Step aside XX
Oh, man, this is the kind of thing that makes me totally furious. Well there are lots of those, but still – this especially. Another man in pearls steals women’s history.
Transgender Woman Will Lead Gender Studies Program At Rutgers
Next up:
White Man Will Lead Critical Race Theory Program At Rutgers
Just kidding, they would never do that. Never never never. They would eat broken glass before they would do that. But women? Oh that’s completely different…because, you see, women are karens, so they have privilege over men in pearl necklaces.
Rutgers University: Catherine Fitzpatrick may be the first openly transgender woman in the U.S. to lead a women’s and gender studies program
That is, “Catherine” Fitzpatrick may be the first openly male person in the U.S. to lead a women’s and gender studies program, but we bet he won’t be the last!
An English literature professor at the university since 2014, Fitzpatrick believes she may be the first openly transgender woman in the country to lead a Women’s and Gender Studies program.
And has no qualms about it. Fitzpatrick has no qualms about taking a job that should have gone to a woman, because we have all now been instructed that trans women are more oppressed than women, and thus get to grab everything that used to belong to women, including even the subject “women” and the discipline women’s studies. Women are second best and frankly should just…well, you know, stay home and bake pies.
There are openly transgender scholars who lead other programs and departments at the university level, according to Yale professor Susan Stryker, one of the country’s foremost scholars on gender issues. But when Fitzpatrick was asked to take the helm of a program dedicated to the study of women and gender – an appointment Stryker also thinks is a first for a transgender woman – it felt like the ultimate validation of her true self.
And that, of course, is infinitely more important than the validation of the fact that women matter too, just as men matter. Sorry laydeez that’s old hat, we don’t believe that any more. Trans women matter, but you, not so much. I like cherry pie the best.
“I think I can now announce that I have accepted the position of director of Women’s Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. Relatedly, we can finally answer the age-old question, ‘how do I know when my transition is over?'” she wrote in a tweet this fall.
That’s what matters – his transition. Not women, not the movement to free women from the rules and limits imposed on them from time immemorial, no, just the transition of a man to a pretend-woman.
Though she was showered with congratulatory tweets from followers, Fitzpatrick’s happy moment also drew out trolls questioning her appointment. And she knows she will be hounded by some feminist groups that reject the role of trans women in the feminist movement once her story is shared on social media.
Yes how dare women think that feminism is for women just as BLM is for black people. How dare women think they get to say men are not women however much they like to fantasize that they are. How dare they say anything at all, really.
“I think this is precisely the thing that certain feminists feel is a betrayal. The argument tends to recycle itself because there are always new transwomen coming out,” she said. “They come for people without any provocation, but if you avoid engaging them online, they get bored and go away.”
So he gets that we “feel” it’s a betrayal, but he also doesn’t care, and feels entitled to ignore us until we go away.
However, Fitzpatrick is quick to point out that while a trans lady running a Women’s and Gender Studies program is “cool,” it has not escaped her that she is another white professor in a position of power at one of the most diverse universities in the nation. She said she is committed to using her new role to represent marginalized communities – especially those in Newark.
Wow. That rubs it in even more. Taking a woman’s job is “cool” but oh oh oh he’s a white professor, oh oh oh where are some marginalized communities he can represent? Maybe some of those bitches could draw up a list for him during breaks from pie-baking?
“I don’t want to think about trans-only issues,” she said. “I want courses that talk about a much broader bases of things, courses that focus on race, disability, the struggle for sex worker’s rights and Mad Pride (mental health) movements.”
Every fucking god damn thing except the struggle for women’s rights. Because it’s become so “cool” to hand those over to men.
Trolls. Anyone questioning Fitzpatrick’s appointment is a malicious, bad-faith actor. There is no such thing as principled objection or sincere questioning or genuine misgiving. There is only malicious troublemaking. At least the piece didn’t refer to them as “harpies.” Progress!
Oh, but Fitzpatrick is a “trans lady running a Women’s and Gender Studies program.” More progress!
Great. A gender studies program that doesn’t talk about the role of sex in discrimination, that doesn’t include women at all. I wish I could be sure all female students would boycott it; unfortunately, the females of the younger generation often want to flaunt their woke cred, so they will get students.
Two things.
First: I mean, Gender Studies is neither about nor for women. It’s one of the Critical Theory fields, right? So it’s woke, and we know that wokeness and misogyny go hand in hand. Perversely, making a transwoman the department head may be something that you should welcome. It demonstrates that feminism and Gender Studies do not mix, what with feminism requiring that one actually be able to distinguish women and men. So, yeah, I’m all for anything that makes it easier for the world to see and harder for everyone to deny the insanity of these fields.
Second: I don’t buy into standpoint epistemology, so the notion that the accidents of a person’s birth determine their fitness to transfer propositional knowledge to others makes me gag. The fetishization of group membership is pernicious. A man can teach female biology; a woman can teach male biology.
