The new know-nothingism.

No one should be writing books on autism, which has to mean also that no one should be doing research on autism, who isn’t autistic? What sense does that make? Is it a rule for all such subjects? No writing or research about blindness if you’re not blind? No writing or research about cancer if you don’t have cancer? No writing or research about chronic depression if you’re not chronically depressed? No writing or research about alcoholism if you’re not an alcoholic?

I suppose this is an offshoot of the idea that white people should shut up about racism and listen to black people instead of doing all the talking. I think there’s some truth to that, but I don’t think it should be taken completely literally – I think white people shouldn’t talk over black people, and I think we should listen as much as possible, but I don’t think we should take a vow of silence on the subject.

Also, how is autism comparable to “ethnicity”? Answers on a postcard.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on + Month.

A purity spiral in action:

In 1970 it was Pride Day.

By the mid-1990s it was Pride Week.

By the turn of the millennium it was starting to be called Pride Month.

By 2022 the Canadian government had declared all of summer, from June to September, as “Pride Season.”

And now, just a year later, of course, Diversity, Equity, and Incusion busybodies want to extend the season through October.

This will just about get queer people safely to the end of the second week of November, which is the start of Trans Awareness Week. And the day after that is of course the Trans Day of Visibility.

In case you’re worried about that two-week prideless interlude in which people have the nerve to celebrate World War I veterans instead of the real heroes — the Rainbow People — there’s Intersex Remembrance Day on November 8th. But many believe that’s still not enough queer remembrance for November, so there’s an active campaign to ensure the whole month of November is celebrated as Trans Awareness Month.

And earlier in the year, for those who can’t wait until June to express their pride, we’ve got the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia in May, and before that, there’s International Asexuality Day in early April.

Next year we won’t even have to wait until April, because Sunday March 31st is the most holy day of them all: Trans Visibility Day, which unenlightened cisheteronormative folk insultingly refer to as Easter Sunday.

Oh! And speaking of Jesus: south of the Equator, Mardi Gras has already become Australia’s gay pride celebration season.

And back up here, the exclusionary cisheteronormative “Valentine’s Day” is counterprogrammed with Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week, for the seven days following February 14th.

What’s left?

Christmas, New Year’s, and in the U.S., Martin Luther King Jr. Day, remain shamefully unqueer.

But I’m sure GLAAD and Justin Trudeau will team up and make a plan to fix those holidays, too. For one thing, the “+” doesn’t even have a single day yet, let alone a week or a month!

Here, for free, are some suggestions:

Christ+ day

Martin Luther Drag King Week

New Year’s Resolution to End All Queerphobias Eve

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The dog that didn’t bark.

Saying ‘we have evidence’ or ‘there is evidence’ is not the same as presenting evidence. There are a lot of people who claim to have evidence for bigfoot; sure. Show us the evidence. Subject it to rigorous review and repetition to see if the claims hold up. Then you’ll have evidence.

One of the things that many people who argue for the existence of creatures like bigfoot/sasquatch, Mokele-mbembe, or the Loch Ness Monster don’t seem to realize or appreciate is that their claims entail perforce the continued existence through time of an entire population of their preferred cryptid(s). A population and a history. One means more, perhaps many. Now means yesterday, as well as long before. The secretive, hidden existence of a whole bunch of large creatures over long periods of time in the face of multiple, repeated expeditions actively seeking them is much less likely than supposed, impossible singletons. Unless they’re supernatural, any animal needed parents, grandparents, etc. Specimens would have been seen, hunted, eaten and/or stuffed and mounted in museums long ago.

Like the cryptozoologists saddled with bigger claims than they realize they’re defending (an entire breeding population of large animals with an invisible, unevidenced past, rather than just a single, elusive specimen), transgenderists have their own load of unclaimed baggage that they are in no hurry to pick up, apparently happy to leave it circling endlessly on the luggage carousel, hoping that nobody notices it. They depend upon the existence of some kind of gendered soul, but offer no proof of its reality, no physiological origin, or seat of residence, and no reliable, independent test for its presence or nature, beyond stereotype and affectation. “I slink, therefore I’m Femme.” This smuggling of unacknowledged Cartesian dualism is but one problem that hides within genderist claims. How it is able to accommodate the contradictory and incommensurate states of transgender, gender fluid and nonbinary “identities” within its already ill-defined remit is a question that is left unasked.

