Their own union
Academics at the University of Edinburgh have accused their own union of attempting to stifle debate after it called for the launch of a book on sex and gender to be scrapped.
Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader features essays from figures such as the philosopher Kathleen Stock and is edited by Selina Todd and Alice Sullivan, a professor of sociology at University College London (UCL) who gave evidence to the Scottish Parliament last year on the Scottish Government’s gender reforms.
Selina Todd is a professor of history at Oxford. Don’t ask me why that was omitted.
The University and College Union (UCU) Edinburgh branch committee has written to the university’s principal, Sir Peter Mathieson, saying it has “concerns about the launch of a transphobic book on campus”.
UCU Edinburgh has previously been criticised for preventing free speech after it supported demonstrations on two occasions that stopped the screening of the film Adult Human Female on the university campus.
The union argues that the book launch continues with the strategy “that trans people’s existence – like any ideology or theory – can be ‘debunked’” and that essays in the book reduce “trans people to an abstract anomaly or sinister cabal”.
The union argues what? How can a statement of fact be a “strategy”?
In their letter to management, the UCU Edinburgh branch committee said: “The book being launched at the event continues with this strategy by using this false framing that trans people’s identity represents an ‘ideology’ and/or ‘lobby’ and that anyone supportive of trans people’s rights is a ‘gender-identity theorist’ or part of the ‘gender identity lobby’.”
It’s not a “strategy”; it’s reality. It’s not a “strategy” to say that men are not and cannot be women; it’s not a “strategy” to point out that insisting that men can be women is based on an ideology that claims people can be the sex they are not.
The UCU urged the university’s management to show “its support for its trans staff and students” and to demonstrate a recognition that trans people are “not an ideology to be debunked” but a “vulnerable minority” under the Equality Act 2010 and the university’s policies.
But what makes them a “vulnerable minority”? What makes them different from everyone else in a way that makes them a “vulnerable minority”? What makes enormous square-jawed men in lipstick “a vulnerable minority”? It’s a belief system that does that: a set of beliefs about the magic of an internal sense of being the sex that is the opposite of the body’s sex. This set of beliefs was unknown until the last ten or twenty years or so.
They added: “It is also time that you recognised – again in alignment with human rights organisations such as the United Nations – that ‘free speech’ must be balanced with responsibilities and restrictions relating to harm caused by certain types of speech, such as those that advocate and disseminate misinformation and smears against the validity of disempowered minorities.
What does “smears against the validity of disempowered minorities” mean? What is the “validity” of a “minority”? What does it have to do with rights or social justice?
It means, of course, pretending that it’s true that if a man says he’s a woman, he is in fact a woman – he is “valid” as a woman. It’s an idea straight out of clown college.
