Sexual politics have erupted again in Toronto’s ivory tower as another male student has lost a bid to be excused from a class with women without losing marks, this time because he’s shy.

The Ontario Human Rights Tribunal has dismissed a complaint by University of Toronto student Wongene Daniel Kim, who accused his professor of discriminating against him as a male when she docked him marks for not coming to class because he was too shy to be the only guy.

The second-year health science major arrived at the opening of a Women and Gender Studies course for which he had signed up in the fall of 2012 — “It had spaces left and fit into my timetable” — only to discover a room full of women and nary a man in sight.

“I felt anxiety; I didn’t expect it would be all women and it was a small classroom and about 40 women were sort of sitting in a semicircle and the thought of spending two hours every week sitting there for the next four months was overwhelming,” said Kim, 20, adding he manages a part-time job with women because there are also other men.

“I’m generally a shy person, especially around women, and it would have been a burden if I had had to choose a group for group work.”

He didn’t stay for class — that day, or ever — but continued in the course and asked Professor Sarah Trimble to waive the 15 per cent of the mark earned by class participation and attendance.

She refused.

Kim got poor marks on assignments and ended up failing the course, which he said he found frustrating after spending the money on course materials.

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He asked Trimble to reconsider his mark. When she refused, he complained to the Human Rights Tribunal that she was penalizing him because he was male.

Kim said he had been unaware how poorly he was doing until it was too late because Trimble didn’t post marks on the course website. She handed assignments back in class.

“We live in a digital era, why couldn’t she have posted the marks online?” Kim said in an interview. “I believe if you want to attract more males to these courses, you have to work with them. My request for accommodation was reasonable.”

However the tribunal ruled his complaint did not warrant a hearing.

“The applicant has not satisfied me that his claimed discomfort in a classroom of women requires accommodation under the (Ontario Human Rights) Code,” wrote adjudicator Mary Truemner. “He admitted that his discomfort is based on his own ‘individual preference’ as a shy person . . . and stated he thought they (the women) would not be willing to interact with him because of his gender.”

This was “merely speculation as he never gave the class, or the women, a chance,” wrote Truemner, vice-chair of the tribunal.

Kim had no evidence of being “excluded, disadvantaged or treated unequally on the basis of” his gender, she said.

The case comes weeks after York University came under fire for not supporting a professor’s refusal to let a male student be excused from face-to-face group work with female students in an online sociology course because it would violate his religious practice.

Professor Paul Grayson argued that to allow the request would have let “religious rights trump women’s rights . . . and tacitly accept a negative definition of females. That’s not acceptable,” he told the Star.

But York’s administration said Grayson should have excused the student from group work because York had earlier excused an overseas student from group work in an online course.

The controversy sparked a national debate about how far universities should go to accommodate students, from religious belief to personal preferences.

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“The heart of the Human Rights Code is to make sure people are treated fairly and accommodated for grounds protected by the code, like race, gender, disability — but shyness around women is certainly not one of those grounds,” said Jim Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association for University Teachers.

“There is no reason whatsoever to accommodate personal preference — what if I didn’t like redheads? — and when people try to use it for personal preference undermines the basic values of a post-secondary education dedicated to diversity and not treating any class of students as subordinate to others.”

U of T spokesman Michael Kurts agreed the university accommodates student requests based on any grounds protected by the Ontario Human Rights Code, “but those human rights obligations do not extend to individual preferences.”