Posters that threatened us with sexual violence
Joan Smith on Sussex’s failure to hang on to Kathleen Stock:
The Vice-chancellor, Adam Tickell, has written to all staff at Sussex, insisting that the university ‘has vigorously and unequivocally defended [Stock’s] right to exercise her academic freedom and lawful freedom of speech, free from bullying and harassment of any kind’.
Stock has responded by saying that the university leadership’s approach ‘more recently has been admirable and decent’, leaving open the question of what it did when she was first targeted. Because Stock and other gender critical academics, such as Professor Jo Phoenix of the Open University, have faced slurs and bullying for at least two years — so much so that Phoenix is raising funds to take the OU to an employment tribunal.
Selina Todd is another who springs to mind.
For too long, other academics have looked the other way, afraid of being targeted themselves, or in some cases even joined in the harassment. Who could forget the posters around Sussex demanding that Stock should be fired? Yet those of us who denounced the gender extremists behind the bullying of feminists, after our meetings to defend women’s rights were picketed by screaming trans activists, have been primly told that the issue is ‘toxic on both sides’.
It is hard to sustain this nonsense when you have seen the venom with your own eyes. Earlier this month, when women from all over the country gathered in Portsmouth to discuss violence against women, we had to walk past trans activists bearing posters that threatened us with sexual violence in the most obscene language imaginable.
On the ‘other side’ are lesbians like Stock and Phoenix, who simply ask to do their jobs — to ask awkward questions in a polite manner — without threats. On the ‘other side’ are women who highlight the conflict between the rights of vulnerable women in prisons and men who demand the right to be housed with them.
And who do so without obscene bullying and threats.
Damn. I hadn’t seen that Stock had left the university. Damn damn damn.
Utterly depressing. The sheer contempt for academic freedom demonstrated by these so-called activists is nauseating.
Of course, the next time a UK academic who supports a cause dear to these “anti-fascists” (e.g. the BDS movement ) gets fired, these Butlerian Maoists won’t be able to complain.
MC:
Don’t you believe it. They will find a way. It will no doubt come to some of them in a blinding flash of self-interest; sorry, I mean inspiration. It will be Moses-on-the-mountain stuff.
Everyone has a limit, and Kathleen Stock has obviously reached hers, and her decision must be respected. But there cannot be a right to not be offended. If we all had a right to go to some government agency or call the cops whenever someone said or wrote something we found offensive, the world would rapidly descend into a nighmarish schemozzle of ultratrans-Orwellian proportions. The government would likely conclude that the cheapest and easiest way out would be to set up a station full of thought police on every street corner.
As it happens, that is pretty much the situation in the Islamic world today. If you are tired of life and want to end it all, one way out is to buy yourself a one-way ticket to any city in say, Pakistan, stand on a steet corner and yell out ‘down with Islam..!’ No need for Urdu; English will do fine.
In an instant you will be surrounded by outraged devotees of The Prophet (pbuh), each eager to qualify for eventual entry to Paradise and his right to 72 gorgeous virgins, to cater for his every need for the rest of Eternity. No prizes for guessing why Islamic Pakistan is an economic and scientific basket case, while the polytheist and freethinking India beside it is by comparison, an economic and scientific powerhouse.
‘Islamophobia’ has been a crafty invention, designed to conflate criticism of Islam (a philosophy) with attacking Muslims (a discrete population born into rather than converted to Islam.) ‘Transphobia’ apparently borrows from that, and certainly works the same way; encouraging belief that men who wish they had been born female and women who wish they had been born male have a right to be not offended.
At least Kathleen Stock did not display Islamophobia in Pakistan. All she did was rouse a flock of the local galahs in Sussex to accuse her of ‘transphobia’. But be assured, they will be working on it. In time Sussex may well become Little Pakistan.
Also relevant to the above:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/28/sussex-professor-kathleen-stock-resigns-after-transgender-rights-row
??
I’m not understanding that “but.” Stock didn’t leave Sussex University because she was “offended.”
It was Stock’s opponent’s who were ‘offended’. Should have been a new par perhaps. All summed up anyway in the last par of the comment.
Ah well. Nothing’s perfect here below. ;-)