Insult & injury=
Reduxx on another male usurpation of an event to commemorate women:
The University of Toronto invited a trans-identified male to speak at a memorial ceremony dedicated to the women who lost their lives during the École Polytechnique massacre. Despite it being the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women in Canada, the speech instead focused on “addressing transmisogyny.”
Hosted by the University’s Sexual Violence Prevention and Support Center, the event was held today at the St. George Campus in downtown Toronto. While the official announcement claimed the event was intended to memorialize the 14 women slaughtered during the École Polytechnique massacre, the keynote speech was almost completely unrelated to the horrific shooting.
The event was first introduced by two students of the University who began with a speech suggesting that pre-colonial Indigenous cultures did not practice any form of violence against women.
And how would those two students know that exactly? And is it likely? Is it even slightly plausible? All cultures practice violence against women.
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow and Vice-Provost Sandy Welsh also spoke before the keynote was introduced, with Welsh giving out a number of awards “recognizing individuals who’ve shown a commitment to ending gender-based violence.”
In other words they carefully, deliberately avoided saying “violence against women.” Quislings.
The keynote address was delivered by trans-identified male Kai Cheng Thom, who focused on the “rise in transmisogyny and violence against queer and trans women globally.” Thom, a writer and former prostitute, identifies as a “non-binary trans woman”
In other words he’s a man talking about himself at an event that should have been about 14 murdered women.
During his speech, Thom read poetry by a trans-identified male and condemned those who opposed his platforming at the event.
In other words he’s a narcissistic man berating people who think an event to commemorate murdered women should be about those women and violence against women, not about self-obsessed men like him.
During the keynote, the University of Toronto provided audience members with a website link they could use to propose questions for Thom to be asked during the Q&A. The submission link was quickly shut down after a barrage of inquiries were submitted asking why Thom had been invited to speak on transmisogyny on a day intended to commemorate a femicide.
Yes how dare people object to letting a man do all the talking at an event to remember the systematic slaughter of 14 women by a man. How frightfully rude to object.
This represents the third year in a row where an event commemorating the massacre centered a trans-identified male speaker focusing on transphobia rather than the femicide.
In 2022, Fae Johnstone, a trans-identified male, gave a keynote address at Durham College in North Oshawa, Ontario, during the 33rd anniversary of the massacre.
…
The previous year, in 2021, the Prince Edward Island Advisory Council on the Status of Women invited Anastasia Preston, a biological male who identifies as a woman, to speak on “gender-based violence” at a vigil honoring the women murdered in the École Polytechnique massacre.
One insult after another, year in year out.
Well it’s just obvious. Fault cannot be ascribed to indigenous people “of color”, fault can only be ascribed to “white” people. Since pre-colonial indigenous cultures had not even been in contact with whites, they must have been idyllic paradises. So, obviously, there was no violence against women. The whole point of “decolonial” activism is to return everyone to that past utopia. This is all basic stuff taught in any university course these days.
You know, there should be a pejorative term to describe the process by which powerful groups such as privileged men in dresses invade and occupy the spaces of less powerful groups such a women. I can’t for the life of me think what it would be though.
A comment by Sonderval in the “Smilingly” thread explains this perfectly:
Arguing back that trans identified males are not marginalized is shouted down as “bigotry” or “transmisogyny.” By this logic, trans identified males should be keynote speakers at just about every event, but it only seems to be women’s events that they go all out to do so.
I wonder whose idea it was to have this raging narcissist speak at this event? They should hang their heads in shame, but I imagine if one was to confront them on it, you’d be met with wide-eyed, poe faced innocence. Evil fuckers.
Same way they know that TWAW – they just know it in their inner beings.
That’s painting with a bit of a broad brush, Coel, making the statement untrue. For instance, many (probably most) Biology classes don’t teach this. Yes, I know, PZ. In my experience the bulk of the biology classes are teaching about sex more appropriately, though from the posts here, it is terrifyingly obvious that isn’t universal.
I doubt Physics or Chemistry are covering it at all. Earth Science certainly isn’t. I suspect it’s also rare in Math classes, though I haven’t taken a Math class in two decades, and haven’t taught any, so that’s mere supposition.
