A Denver Post columnist says he was fired after disputing the idea that there are more than two sexes.
Jon Caldara, president of the libertarian Independence Institute, announced that he has been fired from the Post, chalking it up to "a difference in style" that his editors found "too insensitive."
"My column is not a soft voiced, sticky sweet NPR-styled piece which employs the language now mandated by the victim-centric, identity politics driven media," he said in a Facebook post. "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."
Caldara criticized an Associated Press directive saying that sex and gender are not binary. "There are only two sexes, identified by an XX or XY chromosome. That is the very definition of binary. The AP ruling it isn’t so doesn’t change science. It’s a premeditative attempt to change culture and policy. It’s activism," he wrote on Jan. 3. In a column two weeks later, Caldara also railed against a 2019 Colorado law that required elementary school children to be instructed in transgender ideology.
"Some parents weren’t thrilled a couple of years back when during school their little ones in Boulder Valley School District were treated to videos staring [sic] a transgender teddy bear teaching the kids how to misuse pronouns or when Colorado’s 'Trans Community Choir' sang to kids about a transgender raven," Caldara wrote. "What are the protections for a parent who feels transgender singing groups and teddy bears with gender dysphoria might be 'stigmatizing' for their kid?"
Caldara said that he was fired by the paper's editorial page editor, Megan Schrader, according to an interview with Westword published Monday.
"Megan told me I was the page's most-read columnist. But there's now a permanently and perpetually offended class, and in order to speak, you need to use their terminology. There's a whole lot of you-can't-say-that-ism going on right now."
In an email to the Washington Free Beacon, Schrader confirmed that she fired Caldara but declined to discuss the reason.
"I am writing a job description as we speak to fill his position," she said. "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."