Denver Post Columnist Says He Was Fired Because of His ‘Insistence That There Are Only Two Sexes’
If Caldara’s claims are true, he can be added to the long list of people on the receiving end of pink slips over their refusal to conform to liberal groupthink when it comes to how to refer to transgender men and women.
A libertarian columnist for The Denver Post says he lost his job last week after butting heads with the paper’s editors over his science-based belief that there are only two sexes – man and woman.
Blaming “the victim-centric, identity politics driven media,” columnist Jon Caldara wrote on his Facebook page on Friday that he was canceled from the newspaper even though he was a staunch supporter of LGBTQ rights including gay marriage.
The main issue, he says, was the insistence by The Denver Post that reporters and columnists adhere to terminology standards dictated by the AP stylebook, which come courtesy of transgender rights activists and their supporters:
What seemed to be the last straw for my column was my insistence that there are only two sexes and my frustration that to be inclusive of the transgendered (even that word isn’t allowed) we must lose our right to free speech.
To be clear I am strongly pro-gay marriage, which has frustrated many of my socially conservative friends. I have friends, family and employees from the LGBT community. I don’t care who uses whose bathroom, what you wear, or how you identify. People from this community have rights which we must protect.
But to force us to use inaccurate pronouns, to force us to teach our kids that there are more than two sexes, to call what is plainly a man in a dress, well, not a man in a dress violates our right of speech.
Caldarawent on to decry the politically correct nature of “liberals in the free press” who fear offending or hurting the feelings of readers and/or viewers so much so that they “mandate” what others can and cannot say:
There was a time when the liberals in the press fought hard to protect free speech. Now they fight hard to mandate speech because, heaven forbid, someone be offended or have their feelings hurt. It’s okay people get offended. In fact, I encourage it. It means we are being challenged. It’s not hate speech. It’s speech. It used to be the press was all about.
You can read his full Facebook post below:
https://www.facebook.com/caldara/posts/3287250567969355?__tn__=K-R
He also praised The Denver Post editorial page editor Megan Schrader in spite of their differences over where they stood on pronoun usage. Schrader told the Free Beacon in a statement that Caldara indeed was no longer with the paper, but she didn’t go into detail.
“I am writing a job description as we speak to fill his position,” Schrader told the Beacon’s Alex Griswold. “I hope that conservative Colorado writers will apply knowing that we value conservative voices on our pages and don’t have a litmus test for their opinions.”
Caldara disputes the “no litmus test” claim, as evidenced by comments he made in an interview with Westword earlier this week:
In retrospect, Caldara thinks the seeds for his sacking were sown by a January 3 offering in which he argued that the AP Stylebook — the Associated Press guide used by many media outlets to determine which words and phrases are appropriate or to be avoided — promotes a progressive bias.
Two weeks later, Caldara wrote another column in which he argued: “Colorado Dems should let sun shine on their hospital fees and sex-ed curriculum.” In the piece, he slammed “Democrats [who] … don’t want education transparency when it comes to their mandate to convince your kid that there are more than two sexes, even if it’s against your wishes.”
If Caldara’s claims are accurate, we can add him to the long list of people on the receiving end of pink slips or otherwise canceled over their refusal to shut up and conform to liberal groupthink when it comes to how to refer to transgender men and women.
One of the few outspoken people who seem to have survived cancel culture on this issue to date is “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling. Last month, she tweeted support for Maya Forstater, a British woman who lost her job last year after old tweets surfaced where she stated biological men could not be women.
“Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill,” Rowling tweeted on December 19th.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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Comments
Ben Shapiro has it right. If you want to have a fantasy, go ahead and enjoy it. But don’t object when I don’t want to go along for the ride.
“The idea that sex or gender is malleable is not true. I’m not denying your humanity if you are a transgender person; I am saying that you are not the sex which you claim to be. You’re still a human being, and you’re a human being with an issue then I wish you Godspeed in dealing with it in any whatever way you see fit, but if you’re going to dictate to me that I’m supposed to pretend, I’m supposed to pretend that men are women and women are men, no. My answer is no. I’m not going to- I’m not going to modify basic biology because it threatens your subjective sense of what you are.”
https://www.dailywire.com/news/ben-shapiro-debunks-transgenderism-and-pro-hank-berrien
Video of that exchange,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=gkONHNXGfaM&feature=emb_logo
Please fire me for saying their are only two biological genders, but hundreds of imaginary genders.
Which one are we going to pretend that we are today?
Gender is not a biological term. The biological term is sex. You can have as many genders as you want because they are all made up psychology jargon.
