An institutionally sensitive issue
Breathtaking. (You know how sometimes when you read something really appalling you find yourself not breathing as you read on? I don’t think I’m the only one.)
A university has “confiscated” the findings of an academic studying Britain’s gender wars in a row over her “dangerous” research data, The Telegraph can reveal.
Dr Laura Favaro began the first ever taxpayer-funded study into whether social scientists at universities feel censored over their views on transgender issues in March 2020 at City, University of London.
But it has descended into chaos, with the study’s author allegedly hounded out of the university, stripped of the findings she collected and barred from publishing them amid claims of transphobia.
How can they do that???
Dr Favaro is now bringing an employment tribunal claim against City for harassment, victimisation and whistleblowing detriment, and claims she was discriminated against for her protected philosophical belief in the reality of biological sex.
The Telegraph says she was invited to move from Spain to City’s Department of Sociology but it doesn’t say who invited her – whether it was City or some other institution or what. The study got £18,000 from the Equality and Human Rights Commission and £10,000 from the British Academy. The Telegraph says Favaro has done a summary report but it hasn’t been published yet; the Telegraph doesn’t say why or at whose behest.
Her study involved 50 individual interviews with academics in gender studies who identified as feminists, a representative survey of social scientists with 650 responses and hundreds of documents and tweets.
Scholars told her that they had threats of violence in the gender debate, hostility from colleagues, and others said they felt their careers “can’t survive that sort of backlash”, and that they have to have “secret conversations” to avoid reprisal and because “we are all so afraid”.
Her final work has not been published, as it was derailed by complaints about an article for Times Higher Education in which she warned that “a culture of discrimination, silencing and fear has taken hold”.
Again, skimping on the information here. Derailed by whom? What’s the point of telling us she was invited but not who invited her, and her work was derailed but not who derailed it?
Following this, she says, her line managers told her that the study had “become an institutionally sensitive issue” and that “City considers my data to be dangerous” and is “frightened of making it public”.
A research participant who “did not like the findings” and academics sympathetic to trans issues were among those who complained. One, Dr Sahra Taylor, a City lecturer, claimed it was an “attack piece on trans people [and] our existences” that has “clearly caused harm to many interviewed”.
We’ve seen claims of that kind a billion times by now. We don’t find them credible.
City found following an investigation that there was “no evidence” that the research breached any ethics criteria.
But City allegedly locked the email account Dr Favaro used to communicate with survey respondents, and demanded that she hand over all of her interview and survey data and delete any copies of it, before making her redundant on March 31, despite her claiming she has a permanent contract.
How can they do any of that? It sounds completely grotesque.
That’s gotta be the clearest self-own I’ve ever seen. Like … wow. Let’s prove that there’s no censorship going on by censoring someone looking into whether there’s censorship going on.
There is an article about the study on a website called the Tr_ns Safety Network that has a different take. The Telegraph’s vague account, Favaro’s own claims and this trans-friendly site all have their various assertions.
Personally, given the open violence and cancelling of gender critical scholars and speakers, I find the claims of “trans-inclusive” scholars to be fearful of the reactions should they speak their minds to be dubious.
For a movement supposedly founded on the centrality and primacy of self-knowledge and “authenticity,” the complete failure of self-awareness evinced is quite astounding. The over-reach and brazenness are indeed breathtaking. The Emperor is demanding the destruction of photos that prove he actually is naked while wearing his “new clothes.” This response is like the love-grandchild of Lewis’s Law, and The First Law of Holes on one side, and Ouroborous and Uncle Remus’ Tar Baby on the other, with the direct parentage somewhat less certain.
Perhaps they’re afraid that people will find out that their claims (including those of powerlessness and persecution) are complete bullshit. They’re desperate to enforce their “NO DEBATE!” position, particularly if evidence of the weakness of their “arguments” and the bullying and intimidation used to silence critics is under particular scrutiny. What do they have to hide? Why do they refuse to have their actions examined? Because they know they’ll look bad. Any “harm” will be to their reputations, but it’s all self-inflicted. There’s only so many times you can paint legitimate criticism and resistance as Fascism and genocide, when women are just saying “No.” If you can’t produce evidence of actual Fascism and actualgenocide, you’ve overplayed your shitty hand, (a hand you had the chance to pick from the entire deck, because the house and its delers were working with you). Calling your bluff shows that your accusations boil down to nothing but “They’re big meanies who use facts and who won’t knuckle under! No fair!” Not much of a substitute for an argument. “THEY”RE EVIL! DON’T LISTEN TO THEM!! TRANS PEOPLE WILL DIE!!!” doesn’t play well to those not already toeing the line. They’ve never read “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” And they have never heard of The Streisand Effect. I hope this blows up in their faces*.
