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No Balance at AU

Becky Robertson, Auburn, AL

At the request of the Alabama Eagle Forum President, I attended the July 20-22, 2001 Southern Girls Convention on the A.U. campus (sponsored by Auburn Women's Organization, Gay & Lesbian Association, and Women's Rugby Team), which did more to indoctrinate than liberate our Southern daughters. The display area offered copies of Lesbian Connection magazine and Witch Camp brochures. The Socialist Workers Party sponsored the book table.

Workshops included: From Wedded Wife to Lesbian Life, Queen Politics, Re-examining Relationships: Monogamy and it's Discontents (how open relationships can work to foster multiple loving relationships), Racism and Heterosexism (how racism and heterosexism share links with each other), and Tara Dance (dance the 21 praises for the all-powerful goddess Tara, fortifying the international sisterhood).

The program listed several guidelines, including:

Try to be sensitive to any languages or practices you may use that assume only two genders, that assume that gender identity is the same thing as the sex you are born with, or which otherwise ignore the existence of trans people.

We apologize for the gender-segregated bathrooms; we don't have any control over how Foy sets itself up. Since we basically have the run of Foy Union, we encourage people of every gender and no gender to use whichever bathroom they feel most comfortable using.

A third of the participants at Gender Bias in Our Schools, which I attended, were high school students. Most of the others were education majors or worked as teacher aides. Several identified themselves as gay.

A teacher aide complained that her teacher treated the elementary aged boys differently from girls. One of the young men said he didn't want his nieces subjected to traditional gender roles. A high school girl stated that uniforms were bad because they didn't allow for individual expression through clothing. And so it went until the session ended.

I consider myself to be fairly progressive, but several things about this convention bothered me, such as:

  1. Where was the educational balance?

    If this convention was university related, where was the instructor to suggest that perhaps young boys are wired differently from girls — and that is why they are sometimes treated differently. After all, it is more important for students to be treated fairly than for everyone to be treated the same.

    The organizers' response was that they only provided the participants with space to conduct their own workshops — [and they] neither endorse nor repudiate any of the topics discussed. But pre-convention materials stated they would not allow dissent from their pro-abortion agenda, considering it proselytizing.

  2. How could anyone related to the university think it educational to use campus funds to pay for something this unbalanced?

    Organizers received funds from several colleges: Education, Nursing, Science, and Math, Human Development and Family Studies, and Liberal Arts. When asked about this, Assistant Provost Wes Williams responded that the money came from departmental private, discretionary funds, not public. I fail to see the difference.

  3. Why are these radical students choosing the field of education?

    Those in attendance didn't seem to form a representative cross-section of majors; they were disproportionately choosing education. If these are the Southern girls who will later teach, more and more parents will select private and home school for their children.

Winston Churchill said, "If a man is not a liberal in his youth, he has no heart. If he is not conservative in his age, he has no brain.” Where were the people with the brains at the Southern Girls Convention?