Last year Michael Biggs wrote a piece for The Critic about…it’s simpler to quote.

Threats of violence against “trans exclusionary” or “gender critical” feminists — who do not believe that people can change sex merely by announcing preferred pronouns or wearing different clothes — have become ubiquitous on social media. It is nevertheless surprising to discover that such threats can now be submitted as academic work for a master’s degree.

The London School of Economics held a conference in April 2021 for students taking the MSc in Gender (Sexuality). One session was entitled “No Time, No TERFs, No Norms”; the disparaging acronym stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists. A paper in the session concluded:

“If TERFs think trans* is an endemic threat to feminism, let us be the threat to feminism… Picture this: I hold a knife to your throat and spit my transness into your ear. Does that turn you on? Are you scared? I sure fucking hope so.”

Does that sound familiar? It did to me, so I searched and found that I wrote a brief post about it at the time.

Michael Biggs again:

The student’s paper was initially exposed by Sex Matters, the organization — founded by Rebecca Bull, Naomi Cunningham, Maya Forstater, and Emma Hilton — campaigning for sex to be recognized in laws and language. (I am one of its Directors.) The volume of criticism ensuing on Twitter forced the LSE to acknowledge that the paper “did not abide by the School’s Code of Practice on Free Speech” and to remove it from the conference website. This response is completely inadequate. For one thing, this student has made explicit sexualized threats of violence against women, and by his own admission poses a danger to students and staff.

Of greater concern is what this episode reveals about the culture of the Department of Gender Studies. It recently accused “those espousing gender critical perspectives” of making “transphobic, discriminatory, inaccurate, and harmful claims about trans people specifically, and gender more broadly”. In this view, anyone who recognizes the reality of sex is inflicting harm on people who deny that reality: such harm justifies retaliatory violence. It is evident that such hyperbolic accusations have created an environment where a student can boast about butchering feminists who refuse to submit to his ideology.

You can read the whole paper if you want to.

Anyway, the punchline is, the paper is by one Matt Thompson, who is a student of Jacob Breslow’s. Of course he is.