She will face a campaign for her to be sacked
The Times on the trans Cultural Revolution:
More than a dozen academics, including several leading feminist professors, fear their freedom of speech is being silenced by students complaining they are transphobic.
They include Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at Oxford, and Kate Newey, professor of theatre history at Exeter. Rosa Freedman, professor of law conflict and global development, is believed to be under scrutiny at Reading University, and Kathleen Stock, professor of philosophy, has faced several formal complaints organised by students at Sussex. Some of the women, along with other academics, say questioning of transgender policies is being censored on campus.
Policies but also truth claims. It’s forbidden to say women have a right to their own spaces and it’s also forbidden to say that people can’t literally become the opposite sex.
Todd, vice-principal of St Hilda’s College, Oxford, initially faced a complaint backed by a Facebook petition about comments she had made on social media. That grievance was dismissed by the university. Now, however, she has been told by students she will face a campaign in the autumn for her to be sacked.
“It is intimidating and isolating,” Todd said. “The view of these activists is that anyone who feels themselves to be a woman should be allowed to call themselves such. Questioning that desire is seen as hate speech that could be harmful. To me that is censorship.”
It’s censorship, and it’s censorship in aid of forcing people to declare belief in absurd irrational claims. That’s a major turn of the screw. “Swear on the Judith Butler text that men are women if they say they are or be ostracized and demonized and blacklisted. Your choice; no third option exists.”
It’s like the campaign from right wing students during the Bush years, trying to get professors sacked if they were seen as too pro-Islam or too anti-war. The difference is that those students rarely succeeded; I’m afraid these will.
The Electric Agora recommended “a number of things worth keeping in mind” engaging with gender issues back in March and continues to publish essays on gender, most recently “All Philosophy is Activist Philosophy” by David Ottlinger three days ago discussing a “piece in The Daily Nous written by three curiously anonymous philosophers” (mentioned on this site) as “an attempt by some academics to silence a group of their colleagues on purely ideological grounds” and defending ‘activist philosophy’.
The moderator, Daniel Kaufman, is “inclined to publish pretty much anything, unless it is abusive of another commenter or traffics in outright slurs.”
The license of the moderator allowed a post by ‘Max’ responding to the recent essay. Max doesn’t “have a worked out theory” but advocates “Defeminis[ing] the academy, get rid of the (crazy) women with their toxic femininity, please.”
The respondent to Max, Jessica MacIntosh, finds (among other things) his post “reductive, insulting, and sexist” and also “appreciate[s] the rare combination of hands-off moderation and the culture of reasoned dialogue on this site”.
Reasoned dialogue, like Butterflies and Wheels.
Yes, I like The Electric Agora. I think I’ve quoted it here now and then.