who do not accept, who hate, fear, or are disgusted by trans person sex issues are transphobic. People saying they don’t want to hear about T sex issues, who cringe inside, or outside, when it must be mentioned, who avoid the subject, who wrinkle up their nose at the ideas…are transphobic.
And, yes, I’m going to say this: It’s also transphobic to cooperate with transphobia. Agreeing to treat ourselves per the wishes of prejudice, to minimize or deprecate our own selves in attempt to please prejudiced people, is just as wrong as that prejudice happening in the first place.
Effects of Not Owning Ourselves in Society
Others make our life hard. We mustn’t agree to make it even harder.
A person may choose personal sexual privacy, but institutions, organizations, government, law, universities…need to openly state, accept, and include T sex issues. If society acts like T sex issues are not okay to say—to depict in respectable literature, films and plays, to discuss openly when appropriate—then quite a number of negative things can follow:
An already complicated effort to find love in new role can be made immeasurably more complex and unlikely, individuals or relationships which may want to be more open may have no perceived support, transgender people, particularly, will tend to gravitate away from places, jobs or opportunities in life where sexuality could be revealed, self-segregate, self-discriminate to avoid, bigots can be reinforced for thinking prejudice is valid, hate crimes can be enabled, trans people who survive may feel unwilling to seek help or even report to the police because doing so can make a public record of sexual details hidden. I know. I’ve been there, personally.
Why does this have to be more difficult than gay openness?
You’re a male who loves a man who is male? Okay. You’re a female who loves a woman who is female? Okay.
But you can’t love a woman who has a penis, a man who has a vagina—who embrace non-binarism in some way, such as transgenderism—or someone who needs to be the other binary, such as transsexual? This can’t be okay so that we have to focus on gender-not-sex and pretend?
The gay social movement is decades ahead of ours—because they stood up for themselves—and I don’t mean, “Accept us equally, only don’t mention the sex issues as they’re offensive.” They realized they were their own hidden assault on their own civil rights.
People cannot demand dignity for something they hide.
Institutions, you are responsible for putting people down by refusing to accept T sex issues.
The “transgender” paradigm must evolve, stop socially denying sexuality, stop trying to force all trans people into a gender box.
If You List Who You Accept, You Exclude Who You Don’t
Hello Pride Month, LGBTQSIAlphabetsoup. You can’t list every variation. There are too many letters in this acronym, as it really varies by individual, limiting ideologies are built into some of the letters, and meanings even change sometimes year to year. If you try to list, then someone will be left out or forced to give up part of themselves to conform to someone else’s idea of who or what they should be.
A gender-focused advocate: “But that T only means ‘transgender,’ a spectrum of people who change gender, an umbrella term for all. And you did also change gender.”
A sex-and-gender advocate: “You make it look like it’s all about gender because you suppress needed sex differences. The only real umbrella term, if any is even needed at all, is ‘trans people.’ And people like me have the specific neural need to be the other physical sex.”
People who identify differently also need to be included without being forced into a box designed by someone else. Now that Gorsuch and the U.S.S.C. has said it’s all related to sex discrimination, we could just go with sex, same as muggles, to cover it—or “diversity,” if it’s the point to include diversity. Which it should be.
It should not be that one view is touted and that others are pressured to conform, which is now the most common case. And it hurts. I know; I’m on the butt end of that.
In truth, it’s all supposed to be about accepting diversity—isn’t it?—people who are different needing to feel worthy as themselves, valued in the face of social bigotry, included even if they think differently. Being excluded is a slam, a put down as an unpopular minority oppressed by people who want to avoid or hide issues that make them uncomfortable.
Prejudice and Valuing Real Diversity
The comic artist, Gary Larson for “Far Side,” once used evolution as the source for a good cartoon. “Lucy,” Australopithecus afarensis, lived about 3.2-ish million years ago in what we now call the Olduvai Gorge, a paleoanthropological site in the eastern Serengeti Plain, Africa…
From day one in the universe to now and into the future, things evolve.
As we evolved as a species, suspiciousness may have served a useful purpose for survival—being wary of that which is different. Greed may have also had its place, acquiring things that aided survival. And fear, avoiding trouble. Insecurity: Am I okay? What is perceived as “good” or “bad” may have influenced where to go, what to eat, what to drink, mate selection, how to raise kids, handle new things, new things encountered, new flora or fauna.