In liberal arts classes? It may be true…even then, I suspect there are some that are not, but it’s hard to be sure of that based on how many we see just on this site. Keep in mind, what we’ve been shown is only a small sampling of all university classes. You have definitely gotten a sample size error, a randomization failure, and a sample that is not representative.
Especially if we, in true TRA fashion, broaden ‘violence’ to include every damn thing even down to verbal disagreement.
If you’ll track Coel’s posts, you’ll notice he only has one brush and it’s wider than my left hand. I don’t even bother reading them anymore.
I think that what needs to be taught regarding First Nations and their history is that the “Noble Savage” concept is insulting and patronizing. What I have experienced as recently as 4 years ago in my 300 level course in diversity is not indoctrination about the poor natives or brown people but the necessity of broadening our experiences to better understand other cultures and how they have integrated into our own. Those students who have this fantasy about an idyllic pre-Columbian world are likely to have gotten it from anywhere but a UofT anthropology course, like perhaps social media. I think the same thing whenever I see someone claim that indigenous peoples worldwide didn’t have 2 separate sexes until Captain Cook (or whoever) forced them to.
Like Iknklast, I do not think that campuses are completely captured by postmodern fact-free thinking about gender and sex and world history; the bias of the news that we concentrate on receiving influences the perspecttive of what we read and see. There are student groups dominated by LGBTQ but I don’t think that you are forced to take an LGBTQIA+++ loyalty pledge to be a professor, student, or admin on campus. It may be necessary to be a closeted TERF in some situations, but Campuses are not the “woke hellholes” that some people paint them to be.
The events that are allowing trans ideology to dominate memorials of real women killed by violence from men are disgusting, and need to be turned back, but I do not know how we will get to that point with those who think that trans ideation of their oppression trumps all. We need to be able to convince those “allies” who claim it doesn’t harm anyone to let people believe that they are the other sex that this is a clear example of harm; and it’s enabled by using chosen pronouns, allowing males to enter wherever woman want to have their own spaces or groups.
And this definitely erases women’s experience of violence. Wasn’t there already a full month of remembrance of trans everything including violence?
@iknklast:
You may have overlooked the sarcastic tone of that remark.
Although, having said that, telling STEM fields like physics that they need to “decolonise” is all the rage nowadays.
What that means is unclear. It could mean looking for rather minor contributions to physics from people “of colour” and highlighting them as being equivalent to those of Newton, Galileo and Einstein. (Though, East Asians and people from India don’t count, since plenty of them have indeed made major contributions to physics.)
But no, doing the above (we’re told) is “tokenism”, so that’s not what is being asked.
So maybe they mean highlighting indigenous “ways of knowing” as being equivalent to, and equally “valid” as, modern science. Except that they’re not.
So maybe they mean just hiring lots of people “of color” regardless of merit (again, of course, East Asians and people from India don’t count).
Three years in a row they have had a man in womanface be the center of attention for this memorial. Maybe maybe maybe next year they will let a lowly woman be the main speaker? As long as she grovels and makes her whole speech about the men in womanface, maybe then? How are so many women today so weak? Why are they so eager to grovel for crumbs from the table while men in bad drag feast on everything women built?
Coel, you are still using the broad brush. I don’t know what your recent college experiences are, but I just retired from teaching. This is my first semester not to teach. Yes, the administration would have great big assemblies at which we would have a speaker who gave us all sorts of DEI stuff. They didn’t actually come in and monitor our classrooms, and most of the students didn’t give a damn on their student evaluations of us if we didn’t mention decolonization, or if we taught without forcing our stuff into specified molds. Yes, I taught the contributions of women like Henrietta Leavitt and Rosalind Franklin; it would have been shameful not to, since what they discovered laid the groundwork for the stuff the males later discovered, and without their discoveries, the males wouldn’t have gotten it so quickly, for sure. But that is no more about forcing inclusion than it is to teach about Hubble, who used Leavitt’s discoveries, or James Watson, who used Franklin’s. It also was important for understanding how science is a collaboration.
I think our English, Psych, and Soc classes probably did the inclusion thing, but the STEM? No, we attended mandatory meetings, mocked much of the stupid information we were given on how to teach (usually by people who weren’t teachers), and kept our teaching free of stupid shit…except of course those things we think are true now but future generations may discover are stupid shit.