At least cryptozoologists go looking for their quarry, they have put their money (or, occasionally, someone else’s) where their mouths are. Genderists are content to leave it all a matter of faith. Vague definitions and verbal slight of hand keep things from getting too real or solid. Mustn’t try dissecting the Mysteries of the Faith. And like the Church of old, they reserve to themselves the right to punish heretics who question that faith.

A serious scientist can risk ruining their career if they admit to believing in cryptids, though the consequences for doing so do not spread much farther than their own livelihood and credibility. There are plenty of serious scientists who seem quite happy to believe in genderist claims; it is often the unbelievers who are at risk of sanction and ostracism.

Eventually, however, reality will win because it persists and endures. It will still be there long after the tweets that don’t age well, and the slanted, dishonest reportage that tries to obscure it. It only has to do nothing but wait. In the meantime there is real harm. Reality can’t win fast enough. The consequences of this belief, and its translation into practice, go far beyond those who espouse it. Yes, their reputations will eventually suffer because Reality (see above). If this were a battle that consisted solely of heated arguments by cloistered devotees hurling incomprehensible arguments at each other within the pages of obscure journals, we could safely ignore them. But the power of gender ideology reaches much farther than academia. It has gained influence in many of the fundamental institutions of the state and society, and it uses that influence to advance its demands and to punish its perceived enemies. This is academic argument with a body count amongst both proponents and opponents of transgenderism. Those who are seduced, ensnared and say “Yes” to its impossible promises, pay with their flesh and blood and fertility. Those who dare stand up and say “No” to its demands, particularly and especially women, are demonized, vilified, slandered, cancelled, fired, bullied, threatened, harassed, and assaulted. In short, agree or disagree with a transgenderism powerful enough to enforce its will, you lose.

How many?

But…but…but…

Laurier has Pride

Each June, Pride Month recognizes and honours the experiences and history of Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual (2SLGBTQQIA+) and other identities and communities and celebrates the positive impacts 2SLGBTQQIA+ people have had around the world.

Isn’t that enough?

Meanwhile where is Women’s Month?

Wilfrid Laurier University aims to create safe and equitable campuses for all 2SLGBTQQIA+ members of its community. The university will celebrate Pride Month with a series of educational and inclusive events, some of which are highlighted below.

Flying the Progress Pride flag represents Laurier’s commitment to honouring the identities, experiences, and contributions of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community and its continuing struggle for social, political and economic equality, as well as the university’s commitment to the inclusion of First Nations, Métis, Inuit, Black and racialized voices in 2SLGBTQQIA+ and other equity initiatives.

But not women. Never women.

Seriously now. Take a good hard look at that cover.

What is the central image, the one that jumps out at the viewer? A very conservative Muslim couple, the woman in a burqa chador and a man with the regulation full beard, with a child between them, both of them wreathed in smiles as they walk a few inches behind an apparent gay couple.

That is not the real world.

Very conservative Muslims do not beam joyously on gay couples in the park. They don’t. Secular liberal Muslims yes, but the uniform-wearing ones, no. Theocrats, Christian or Jewish or Hindu or Muslim, do not beam approvingly on same-sex couples, not even when they’re actually not same-sex couples because one of them is a trans man. They wouldn’t be tripping the light fantastic holding their child’s hands while the spawn of Satan loitered right in front of them.

Also look at that harlot just above the man, with her bare arms and hair. Not ok. Look at the little girl with the ice cream cone – why, she’s practically naked.

What’s the thinking here? That they’ll distract from the fiction of the pregnant “man” by presenting a fiction of cheery tolerant friendly conservative Muslims frolicking with the gender communiny?

Granted the cheery tolerant conservative Muslims aren’t physically impossible the way the pregnant “man” would be. But they are absurdly implausible, because believers who are that liberal don’t dress that way. The conservative dress is a marker, a marker of conservatism. Part of its job is to be a rebuke to the rest of the world.

Surely the publishers know this.

