A professor at Indiana University School of Medicine condemned a lesson inculcating gender ideology among first-year medical students as “anti-scientific” and “anti-biological,” warning that it would have “very detrimental effects to the health care profession” and stating that he had not heard of any internal discussions about the lesson before professors implemented it.
“I did not hear about it until it came out in the news,” the professor, who spoke with The Daily Signal on condition of anonymity, said in a phone interview Wednesday. He said the transgender lesson did not surprise him, however, because “the entire biomedical profession has been conquered by this aggressive ideology that inculcates a certain worldview.”
The lesson, “Sex and Gender Primer” for the Human Structure course, endorses calls for the redefinition of sex, claiming that biological sex is “NON-binary” (emphasis original). According to a PowerPoint presentation that the medical organization Do No Harm provided to The Daily Signal, it encourages medical students to use “inclusive terminology” based on the notion that gender is divisible from sex.
It presents as a “resource” the “genderbread person” diagram separating gender identity from gender expression and from anatomical sex.
The lesson laments that “most textbooks present sex as binary” and advocates for “anatomy texts to discuss sex on a spectrum.” It notes that it “will take time to update” the “sexual, reproductive, and genital system content” that is “highly gendered.”
The lesson endorses “person-first language” such as “people with cervices” rather than “women,” and “anatomy-based language,” such as “the testes produce sperm” rather than “the male gonad produces sperm.”
The lesson also notes that “linguistic practices are open to change as LGBTQIA+ advocates refine their perspectives on language.”
The school of medicine’s website describes “Human Structure” as a nine-week course in phase one, year one at medical school.
Do No Harm, an organization of doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals that speaks out against medical abuses, first obtained the lesson, which The Daily Mail first published Sunday, without attribution to Do No Harm.
Do No Harm’s board chairman, Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a kidney specialist, condemned the lesson in remarks to The Daily Signal, tying it to so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion classes.
“Indiana University School of Medicine’s woke DEI classes on gender are highly speculative and won’t change the health of any group in America for the better,” Goldfarb said.
“This class conflates the anatomy of male and female reproductive systems with a highly controversial and scientifically dubious concept of ‘gender fluidity,’” he noted. “It uses complex and very rare abnormalities in human development to assert that gender is a spectrum and not the manifestation of the basic biologic reality of the sexes. These ideas should not be presented as established biology. By doing so, they provide support for the gender transition of minor children. DEI indoctrination in medical schools must be stopped for the sake of quality of patient care.”
The Indiana University medical professor agreed.
“It’s anti-scientific and anti-biological,” the professor told The Daily Signal. “This is going to have very detrimental effects to the health care profession. It’s going to degrade the trust of the public in health care.”
He warned that transgender ideology “reverts us to a pre-Enlightenment era, where biology and objective facts are not relevant.”
“I have not heard of any internal discussions about this,” he added, lamenting that “there is no open debate about it at all.”
“It reminds me of what I’ve read about the Stalinist era and the way scientists were handled by the state regime during the 20th century,” the professor added. According to English science writer Simon Ings, the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin “embraced, patronized, and even fetishized science like never before,” but “scientists lived their lives on a knife edge,” facing exile, imprisonment, or death if they countered the regime’s ideology.
“I suspect that if there was open discussion” at Indiana University Medical School, “most individuals would be opposed to forcing this very aggressive ideology on trainees,” the professor said.
He urged the medical field to “encourage and require open debate” and to “purge ideology and politics from medicine,” even if it requires politicians to use “financial leverage” to remove gender ideology from schools.
Indiana University School of Medicine declined to comment on the document to The Daily Signal.
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