Donald H. DeHayes
Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
University of Rhode Island
[email protected]
Jeannette E. Riley
Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
University of Rhode Island
[email protected]
Rosaria A. Pisa
Director, Gender and Women’s Studies
University of Rhode Island
[email protected]
Re: Support for Professor Donna Hughes
Dear Provost DeHayes, Dean Riley, and Director Pisa,
We represent the U.S. chapter of the Women’s Human Rights Campaign, and we are writing to support the free speech rights and academic freedom of Professor Donna Hughes.
The Women’s Human Rights Campaign (WHRC) is a global nonpartisan group of volunteer women dedicated to protecting women’s sex-based rights, and WHRC USA is the U.S. chapter of WHRC. Our volunteers include academics, writers, organizers, activists, lawyers, and health practitioners. The Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights was created by the founders of WHRC to lobby nations to maintain language protecting women and girls on the basis of sex rather than “gender” or “gender identity.” The Declaration re-affirms women and girls’ sex-based rights and challenges the discrimination we experience from the replacement of the category of sex with that of “gender identity.”
As an organization concerned with the sex-based rights of women, WHRC USA advocates for the rights of lesbians alongside the rights of all other women. We are, therefore, supportive of efforts to end discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. We are, however, opposed to the concept of “gender identity,” and particularly to the conflation of “gender identity” with sex.
According to the United Nations, the word “gender” refers to “the roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society at a given time considers appropriate for men and women.” For women, who have suffered for millennia from the constraints society has imposed upon us, gender is hardly something to be preserved or protected. Further, “gender identity” is a concept that has no coherent meaning. By definition, the only “identity” that can be conferred by “gender” is a stereotype.
Our stance on the deleterious effects of the gender identity movement on the rights of women and girls are in alignment with what Professor Hughes wrote in 4W, that this ideology has no basis in material reality. The University asserts that faculty have an obligation “to show due respect for the opinions of others and to “exercise critical self-discipline and judgment” and “appropriate restraint” in transmitting their personal opinions”, yet we would counter that the University has an obligation to respect the intelligence of its students’ abilities to be faced with ideas with which they might disagree. The University should be a forum to expand students’ minds, not a protective bubble where the administration guards against wrongthink.
Professor Hughes is to be publicly commended, not censured or reprimanded.
Sincerely,
WHRC USA Steering Committee
Kara Dansky
Marian Rutigliano
Austin Deville
Connie Hahn
*Please note that the Women’s Human Rights Campaign USA (WHRC-USA) is now officially known as Women’s Declaration International USA (WDI-USA)
I heard about this a few weeks ago when an article came up in the Christian Post about it. I literally thank God for the Christian Post for daring to publish works that go against the current trans ideology. I’ve been sending the Christian Post article and the original 4w article to people I can trust not to “cancel me,” either because they respect an open, honest discourse of all issues; trust and respect me; or can’t “out” me because I posted the article anonymously.
Thank you WHRC for standing up for Donna Hughes and all other cancelled women. You give me hope on my darkest days.
Sincerely,
Kathleen F. (a declaration signatory)
STOP CENSORING WOMENS VOICES AND HEALTHY DEBATE!!