Genderists are quick to claim the banner of “free speech” when responding to gender critical feminists, claiming their campaigns of intimidation, defamation, and cancellation against these women are the fully justified “consequences” of gender critical speech, and that those women are only getting what they deserve. Funny how trans activist academics are now “afraid” of the consequences of their own actions when the shoe’s on the other foot, when they no longer get to dictate the accepted, orthodox narrative to which all must submit and bow. Sauce for the feminists is sauce for the genderists.
*This would be translated by genderists as my planning to send pipe bombs to them.
Really? What type of harm? It’s not so clear.
Also from the Telegraph, a teacher was made to apologize to the class after saying “Good morning, Girls!” to a class of, um girls. Apparently one identifies as a “they/them.”
The teacher did not have her contract extended for this trans-gression.
Teacher forced to apologise over preferred pronouns.
Students were allegedly shown a video discussing gender identities and sex being assigned at birth.
“I was told that they made placards with slogans such as ‘Trans lives matter’,” the teacher said.
“Before the end of the week, I was in some sort of disciplinary process and the head of year was telling me I had to apologise to the girls.”
The teacher, who asked to remain anonymous to protect the pupils, said she was made to stand to one side as the head of year addressed the pupils saying “no one here would want to hurt you”.
“All we want to do is suck your brains.”
The department head, professor Lysenko, wants a word with you…
“It’s a simple Thought Replacement Procedure, young children-who-will–menstruate. You’ll barely notice.”
If they refuse to be called girls, what are they doing in a class (I presume a school) for girls? If they are neither girls nor boys, why are they in a place designated for one sex? They/thems should be required to use only facilities open to both sexes; in fact, they should want to use facilities open to both sexes, because using a single-sex facility violates the non-binary specialness of their uber-special personality.
I hope the teacher sues.
A recent conversation involved a friend asserting that trans people are “under attack” here in Alabama and elsewhere in the region. It is so difficult to figure out what that means, and I didn’t want to get into specifics in the already-tense conversation. I would, however, presume from context that “under attack” at the least included people being unwilling to use bespoke pronouns, refusing to adopt “assigned male/female at birth” terminology, and using actual sex rather than personally selected “gender” as a determinant of who goes to which restrooms, lockers, single-sex schools, and sex-segregated sports teams. Oh, and refusing to allow children to be mutilated and medicated in support of this “gender” assertion.
But this is Alabama, where some politicians (and I’m sure members of the public) are confusing so many current liberal positions that they think Critical Race Theory “sexualizes” kids somehow. I am not joking. They grab the complaints about all the Lefty Things, and mentally merge them, as if all the Lefty Things are one thing. And this is Alabama, not the most friendly place for people who don’t conform to social norms. So I don’t doubt there is justification for claims of a group being “under attack”, even if I don’t agree on the details.
Even if a group is genuinely under attack, that doesn’t provide justification to believe everything the group claims. Claims have to be evaluated on their own merit.
This is the tactic that Christianity has used forever. The two centuries of persecution before they became the most powerful institution (and one of the richest) in the world has been wheeled out to justify the 20 centuries of persecution they dished out. It is also used as a measure of truth. “They were persecuted, and they didn’t give in, so they were killed. No one would be killed for something false.”
When I hear that, I just say “Jim Jones” – though the current generation isn’t actually aware of Jim Jones, so I’ve sort of moved to Islamic terrorists.
The thing about this that truly fits the trans narrative is that historians are discovering the persecutions were not as widespread or severe as the Christians claim. There were persecuted, but they tended to be regional and limited in time, not some sort of major, ongoing, constant persecution. And in some cases, the executions were based on the violation of some law. We could say it shouldn’t be a law to worship the emperor, and I am willing to say that, and I don’t believe in execution of hardened criminals, let alone heretics, but it still wasn’t the mindless, unthinking persecution they act like happened.
A lot of what passed for persecution to the early Christians (and many today) was simply not accepting their point of view. Tolerance of a wide variety of beliefs was…and is…persecution to true believers. That lines up beautifully with the trans view and their claims to be marginalized.
And like trans, it protected the Christian beliefs from being closely examined for a very long time.