Dons sign letter
More Silence the Woman at Oxford:
More than 40 academics – including Prof Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, and Prof Nigel Biggar, the theologian – have intervened in support of a planned appearance at the Oxford Union by Prof Kathleen Stock, a leading feminist, in a letter to The Telegraph.
In the biggest row to erupt at the university since Rhodes Must Fall, students have tried to cancel Prof Stock’s talk – claiming that she is transphobic for her view that it is fiction to claim “transwomen are women”.
It’s a funny thing that none of the other movements for justice or rights or equality or whatever you want to call them have been fiction-based. Workers’ movements were about workers, racial justice movements were about black and brown people, women’s movements were about women, lesbian and gay movements were about lesbians and gay men. Nobody was pretending. None of it was based on “You have to validate my fantasy about myself.”
The letter from the Oxford dons is one of the most significant interventions by academics in recent controversies over free speech on campus.
They say they possess “a range of different political beliefs, Left and Right”, but are united in their belief that “universities exist, among other things, to promote free inquiry and the disinterested pursuit of the truth by means of reasoned argument”.
The letter adds: “Professor Stock believes that biological sex in humans is real and socially salient, a view which until recently would have been so commonplace as to hardly merit asserting.”
They could have skipped the “hardly.” Until very recently everyone simply took it for granted that biological sex in humans is real and socially salient.
Universities have traditionally grown as places where ideas and ideologies clash, and the most rational and consistent prevail. Attempts to shut one side in any debate up are rightly seen as a confession of weakness if not total bankruptcy on the part of those making such..
The supporters of the proposition that ‘some men are women’ or the less noisy ‘some women are men’ would appear to be in that last category.
Oh, I dunno, the “parental rights” and “medical freedom” movements are pretty damn fiction based… though I guess it’s more of a “abuse is discipline” or a “poison is medicine” thing than “apples are otters” sort of thing.
And yes I know that in many cases poison *is* medicine, particularly chemo drugs, but that’s a pedant’s game (and I’m a pedant).