Fired Denver Post columnist insisted there are 2 sexes

FPI / January 22, 2020

The most read columnist for the Denver Post no longer has a job at the newspaper after he wrote that there are only two sexes.

Jon Caldara said he was fired after he criticized an Associated Press directive saying that sex and gender are not binary and, later, a Colorado law requiring elementary schools to teach transgender ideology.

"There are only two sexes, identified by an XX or XY chromosome,” Caldara wrote in a Jan. 3 column. “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."

Two weeks later, Caldara also wrote a column critical of a 2019 Colorado law that requires 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 starring 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?"

In an interview with Westworld published on Monday, Caldara said that he was fired by the paper's editorial page editor, Megan Schrader.

"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," Caldara said.

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," Schrader told the Beacon. "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."

Caldara, president of the libertarian Independence Institute, said in a Facebook post: "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. 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."

Free Press International