Dear Sirs: please fire all the women

Sep 8th, 2018 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

So. Lucy Bannerman in the Times (the one in London):

A transgender lecturer orchestrated a smear campaign against academics across the UK in which universities were described as dangerous and accused of “hate crime” if they refused to accept activists’ views that biological males can be women, it can be revealed.

Natacha Kennedy, a researcher at Goldsmiths University of London who is also understood to work there under the name Mark Hellen, faces accusations of a “ludicrous” assault on academic freedom after she invited thousands of members of a closed Facebook group to draw up and circulate a list shaming academics who disagreed with campaigners’ theories on gender.

In other words this is a trans woman. Isn’t it interesting that we don’t see this kind of thing nearly so much from trans men? Like, almost not at all? Isn’t it interesting that whatever else trans women bring with them after transition, they sure as hell hang on to the misogyny? Because guess what: the “academics” in that last sentence are all women.

The online forum, seen by The Times, also revealed that members plotted to accuse non-compliant professors of hate crime to try to have them ousted from their jobs. Reading, Sussex, Bristol, Warwick and Oxford universities were among those deemed to have “unsafe” departments because they employed academics who had publicly disputed the belief that “transwomen are women” or questioned the potential impact of proposed changes to gender laws on women and children.

It’s a skillful trap, isn’t it. Trans women bully women relentlessly, which tends to nudge women into going public with their doubts about how true it is to assert that “transwomen are women,” which results in more and worse bullying, which nudges more women, and so on in a circle forever (until the crash comes).

Natacha Kennedy claimed the list is necessary as a warning to students, in case they strayed into an “unsafe” course taught by one of these witches women.

Aimee Challenor, the former Green Party candidate who used her father as her election agent even though he was facing charges of raping and torturing a ten-year-old girl, for which he was later jailed, was among those who responded to Ms Kennedy’s post of August 14 to the Trans Rights UK Facebook group, with suggestions of who to blacklist. All the named academics were women.

Emphasis added.

One of them is Kathleen Stock, who makes the philosophy department at Sussex “unsafe” by arguing against “redefining the category of woman and lesbian to include men.” You might as well call it “unsafe” to argue against redefining the category of peaches to include potatoes.

“File a hate crime report against her, and then the chairman and vice-chair,” advised one. “Drag them over the fucking coals.”

For the hideous crime of saying men are not women.

Rosa Freedman, an expert in human rights law at the University of Reading, had also upset activists by saying that biological males should not have access to a women’s refuge.

So the plotters plotted what words to use to persuade her university to fire her. “Call it hate speech!” they told each other, wiping the foam from their lips.

Professor Freedman told The Times: “We are talking about the aggressive trolling of women who are experts. I have received penis pictures telling me to ‘suck my girl cock’. This is straight-up, aggressive, anti-woman misogyny. In no way have I made the space unsafe. I find it deeply distressing that an academic would set out to smear my name and impugn my reputation, simply because I put forward a perspective, based on robust and specific evidence, with which they disagree. That is not academia. That is silencing people.

“The idea that writing about women’s rights automatically becomes a hate crime in some people’s eyes is ludicrous. All it has done has made me more determined to write about this, in a respectful way that allows other perspectives to come through, and not just the views of those who shout the loudest.”

It does brace up the ol’ determination, that’s a fact.

Professor Stock said: “What would make a philosophy department unsafe is if its academics weren’t allowed to challenge currently popular beliefs or ideologies for fear of offending. Deliberately plotting to have my department lose students, or to have me dismissed, through covert means, is surprising behaviour from a fellow academic.” Both professors praised the support that they had received from their universities.

Bannerman notes that Brown last month didn’t do quite so well.

One member of the Facebook group, Sahra Rae Taylor, stood by her contribution to the list. She said: “That way we can advise people applying that ‘if you want to study law, then don’t go to these places’. Which would allow them at least to avoid being taught (and marked, and under the influence in some way) by a transphobic douchebag.”

Ah yes, very academic, much serious thought.

Ms Kennedy, who describes herself on Facebook as a “stroppy, bolshie transgirl with attitude who hates the Tories with a passion”, refused to comment. She represented Goldsmiths during trans awareness week in February.

Then it gets weird.

It confirmed that she was an employee but would not explain which department she worked in or why she appeared to be listed twice in the staff directory: once as Mark Hellen, in the department of educational studies, and secondly as Natacha Kennedy, who is named in equality and diversity reports. Both profiles appear to be active.

That doesn’t even explain what kind of staff. Administration perhaps?

It also remained unclear why an academic paper on Ms Kennedy’s specialist subject of transgenderism in children, published by the Graduate Journal of Social Sciences in 2010, cited two co-authors: Natacha Kennedy and Mark Hellen.

Neither Ms Kennedy nor Goldsmiths would clarify whether the paper was by two individuals or the same person. A spokesman said: “Goldsmiths prides itself on its inclusive community and is committed to the values of freedom of speech within the law.”

Inclusive of what, exactly?

Updating to add: Natacha Kennedy on Facebook:

Capture“I’m sure the people of Ireland will give the fake-tanned fart-face a welcome the cunt deserves.”

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