And then she said
A gender studies professor at University of Rhode Island is facing backlash for comparing transgender people with far-right conspiracy theory-driven website QAnon, according to the Daily Mail.
Professor Donna Hughes wrote a piece for a radical feminist site. Oh the horror.
…saying that people who think they can change their gender are suffering from a “trans-sex fantasy.” Hughes also said that transgender people, just like QAnon with the right, has radicalized the left. Going further, Hughes said the left is using transgender issues to further an agenda that harms children.
“The American political left is increasingly diving headfirst into their own world of lies and fantasy and, unlike in the imaginary world of QAnon, real children are becoming actual victims,” she wrote.
Hughes taps into the prevailing anti-trans, dog-whistling rhetoric of the right…
Blah blah blah, but even the right isn’t wrong about everything – in fact the truth is that everyone agrees on most things. The parts we disagree on are a small fraction of the whole, they just seem bigger because we focus on them. If the right also thinks it’s not beneficent to tell people they can change sex and to give them hormones for that purpose, then that’s just one more thing we agree on.
Annie Russell, director of the university’s Gender and Sexuality Center, said Hughes’ comments are “beyond the pale.” Russell told The Providence Journal, “trans people are people, period.”
See? Yet another place where we agree on one thing while disagreeing on another. We too think that trans people are people! So much do we think so that we’ve never said otherwise. What else would they be? Chairs and birds and rocks don’t think they can change sex. Another thing we think though is that people who disagree with us shouldn’t cheat by implying that we don’t think trans people are people. Annie Russell is cheating by implying that Hughes would disagree with her that trans people are people. Dirty pool.
Furthermore, she added, students at the university are upset by Hughes’ comments, which are “not only outdated, it’s never been a part of the gender and women’s studies movement.”
What’s never been a part of the gender and women’s studies movement? The understanding that men are not women? If that’s the case, what the hell is women’s studies? What do those two words even mean?
University of Rhode Island issued a statement, saying, “The University does not support statements and publications by Professor Donna Hughes that espouse anti-transgender perspectives and recognize that such discourse can cause pain and discomfort for many transgender individuals.
“The University is committed to transgender rights and the need to eliminate all forms of discrimination and violence aimed at transgender individuals and the LGBTQIA+ community.”
Well shame on URI for doing that. My brother’s first academic job was at URI, so I take it a bit personally. What a cowardly shitty abject thing to do.
Hughes, of course, is not happy about the backlash, problematically claiming her right to free speech is being trampled upon.
What a witless sentence. The article isn’t signed; maybe a machine wrote it.
The problem being, of course, that she is right and they can’t think of any way to demonstrate why she should not have free speech (or academic freedom), but don’t want to say that.
No one seemed all that bothered when Baby Boomer students at their universities were upset about the Vietnam War…and real Baby Boomers were dying real deaths in a real jungle. No, the problem then was that the students were speaking out, those damn radicals and liberals who don’t think young people should be cannon fodder.
Now all the student has to do is say “I feel bad”, and every college in the country will trip over their feet trying to “fix” what is “wrong”…almost always involving a professor saying something totally reasonable and within the bounds of their field of expertise, but which doesn’t make said student feel like a special little snowflake.
Should Prof. Hughes have said “trans-sex fantasy”?
There’s been a concept creep with the word “safety,” which has expanded over the last few years to mean “emotional safety.” In The Coddling of the American Mind: How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure authors Lukianoff and Haidt blame “safetyism” on several factors, including the strong possibility that the kids who enter college today are young for their age, lacking the experience and independence that earlier freshman already had. The catastrophizing and infantalizing of these knee-jerk rushes to protect students from being challenged strikes me as a form of helicopter parenting.
Why shouldn’t she have said that, Colin? The idea that a person can change sex is a fantasy. Do you think she should have ceded ground to the fantasists by sugar-coating her words?
Thanks, Sastra, I just ordered that book. (Like I need to add more books to my reading list. Oh, well.)
iknklast: another book for your tsundoku. (A lovely word – check it out on wikipedia if it’s not familiar.)
Thanks, Harald, I needed that word. I do read them, I just can’t read them fast enough to keep up!
@iknklast:
It’s a good one, pulling together a lot of disparate elements to explain, among other things, transgenderism. Some things I already knew, others surprised me a bit.
Ah, thank you, Harald, for reminding me, too, of that word, which I’d forgotten about. Like iknklast, I am a confirmed 積ん読者.
@AoS #4
The belief may be false, but the calling it a fantasy (especially with the word sex) suggests a psychological state trans people that might not obtain.