The definition of the term gender refers to the sex to which one identifies psychologically. If one cannot identify with one sex for their entire life then they are transgender. If one cannot identify with any gender, they are agender. Non-binary is a term that can be employed to indulge either of these forms of mental abnormalities compared to >98% of the population.
The linguistic trick here seems to be for activists to (re-) define “man” and “woman” not as “adult human male” or “-female”, but as masculine and feminine gender identities.
Which conveniently leaves one without nouns that mean, respectively, “adult male human” and “adult female human.”
Caldera apparently understood all too well that “style guides” that insist on Newspeak are inherently ideological, as they literally leave one without words to express what one wants to say.
Unfortunately it seems his bosses understood this as well.
No, gender as sex has been used for over 600 years whilst the term sex is growing increasingly uncommon – except in reference to copulation. The notion of disentangling gender from sex is a very recent construct. Yes gender includes more than mere biological differences – gender roles for instance, but that doesn’t negate the biological basis of the term.
The sexgender one identifies as is irrelevant. Only what one actually is matters. Unlike race, sexgender are not open to debate. You are either one or the other.
Side note. Couldn’t Caldara sue for unlawful termination? While it would depend on the language used, being fired because you believe in reality seems absurd, and, though IANAL, in this instance seems like it could, at the very least, be in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
Somebody forgot to tell Random House, because in my old Collegiate version no such usage is included. Per them, “Gender” is strictly a literary/grammatical term, as in masculine, feminine and neutral.
In general, in the USA there is no such thing as “unlawful termination”. Unless he had a contract they can fire him for anything they like, so long as there’s no law explicitly forbidding it. I’ve never heard of a state that has a law against firing people for their opinion on a scientific fact, and I doubt Colorado has such a law.
I don’t have a gender. I never did. I have a sex. It is male.
a cat can have kittens in an oven, don’t make them biscuits.
fwiw he’s partly to blame for this crap. total support of all the gay issues led to this. he can’t have his cake and eat it too.
many people warned of this loss of free speech many years ago yet we were ridiculed by the gay supporters. now they are paying the price. and they deserve it.
yup… they hectored us into dropping the “slippery slope” argument, and now we’re all sliding downhill at break-neck speed. where it stops, nobody knows.
Nadler probably already wear a bra.
Two great sexes animate the world
Milton
What?? You dare to quote an old, dead white guy? A pox upon you.
The official record will say he was fired for refusing to follow industry standards. He can sue but the deck is stacked against him.
Everyone but us crazies on the right can pretend that there was no political correctness involved. He was just bad at his job. Cute. Real cute.
Two sexes. Two genders. And a transgender spectrum (e.g. homosexual) of deviant physical and/or mental attributes.
Trans-social (e.g. transvestite, pedophile). Transhuman (e.g. selective-child, one-child). Chauvinist (e.g. feminist, masculinist).
How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg? Four. Saying that a tail is a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
Abraham Lincoln
The insane Left has taken over. At some point, the grown ups will need to take over.
The Left is by far the most dangerous political group in the world. They intend to rule and control. They are no different than the Socialist left of the past. Same dangerous and deadly ideology just different faces and names. This will end in a Civil war between freedom loving Americans and the satanic Left who bring poverty and death.
Soon the Denver Post will be out of business and there will still be but two sexes.
“To be clear I am strongly pro-gay marriage, which has frustrated many of my socially conservative friends. I have friends, family and employees from the LGBT community. I don’t care who uses whose bathroom, what you wear, or how you identify. People from this community have rights which we must protect.”
It does not matter how much you virtue signal, Jon – you are now an official Enemy of the People (TM).
I read recently that when one goes for a “sex change” surgical procedure, only two options are available. Hmmmmmmm.
Watch the micro of how all this poison spewed by the democrats/left/islamists is affecting people on the edge.
No accident, either: the democrats/left/islamists need violence, and need people to commit it.
Watch:
https://bombardsbodylanguage.com/2019/01/14/body-language-attempted-assassination-of-donald-trump/
There are TWO genders!
There are FOUR lights!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_eSwq1ewsU
ST:TNG “Chain of Command”
Gender: masculine, feminine, refers to normally distributed, sex (male, female)-correlated physical and mental attributes. Gender is a phenotype, and social-type. A social-type including clothing standards that are suitable to each sex, and to construct a favorable juxtaposition of the sexes in order to normalize a functional (fit) society.
Why stop with trans/homo marriages? Civil unions for all consenting adults. Don’t be a bigot (i.e. sanctimonious hypocrite). That said, can a Pro-Choicer, selective, opportunistic, politically congruent (“=”), of the Twilight faith, in deference to mortal gods, be a bigot in principle?
Imagine that. They fired him for telling the truth. Typical liberal B’s!