But primitive neural issues that may have helped us in some ways in the past can also cause current trouble that we must struggle to overcome. If we wish to evolve further from here as thinking, caring, more advanced people, we must teach ourselves to grow.
Among the things we need to learn is appreciation for diversity—the fact of diversity, itself, as value—stop thinking we have to force into our brains acceptance for specific diversities and start just valuing variance.
Diversity brings solutions, depth, richness to our existence. Who wouldn’t want that? People with that primitive fear of difference, who just want their own world view to be correct, or people who want to force others to conform to it.
But without diversity, where would we be?
- Hippocrates was Greek, probably a pagan, the father of modern medicine.
- Jabir ibn Hayyan was a Muslim scientist who taught us to think not in terms of alchemy but actual chemistry, liquefaction, crystallization, distillation, purification, oxidation, evaporation and filtration.
- Leonardo da Vinci was probably gay, a great Italian designer, thinker, and artist who painted among other things the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.
- Marie Curie was a woman, gained two Nobel Prizes, in physics and chemistry, for her work in radiation.
- Albert Einstein was a Jew, Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. He changed our view of the universe several times also including the famous E=mc^2, the Theory of Special Relativity, and 10 years later the General Theory of Relativity.
- Daniel Hale Williams was a Black man, who performed the 1st successful open heart surgery.
- Alan Turing was gay, a gifted mathematician who invented a machine that broke the German encryption system, Enigma, in World War-II, saving countless lives.
- Tu Youyou was Chinese, Nobel Prize for a treatment for Malaria, saving millions of lives world wide.
- Katherine Johnson was a Black woman, a mathematician, who helped humanity and NASA put men on the moon.
Creativity, new thought, new approaches, better ways of feeding our families, of learning, of living happy lives…all happen because someone thinks of it. If we all thought the same, it couldn’t happen.
I think of prejudice as primitive, from our earlier evolution.
We no longer need to be tribal for survival, and in fact, we must not all be the same. We must embrace diversity among us, including people who think in a way that appears to invalidate our own view—provided that all are included.
Yet we still have people who hate others because of difference and the prejudice in our own heart:
Donald Trump was elected President of the United States—a man who has a history of demeaning whole groups of minorities, who has supported white supremacy and dictatorships, who has admitted grabbing women’s crotches against their will.
We have George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, Maurice Gordon, Michael Dean…on and on. Black Lives Matter (#blacklivesmatter), but not to people who still tap ancient prejudice.
We had slavery in the United States, and some people clung to it so earnestly they took up arms against the country, 620,000 died in the Civil War. Yes, the Confederacy was to a great extent about slavery and human rights. Notable here is that people were willing to argue, fight and die to keep slavery, and many wish to keep monuments visible in the town square or on a flag to honor that evolving nightmare of racism and cruelty.
“Men” meant all people? Or white, male land owners. Or “men” later: “When we say ‘men,’ we mean women also, we just don’t want to actually say ‘women.’” We had to fight for inclusion, and not just for women but other races and economic classes, as well.
Gay people have been killed.
And trans people are killed for our differences, also.
Like Virginia Tech and society at large, there are people who inexplicably fight to suppress others, to maintain a belief that some people are more deserving than others, that some people, phenomena, or ideologies should be suppressed.
Gender Supremacy; Gender Bigotry
Who could say, “No. Say ‘gender’; don’t include ‘sex,’” knowing how vital it is to some people who do so identify?
Stressing that the narrative for all trans people must be about gender and not physical sex or sex response issues is rather like gender supremacy, a gender bigotry that is not unlike maltreatment of other minorities, and it is just as ugly. Transsexualism or those focused on T sex issues (as above detailed) are on the butt end of that. And saying you’ll be embarrassed is no excuse, is a feeble, tragic excuse to hurt people. Society must accept transgender non-binarism. Please don’t suggest T sex issues be excluded.
I ask for acceptance and inclusion of transsexual and T sex diversity, both of sexuality and of thought where it does exist.
Joe Ware’s Example
Joe was a conservative, Christian Republican, 40 years older; I was a liberal Democrat Jewish transsexual—yet we loved like “On Golden Pond.”
We were different in just about every way, but what did that matter? We weren’t hung up on those items as a reason for argument or disgust. If we had been, we wouldn’t have loved.