Colin, if I went around claiming to be Napoleon, and claimed that I had been ‘living as Napoleon’ for years, I think people would rightly call it a fantasy…a delusion, even. If I insisted that everyone else had to treat me as Napoleon, that would be taking my fantasy/delusion to an extreme.
But if I claimed to be a man, just an ordinary man without a tricorner hat, that would not be a delusion? Or fantasy? Pray tell me why not?
Minor nitpick: Bonaparte is generally depicted with a bicorne…
@iknklast #11
It would be incorrect. I’m thinking of this more from a rhetorical view. We may have to let this go peak trans before we can push back. Gender ideology may be a religion, but it is no longer a cult.
My bad. Got my bis and tris mixed up. But maybe it identified as a tricorne.
Very biphobic of you, iknklast.
OMG! I love this word. It even applies to me with magazines and (gasp) newspapers. I didn’t actually READ the Sunday Sn Francisco Chronicle from March 14 until today…and I kept buying the paper over the past two weeks nonetheless.
I wonder if there is a similar word for a wine nerd who somehow keeps acquiring wine even though he no longer has much space to store it properly?
I have a tsundoku of computers.
;(
Silly me, I thought a bicorne was to get people out of the way when cycling.
Sackbut, we’ll give you a chance to show yourself out before we call the bouncer. ;-)
A bicorne is both wheat AND corn.
Indeed. A tricorn does the same thing for someone on a tricycle.
And now we all know exactly what a unicorn is.
They are Neither and Both, at the same time. It is one of the Mysteries of the Faith. Center, celebrate, and accept. Blessed be, Blessed Bi.
We must respect the right of self-determination for all grains.
Colin Day #13
The problem is that people keep predicting peak trans, but, just like the rainbow or the frequently prophesized peak Trump(ism), we never quite seem to get there, and maybe we never will. There is certainly nothing inevitable about it. Too many people, from individuals to organizations to entire movements, have invested too much in the trans narrative and burned all bridges behind them, and now there is no way back without admitting to themselves and the world that they’ve been a bunch of major assholes.
Self-degermination.
Bjarte, I think you might be right. Or rather, I suspect we aren’t going to peak ourselves out of this mess. I think it will take enough peaking to build up a sort of herd immunity so that insufferable young people can show up to tell all us old people how stupid we were for believing this nonsense in the first place. We will have to put up with this glorious new generation while being labelled as the problem – just as we are now – and we might very well find that the new hyper-enlightened golden-children are worse than the bunch we currently have.
Exactly
I wish I remember who said it and in what context, but one of my favorite quotes went something like “progress isn’t caused by the passage of time”. Indeed it takes some active “pushing”, and if we’re not doing it, the other side most certainly will.
It’s not an accident that the first lesson from Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny was “Don’t obey* in advance”, and this applies to more than just the literal death of democracy. It’s tempting to think there is no need to start pushing back before things get intolerably bad, but as Snyder points out, by the time they get intolerably bad it’s usually too late.
*Or “concede”, “adjust”, “adapt”, “fall in line” etc.
Time for my periodic reminder that we have to be careful about such comparisons. Religious conservatives and their hangers-on do not, in fact, agree with GCFs, even if they stake out the same positions on a handful of issues. This is because when the GCF says that a man cannot be, in truth, a woman, they refer entirely to biological reality; when the religiot says it, they mean that there are universal, God-ordained categories that encompass the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, and that in all ways what is in one should not mix with the other–be it athleticism, housekeeping, fashion, sexual submission or political power, every such trait shall be deemed masculine or feminine, and forever entwined with the state of being male or female, respectively. (And it’s worth noting that the past several years have seen non-religious conservatives take up the same position. Evidently, it’s possible to be misogynistic without God, too.)
And I maintain that this provides a possible wedge, for a portion of the TRA alliance, namely the so-called “non-binary” folks. Because the proper response to someone saying “I’m non-binary,” is to get them to understand that NO ONE is a true ‘binary’ person when it comes to gender roles; manliness is an impossibly high bar to meet (which feeds the toxicity of the drive to achieve it), and femininity contains so many inherent contradictions that it is literally designed to allow any woman to be found wanting in some respect, by virtue of actually achieving some measure of another.
Then point out that TRAs actually reinforce the gender binary in society (they simply wish, in one way or another, to change which bullshit box they get put into, instead of burning down the boxes).
Peeling the NB faction off of the TRA movement could very well lead to the movement collapsing from its inherent contradictions.
Fair point, although I think many religious conservatives do in fact have biological reality in mind along with the god-given thing. To put it another way I think they too can detect bullshit when it’s steaming away under their noses. Not all, but many.