@iknklast:
You’re right that “decolonisation” has not yet changed what happens in most STEM classrooms. It is being pushed by certain factions and while, as you say, lots of people are just ignoring that and continuing as normal, that is a dangerous strategy because nowadays the DEI admins have all the power.
In many universities today you cannot hire (say) a physics faculty without the approval and oversight of DEI, and the DEI admins do not care about physics (none of them have a STEM background), they care about DEI.
As just an example of the rhetoric, this was published in The Physics Teacher this month:
“Anti-Blackness is pervasive in academic spaces, and phys- ics curricula, programs, and departments are no exceptions (see e.g., Ref. 10). Anti-Blackness operates in myriad ways ranging from microaggressions to systemic obstruction and exclusion of Black and African American students, faculty, and staff. It is, as Beverly Daniel Tatum calls it, “the smog in the air” that we breathe every day.”
And:
“In order to become more relevant to a changing social sensibility concerning broader issues in the world (such as the climate crisis, rampant racism, White backlash/rage, and neo-colonialism), physics curricula must shift their foci, methods, and content to become relevant and applicable to how physics is practiced today. But more than that, we have an opportunity to inform what guides research priorities and technological developments in the future by centering justice issues within the physics curriculum.”
@iknklast:
By the way, I’m fine with proper crediting of the contributions of women over the history of physics and other sciences, though that is not really the issue nowadays since, as people have noticed on this blog, today’s “critical social justice” activists have largely stopped caring about women, with more-“oppressed” minorities being higher up the pecking order.
[Though it would be nice if it were acknowledged that, for over 20 years now, discrimination in hiring in hard-science fields such as physics has been distinctly towards women (not against them, as some commentary might suggest).]
[…] a comment by Mike Haubrich on Insult & […]
Citations?
That’s rhetorical, because I’ve done the research myself. Only 27% of new hires of physics professors in college are female. I will admit, only about 21% of the degrees are female, so slightly higher than they are obtaining degrees, but…the vast majority of the new hires in physics are male, so it might not be quite so much discrimination towards women as all that. One thing it might be is availability.
Huh? Well…
Biology is much more woman-oriented, with 52.5% of the Ph.D.s going to women. Most of the major universities are still dominated by men. You wouldn’t know that from where I worked, for instance, which has tended toward three women and one man on the biology faculty. But…another interesting thing. The women tend to have Ph.D.s while none of the men do…they are all M.S. as their highest degree. What?
I was at a community college. A lot of my friends in school wouldn’t even apply at community colleges; they wanted to do important work. I felt a community college was important work; they probably need good teachers more than the universities do, because they take pretty much anyone who applies and many of the students are out of their league, at least at first. The teachers can help them succeed. But the applicants at our college were mostly women Ph.D.s and males with Master’s. When you look at faculty of colleges and universities, the number that were women seems impressive at 48%, but consider how many community colleges that includes, and you can see that at least a large number of these are in the low prestige jobs.
@iknklast:
Perhaps, but not all disparities are caused by “discrimination” (in fact most are not).
There are some jobs that are overwhelmingly female (e.g. primary-school teacher, nurse, HR person) and others that are overwhelmingly male (e.g. deep-sea fisherman, lumberjack, construction worker). This is not discrimination, it’s what people opt for.
And it is precisely those fields like physics, engineering, maths, and computer science, that have a low representation of women, but which “everyone” thinks should be nearer 50:50, that have the most pro-women bias in hiring, in order to try to attain the target.
In contrast, STEM fields with high numbers of women (medicine, veterinary science, some biological sciences) likely don’t have a pro-women bias these days since they don’t need to.
By the way, here is a recent study, a large meta-analysis, though not specifically about STEM.
“… selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample.”
But note: “both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates”.
“ You know, there should be a pejorative term to describe the process by which powerful groups such as privileged men in dresses invade and occupy the spaces of less powerful groups such a women. I can’t for the life of me think what it would be though.”
Not so specific to what Francis describes above, but coloniser and usurper come to mind. Possibly hijacking as well.