UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-RIVER FALLS RELEASES GUIDE OF OFFENSIVE WORDS & PHRASES FOR STUDENTS TO AVOID

 

 

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:

The PC movement continues to barrel through college campuses across
the country with extraordinary steam as exemplified by a new campaign
against so-called offensive language at the University of
Wisconsin-River Falls, in which students are asked to avoid innocuous
words and phrases like “you guys” and “crazy.” The school published a
guide for its “Check Yourself Educational Campaign” in which it lists a set of terms and words that are said to be offensive.
“Sometimes we say things without realizing the impact they may have
on others,” suggests the campaign. “Take time to educate yourself about
language and the histories of oppression. This list is not extensive,
but touches on common identities and concepts. Read them. Consider them.
Understand them. And Check Yourself before you use them.”
While a number of the expressions found within the guide would
generally be classified as offensive, such as racial slurs, derogatory
terms, and curse words, others are harmless colloquialisms.
The guide spends a lot of time discussing terminology that can be perceived as offensive by the LGBTQ community.
For example, it instructs students to avoid asking about the gender
of a trans person from someone other than the transgender individual.
Similarly, students are not allowed to make claims that bisexuality does
not exist and that people are simply either gay or straight. The
reason? “This denies the fluidity of sexuality and dismisses people’s
experiences and definitions of self.” At the same time, however,
students are asked not to make such statements as “I think everyone is
really bisexual” because it then denies bisexual students of their
individuality as bisexuals.

It also prohibits students from using terms like “she-male,”
“she-he,” and “tranny,” as they “dehumanize transgender women.” It asks
students to stop exclaiming that something is “so gay” as a “negative
adjective.” All derogatory terms for homosexuals such as “faggot” and
“dyke” appear on the list.
The guide also showcases an underlying anti-male attitude, as it
takes a stand on using words referring to “people with vaginas to
express that someone is weak or emotional dehumanizes women and
perpetuates misogyny and sexism” but makes no such point regarding men
and derogatory words typically used for males.
It instructs students to avoid using terminology having to do with
female promiscuity, such as “ho” and “slut.” The reasoning is bizarre as
it seems to indicate that racism somehow plays into the use of these
words. It also seems to justify a sexually promiscuous lifestyle as one
that should be accepted. The guide asserts that the use of these terms
does the following: “Dismisses anyone seen as being ‘too sexual’,
particularly sex workers, women, LGBTQIA+ people, and people of color.
Perpetuates negativity towards sex itself. Promotes a sexual double
standard.”
Additionally, students are asked to avoid the phrase “illegal aliens”
because it apparently reduces undocumented immigrants to “something
less than human.”
Students are discouraged from using terms like “ghetto” or “ratchet”
because it associates “people of color” with negative characteristics of
being “poor” or “dangerous.”
The guide also asks students to avoid terminology that would amount
to body-shaming, specifically by referring to someone as fat, as the
guide claims such a word reinforces “harmful assumptions that fat people
are gluttonous and are fat because they have no constraints around
food.” Students are asked not to refer to themselves as fat for the same
reasons.
It continues by stating that the term audaciously implies “that there
is an acceptable amount of food to eat and anything more is disgusting,
or that enjoying too much food is disgusting.”
“Ugly” also appears on the list, because it somehow “can be connected
back to white supremacist, ableist, sizeist standards of beauty.”
Any reference to a person’s inability to execute a task, such as
“retarded,” “lame,” “dumb,” and “crazy” are also no-nos because they
allegedly target “mental, emotional, and physical disabilities as
objects for ridicule.”
But of all the items prohibited by the guide, perhaps the most absurd
is the phrase “you guys,” which apparently generalizes “a group of
people to be masculine,” and fails to properly address the various
identities of those in the room.
The guide, like all other PC efforts, is yet another attempt at
preventing hurt feelings. It contributes to students’ inflated sense of
self and their delusions that they should never have to experience
confrontation or differing viewpoints that they may perceive as
offensive. Of course, the PC movement encourages all viewpoints to be
accepted, unless they are conservative or Christian. Those are the
viewpoints deemed hateful, and anyone holding them should obviously be
told they are wrong.
Institutions of higher education are doing a dramatic disservice to
their students by guarding them from all that can hurt their egos. Greg
Lukianoff, a constitutional lawyer and the president and CEO of the
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and Jonathan Haidt, a
social psychologist who studies the American culture wars, addressed
this very issue in the September 2015 issue of The Atlantic in an article entitled “The Coddling of the American Mind.”
They contend that political correctness has morphed into an even more
restrictive movement that not only seeks to limit free speech but also
attempts to punish anyone who interferes with those goals, which fails
to prepare students for real-world scenarios. They wrote:

These PC efforts encourage students to avoid all that they fear and
all that offends them, thereby further increasing their sensitivity to
things that may otherwise have not offended them. “In the name of
emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding
protection from words and ideas they don’t like,” Lukianoff and Haidt
wrote.
Schools such as the University of Wisconsin-River Falls are only too
happy to comply. And as long as the students remain on campus, they may
be able to safely avoid being offended, but who will protect them when
they graduate?