Rich guy who shares some of his millions:

Hamish Ogston is one of Britain’s richest men…

He has spent the last five years building up his eponymous foundation, which has donated tens of millions to heritage projects, healthcare and women’s education in the global south.

He’s had dinner with Charles Windsor. Anne Windsor’s husband has had dinner with him. Heady stuff.

Today, a Sunday Times investigation reveals evidence that suggests for the last 15 years he has engaged in the exploitation of vulnerable southeast Asian sex workers. Documents suggest Ogston has trafficked or attempted to traffic Thai and Filipina sex workers, and hosted women who entered the country as tourists only to stay at his property and engage in sex work. Others are, in his words, already in the country “illegally” and beholden to mama-sans (female Thai pimps) or members of organised crime gangs, making them less likely to report potential abuse.

Yes but he’s had dinner with Charles Windsor.

Ogston said that he did not recognise our account and denies entirely that his conduct amounts to the systematic exploitation of vulnerable women. The potential offences include breaking laws on immigration, prostitution and human trafficking — defined as arranging or facilitating a person’s travel to another country to exploit them for sexual or domestic servitude. It is also a crime to “knowingly” employ adults who do not have the right to work or are in the country illegally, and to control a person’s prostitution for gain. Such crimes can result in lengthy prison sentences.

Even if the perp has had dinner with Charles Windsor? Surely not.

Ogston’s alleged exploitation has severely affected a number of the women involved. He has asked sex workers to perform acts on himself, his friends and other prostitutes so extreme that some have required medical attention and risked chronic disease.

I have no sarcasm for that one. It’s staggering. Some men are happy to injure women and leave them chronically ill for the men’s sexual thrills. Scales: on the one hand women’s safety and health, on the other hand some guy’s tingle. His tingle is worth more than her entire well-being.

And there’s more. Scotland Yard helped him. Scotland Yard was on Team Men’s Tingle as opposed to Team Women’s Safety.

In 2016, Scotland Yard contacted a woman who Ogston had paid for sex and subsequently accused of blackmail. Extraordinarily, an officer sent two emails they had received in which the woman alleged exploitation by Ogston back to the man himself. The officer also assured Ogston they were running checks and trying to find an address for her. The millionaire then hired a private detective to track her down.

That is indeed extraordinary.

Bahahahahaha behold the progressive paradise where men carry babies and women are muffled in burqas. Theocrats and gendercrats join hands to defeat the dreaded feminist monster! And everybody is smiling!

Classic. Right-wing ideology in a nutshell. People must be allowed to do whatever they want, provided that what they want to do is expensive and destructive and dangerous.

Fuck public transportation yeah? Fuck pedestrians and cyclists yeah? The only decent people are the ones in cars, god damn it, so give everything to them and punish all those reckless lazy anti-capitalist people who don’t have six cars in their garages.

Freedom! Freedom freedom freedom!

For people who own cars, that is. Not for all those other people, the ones who refuse to support the automobile industry. Lazy irresponsible greedy buggers.

Queering the what now?

One year ago:

So naturally I had to find the source.

York Art Gallery: Queering the Burton

York Art Gallery and the York LGBT Forum have been working to queer the Burton Gallery by telling the stories and sharing the perspectives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA+) people. Art works from York Art Galleries collections will be ‘coming out’ from the stores as well as looking again at some of the art already on display from an LGBTQIA perspective.

Visitors will be able to explore the stories which draw on LGBT Forum participants original research, as well as creative responses to the art which are inspired by lived experience.

‘Queering the Burton’ at York Art Gallery supports York Museum Trusts ambition to make the Gallery an inclusive and welcoming space for everyone. Historically, the term Queer has had a number of meanings. Our use of the word Queer is a positive affirmation. Here, we are de-weaponising what was once a slur, and reclaiming Queer as a collective term to represent sexual and gender minorities.

That is, they think they are de-weaponizing a slur, but a hell of a lot of members of their “community” strongly disagree.

There’s also the tiny little matter of the T’s war on members of the female community.

So anyway. Saint Agatha has been unqueered.

A closer look at that now-removed panel:

Who doesn’t want to read the self-absorbed driveling of a Person of Gender while visiting an art gallery?

