The second point-hiss in the Open Democracy hit piece on Kathleen Stock is a complicated but trivial story about Nathan Oseroff accusing Stock of “publicly advocating bigotry and intolerance” and Brian Leiter saying Oseroff should be fired from his job as an editor at the American Philosophical Association blog, which eventually he was.

Leiter defended his actions, telling openDemocracy that Oseroff-Spicer “repeatedly abused his position at the APA blog”.

The events led both Oseroff-Spicer and his partner, a trans man, to conclude “philosophy just was not the right place for either of us”.

Or to put it another way, he and his partner weren’t the right people for philosophy.

Next up:

Christa Peterson, currently a final-year philosophy PhD student at the University of Southern California, has become an expert on the impact of ‘gender critical’ thought in academia, having clashed with ‘gender critical’ philosophers since the movement came to prominence.

Well, she’s become an “expert” in bullying people who don’t grovel to the ideology.

In 2021, she was invited by a group of postgraduate students at the University of Sussex to present her research on anti-trans thought in philosophy, scheduled at the same time as Stock was meant to give a talk.

Cute. Of course Peterson jumped at the chance to bully Stock more than she already was, which was a lot.

She agreed, but then received concerned emails from the organisers. “My sense is that the students were getting pressure from the administration to cancel it,” she said. “They were sent the university’s conduct guidelines and were told they were responsible for everything I said, and that it could not be an ‘anti-Kathleen’ talk.”

Peterson broadened the scope of her talk to cover anti-trans thought in academia more generally. “I changed the subject of the talk in response to these concerns – which is a clear-cut academic freedom problem,” she said. “I was very worried about getting them in trouble.”

Except it’s not an academic freedom problem because it wasn’t an academic event – it was just Peterson talking to some students at their invitation. (I think it must have been organized as an online “presentation of her research”; I doubt the students ponied up the cash to bring her to Brighton and then send her back again.)

Stock told openDemocracy that Peterson’s talk was “certainly not a standard academic event in any sense” and added: “I am told it took place without any interference from management, so I am not sure I understand what she is now complaining of.”

The revised talk, given in the summer of 2021, went ahead without issue, but weeks after resigning from Sussex, Stock told The Times that she “went off sick with a breakdown” because of it. She told openDemocracy: “The timing by the organisers was intentionally hostile to me, as was the nature of the invitation as a whole.”

All because she doesn’t agree that men can be women.

In November 2022, an academic article in the journal Impact referred to Peterson’s invitation to present her research at Sussex as part of a campaign of “bullying” directed at Stock. The authors, Alice Sullivan and Judith Suissa, both influential ‘gender critical’ thinkers, omitted Peterson’s name and credentials, calling her simply “a Twitter-troll primarily known for her obsessive interest in Stock”. Sullivan had previously called her a “loony grad student” on Twitter.

Peterson says she complained to Impact about this portrayal of her in January of this year and was told she would receive a quick response, but has still not heard back. Impact has yet to respond to requests for comment from openDemocracy.

But the article didn’t name her. Peterson on the other hand has named Stock in public.

The dismissal of her work by senior academics has left Peterson concerned about her career opportunities. “I’m going on the job market this year and these people keep saying my academic work is bullying and harassment,” she said. “I will not apply to jobs in the UK. I think most departments would have at least one person who would have a real problem with me being hired, because they think I’ve been bullying Kathleen Stock for years.”

I absolutely think no one should hire Peterson for an academic job. I think she would be extraordinarily bad at it.

Peterson is not the only researcher into ‘gender critical’ academics who has felt pressured by a British university to soften their academic work on the subject.

Open Democracy really should look into the pressure on gender critical academics before it worries about pressure in the opposite direction.

Grace Lavery, a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, gave a talk in 2022 at University College London (UCL) about what she called “the mortal threat to academic freedom in the United Kingdom that has been mounted in recent years… by an alliance composed of the gender critical movement and the managerial class of administrators that govern the UK [higher education] sector.”

…

When the editors of Think Pieces, an in-house journal at UCL, asked Lavery to produce a written version of her talk, she was happy to oblige – but started to become concerned when, months after she submitted an article, it had not appeared. Lavery understood editors feared they could face legal action for running the piece as was, something UCL appeared to confirm when we asked about the article, telling openDemocracy that it “must carefully take other factors into account when publishing articles including the risk of legal action against the institution”.

Lavery instead published the article on her blog in June. “It was the first time I’d ever heard of university administration actually intervening in the normal course of publication of work,” she said.

I bet he was thrilled. (We’ll have to read the article. Later.)

Another academic who says her career has been affected by her support for trans rights is Newcastle University sociology professor Alison Phipps, who was head of gender studies at Sussex University when Stock was teaching there. Phipps has been a vocal trans ally for the past decade, which she says has meant “some academics working on violence against women give me a wide berth, as do some third sector organisations”.

Ok so why doesn’t that give her pause? Why doesn’t it worry her that academics working on violence against women give her a wide berth? Why doesn’t it cause her to think again about her work?

According to Phipps, ‘gender critical’ women in her field “tend to set the mainstream agenda, with very few people willing to risk their own careers by challenging them openly”.

What??????

It. is. the. other. way. around.