“Gender studies” took over women’s studies years ago. Bet you Rutger’s just keeps the “women’s and” part of the name as window dressing.
Granted.
How is that relevant to taking issue with an institution being lauded for appointing yet another male faculty member to a position of authority?
Correct, NiV. There are many, many men gynecologists. And on the few occasions I have had a problem in my “man bits”, I have preferred a female nurse and doctor, not because it turns me on, but because I just don’t like another man playing with my junk.
I’m a bit puzzled – why is a gender studies position “a job that should have gone to a woman”?
There are men doing gender studies, should they be excluded from leading study programs? Why?
“Transgender Woman Will Lead Gender Studies Program At Rutgers”
“first openly transgender woman in the country to lead a Women’s and Gender Studies program”
“I have accepted the position of director of Women’s Studies at Rutgers”
So which is the name of the program?
My understanding is that these programs in general began as women’s studies, then revised titles to gender studies or women’s and gender studies. I think the material quoted in the OP shows this new department head has little or no interest in women’s issues. Given the current situation with trans activism, there’s reason too be afraid that the department head will be actively hostile to women’s issues.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with having a white person teach about race, or a man teach about women’s issues. I’d trust Robin DiAngelo in the first case and Robert Jensen in the second to do a good job. But it’s unusual.
Slight tangent: Lani Guinier, Clinton’s withdrawn nominee for a civil rights post, wrote a book of essays on political topics, including the assumption that the best representative of the interests of a group is necessarily a member of that group. The book affected my thinking in a number of areas, and I recommend it.
So, are we to believe there are covertly trans women leading departments in female-specific fields?
I would be entertained by the spectacle of an academic dispute where women’s studies split off from gender studies. The first could study the actual situation of women in the world and the history of sexual discrimination; the second could study whatever fantasy is in fashion.
Let me dream for a moment before you tell me it’s an absurd and manifestly unwoke idea that would get its proponents blamed for murdering transgender people too.
Yes, I don’t buy into standpoint epistemology either, but it’s not quite that simple. As people have mentioned, “Gender Studies” is at least some of the time a replacement for “women’s studies,” and a stealth one at that. At this point in history I don’t think trans women should be teaching women’s studies renamed gender studies. I think there’s a trans standpoint epistemology that would be very likely to push the trans woman’s teaching off the rails.
The fact that the successful candidate makes it about their validation and transition is telling. Somehow I think that a reality-based feminism examining the history of the oppression of the female sex class based on exploitation and control of their reproductive biology is going to be a much lower priority than “courses that talk about a much broader bases of things.”
How long before a thus newly-constituted Women’s Studies department faced invasive, colonial demands from Fantasy Island to make room and “be nice?” Taking over Women’s Studies is the perfect validation, which is, let’s face it, the most important thing of all.
Actually, I suspect for some, pushing women to the sidelines, bullying women, dominating women, and taking over women’s spaces is as much about misogyny as it is validation.
And it appears the “broader base” is going to ignore the oppression of the female sex class entirely. The broader base will probably initially include race, disability, etc (which have f*** all to do with gender, though there is overlap since women have different races and can be disabled). After an initial period of saying “see? Broader than just bitches” and pointing to their intersectionality with righteousness and wokeness, the program will narrow down to trans-gender. Much like the bookstore I used to frequent, where “gender studies” initially seemed to mean lesbianism, with a hint of trans, and one token book about feminism – it has now morphed to being about trans, and in fact, you could search the entire bookstore (I have) for a single book about feminism and women. They even removed Margaret Atwood from their fiction shelves.
So ultimately “gender studies” will morph into “alternative gender studies”, and be mostly about men, since the occasional pretense of caring about transmen (but only when you can bash women with the idea that some men also menstruate and men can gestate and carry a baby to term) usually are little more than a footnote.
That’s what I was trying to get at. Assuming GS is supposed to fulfill the role of WS, then as the lowest possible bar it has to be able to identify “people who menstruate” as women and “people who inseminate” as men. Can this transwoman do that? I’m betting not. So the appointment puts the lie to the claim that GS does the job of WS, regardless of what it claims to do. (Much as men are not women, regardless of what they claim to be.)
It’s like a microcosm of the whole situation.
So kind of Gender Thrown Up Into the Air and Scrambled Beyond Recognition Studies. Or, Gender Understood Completely Randomly Studies. Or, Surrealism 101.
There you go, trying to make it appealing by conflating it with surrealism. Surrealism in art and theatre is amazing. In real life, not so much.
He and other trans “women” should head the “gender” department, but an actual women should head the “women’s” department.
As to first transgender woman named to lead Women’s Studies (leaving aside the Gender Studies equivocation for the moment): is it true that that’s the equivalent of “the first man” to lead a women’s studies program? There’s never been a non-trans male head of WS before? I’d be a little surprised if there had never ever been one before.