Zoe Dykstra has a simple reason for studying medicine: She wants to take care of sick people. “I’m just trying to get through college and get my degree and be a nurse,” she said in our phone interview.

But a recent class presentation at Grand Valley State University in Michigan called “Pronouns as a Treatment Plan” did more to confuse and frustrate Ms. Dykstra than help her to be a medical practitioner. “Grand Valley is hounding this so hard to the point where it doesn’t even make sense anymore,” she said.

“Going into a field trying to take care of people is what I signed up for, but they are adding this whole other layer of cultural competence and [if you don’t agree] you are not a good nurse.”

The presentation warned students they might be “triggered” by the discussion of “sexual orientation” and “chosen name vs. dead name.” Nursing students were told to watch out for questions from patients such as “what if they want to see my ID” and “what if they stop me at the airport?” Hardly medical questions.

The presentation told students not to use a pronoun with someone until “you know what they are.”

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“There is more than just salt and pepper in the spice cabinet,” the presentation said. “What can we learn from the other spices?”

Biology takes a backseat in this lesson. The reality is that our ability to produce eggs or sperm is what separates humans into males or females. Despite rare genetic anomalies, there is no third (or fourth, or fifth) sex.

But that is not what Ms. Dykstra and her classmates are being taught. “I’m going to encounter people who don’t have the same views as me and don’t live as I live, and I am fully ready to take care of them,” she says. “Making us feel guilty if we don’t agree with that makes it very confusing about how to care for people.”

Her case is not unique. U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has already said that her office is not going to fund federal grants that promote radical gender ideology. Recently, Ms. McMahon wrote on X that one grant application that was cut was for “services related to gender orientation” at a university and the school’s “equity-based hiring strategies” focused on applicants’ “sexual orientation and gender-related identity.”

The problem facing students and faculty today is not just that “gender identity” denies biological truth, but that advocates for such identity politics want people hired and promoted based on their identity, not their skills and abilities. Yet patients are not treated more effectively merely because their doctor or nurse has a certain gender choice—they will be treated better by more skilled practitioners.

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Interest groups are more interested in identity politics, and their policing of language in medicine goes beyond pronouns and has become nothing short of oppressive. The American Medical Association, the largest association of medical professionals in the world, released a glossary for practitioners that banned the use of certain words. Research papers cannot be called “white papers,” patients are not “vulnerable,” “high risk” or even “hard to reach.” Patients are “oppressed” and face “social injustice.”

“I will care for them as well as anybody else, but it goes against my values to give them gender-affirming care,” Ms. Dykstra says. “It scares me a little bit.”

As it should. Research finds that “gender-affirming care,” such as prescribing drugs for off-label uses to increase testosterone in females or alter hormones in boys, can have dangerous side effects, including causing bleeding from the vagina in girls. Notably, research also finds that such interventions do not consistently relieve depression or anxiety in patients confused about their sex.

Grand Valley is hardly alone in pushing radical—and biologically inaccurate—ideas. Groups such as Do No Harm have investigated medical school curricula and found that “social and political issues have begun to meaningfully crowd out traditional medical training.”

That is the last thing aspiring nurses such as Ms. Dykstra, along with millions upon millions of patients, need at a doctor’s office.