And when I looked deeper into Joe, I saw the most remarkable man! A Virginia Tech and Caltech genius with the most humble yet piercing intellect, who could listen to people and then offer the slightest phrase that cut to the heart of it, offering guidance, settling dispute. When he spoke, people listened, and not because he’d usually been the boss; because he was usually right.
A quiet Christian in the best way I could imagine, he believed in God and the value of mankind. He saw goodness in people. He did not judge them. Never in the 22 years I knew him, until his passing, did I hear him speak ill of anyone. I had known him to embrace people of different political ideologies, different races, various trans people, gay/straight…didn’t matter. He was that kind of person.
And he married me openly, in his church, by his pastor, before our friends. We married each other 17 times, each year near our anniversary—once in the home of his son, once in American Church in Paris, once by his minister while Joe sat in the car because he was too infirm at that time (Parkinson’s) to get out—inspired by his church organist, Fern Fay, who did the same.
He wasn’t secretive about loving me. He was not afraid to admit it. It was not something that should not be spoken. It was beautiful.
Neil Gorsuch and the USSC, Supreme Court Diversity Decision
Thank you Justices Gorsuch, Roberts, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan and the United States Supreme Court (USSC) for making it clear that in the United States of America, discrimination against sex variations do fall under “sex discrimination.”
I didn’t ask VT to include transsexualism, sex identity, or sex expression in NDSs, per se. If you list the gender correlates and exclude these, then it’s exclusion—which is the problem. I asked for neutral language for T sex to also be included, something that could come out of discourse if we ever got it (which we didn’t), perhaps something like an addition of 5 letters, shown here in italics so you can see which 5 letters I’m talking about, as non-discrimination for
“…sex (including pregnancy), sex or gender identity, gender expression…”
How could I ask for less? How could it be done with 4 letters? 3? And why should it have to be? Remember, there is no law forbidding this.
My thought:
If it comes down to sex discrimination—and I agree it does—if non-discrimination statements no longer require “gender identity” or “gender expression,” then why would they be left in there with corresponding sex issues excluded? I think as a political statement, as a preference, as an indirect way of saying T sex issues are still unwelcome, unaccepted, a prejudicial embrace of non-binarism that seeks to hide non-binary sexuality.
And if “gender identitiy” or “gender expression” do need to be retained for some extraneous reason—why? Again, just a higher level of an effort to promote one ideology over another.
Virginia Tech’s Exclusion is Like Religious Suppression
One way to look at how to be inclusive is as if it were something else.
If it were who someone may be attracted to, we don’t say “…whether straight or not…” to be inclusive. That would be prejudicial. We say “…sex orientation…” as it’s neutral, includes all regardless of ideology or need.
If it were someone who may be of a sex, we don’t say “…whether male or not…” to be inclusive. That would be prejudicial. We say “…regardless of sex…” as it’s neutral, includes all, regardless of ideology or need.
If it were someone who may be of a religion, we don’t say “…Christian or not…” to be inclusive. That would be prejudicial. We reference “…freedom of religion…” as it’s neutral, includes all, regardless of ideology or need.
If it were someone who may be trans, we shouldn’t say, in effect, “…transgender or not…” to be inclusive. That is prejudicial as it only references the gender-not-sex view. We should reference “…trans person…” as it is neutral, includes all, regardless of ideology or need.
You may know your religion is true. You may know it to your soul. You may have communed with God. Most people may be of your religion and affirm it as true. You may not like my religion. You may believe I will go to hell if I don’t accept and live by the tenets of your religion.
But if I tell you I’m of a different religion, you need to accept that and live together with me in peace and respect.
Virginia Tech and Society
It is best to use neutral “trans person” language so that all ideologies are included, none are weighted, none are favored.
But if you do list gender issues, as you obviously prefer, please—I beg you with all the fervent emotions of those currently fighting for race equality among symbols of Confederate oppression—ALSO include the view that some people are primarily about opposite physical sex issues, that “trans people” is the only real umbrella, that phenomena are distinct by significant difference and science should struggle for precision, not give in to social movements, that T sex issues should not be suppressed or re-written in history, that transsexualism and its core issues are worthy and valid, that all T sex issues no matter how non-binary are worthy and valid…
The transgender paradigm has a long history of suppressing transsexualism and trans sex issues. It’s got to end. We must all be valued as we really are.
That is called acceptance of Diversity.
Stating one and refusing to state the other— That is called bias, an assertion of ideological supremacy, which causes people to prejudge.