The Times on that canceled anthropology panel:

For a big annual conference on anthropology, Kathleen Lowrey, an associate professor at the University of Alberta, put together several panelists around a controversial theme: that their discipline was in the midst of erasing discussions of sex, which they believe is binary — either male or female.

So she collected a panel of speakers, only to have the profession…er…erase it.

That statement again, in case it’s faded over the past few days:

In a joint statement on Thursday, the two sponsors of the conference, the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society, said that they wanted to protect the transgender community: “The session was rejected because it relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline, framed in ways that do harm to vulnerable members of our community.”

The statement also compared the panelists’ views to eugenics.

“The function of the ‘gender critical’ scholarship advocated in this session, like the function of the ‘race science’ of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is to advance a ‘scientific’ reason to question the humanity of already marginalized groups of people,” the statement said.

Of course gender critical scholarship is not “like” 19th century “race science.” Claiming it is is just enhanced bullying.

In recent decades, many anthropologists have moved to a more nuanced view of sex, one that often rejects it as simply binary.

Nuanced shmuanced. The word they’re looking for is “supernatural.”

Dr. Lowrey said that she and the other panelists were blindsided by the decision and that none of them had been contacted about any concerns from the anthropology groups since the panel received its July approval. In a statement, the panelists said that it was a “false accusation” that their ideas were intended to harm the transgender community [trans people].

Of course their ideas weren’t “intended to harm” anyone, and sneaking that “community” in there is just part of the general manipulation and outright lying. I don’t know if it’s the Times that sneaked it in or the goons who canceled the panel, quoted by the panelists, but either way it’s manipulative.

The move was criticized by some academic freedom advocates who said that the two anthropology groups had caved to political pressure and proved the panel’s point: that the discipline was unfriendly to dissenting views on sex and gender.

But Ramona Pérez, the president of the American Anthropological Association, rejected the attacks.

Bam, there it is again. What “attacks”?? The Times is putting a big fat foot on the scales here. Saying the cancellation is wrong is not an “attack.”

The panel was nixed, she said, only after complaints that it did not have scientific merit and that it was harmful to some of the association’s 8,000 members.

“This was an intention to marginalize, not engage scientifically,” Dr. Pérez said.

What the hell is that supposed to mean?

Dr. Lowrey’s panel received preliminary approval based on a relatively anodyne abstract, reviewed by people without subject-matter expertise, Dr. Pérez said. It was later, when others took a closer look at more detailed plans for each presenter, that the association started receiving complaints by biological, evolutionary and cultural anthropologists, Dr. Pérez said.

“We looked at who was actually in it,” she said, and “we began to see that this really was one of those times where people who have an alternative agenda come into professional associations, try to get into these conferences, in order to push an agenda that doesn’t actually match up with the discipline.”

That’s extraordinarily offensive. The witches “come into professional associations” like people crashing a party – please ignore the fact that they’re anthropologists at an anthropology conference. They “try to get into these conferences” because they are anthropologists and the conferences are anthropology conferences – that’s how that works. Not all panels are accepted, but it’s not fraud or gate-crashing or sneaking in the back door to propose one. The Times sucks at this.

You know, it’s just occurred to me to wonder something. I don’t know why it took me so long. What I wonder is: if the trans ideology is based on truth – if it really is true that people can be born in the wrong body – why are there not whole bookshelves full of accounts of the experience? Why has this truth been hidden from us for so long? Why didn’t we already know about it, before 2010 or whatever it was? Why aren’t there memoirs and autobiographies and biographies and histories telling us about it?

There are of course memoirs and novels and so on that express discontent with the rules of gender, including some with a wish one could be the other gender. There’s Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. There are gripes and thought experiments; there are Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Eyre and Nancy Blackett. But are there rows and rows of books about people adamantly insisting that they literally are the sex that’s the opposite of their bodies? Not that I know of.

Well if the core claim of the ideology were true, there would be. We would already know all about it, because we would have been told, for centuries. It wouldn’t have just popped up in the last ten or twenty or fifty years.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on What’s that smell coming from the basement?

…the sad reality is our climate is changing faster than our infrastructure can respond…

We all know what happens to organisms whose ability to adapt fails to keep up with the pace of its changing environment. Humans are numerous and resourceful enough to be around for a long time (even if it is ultimately in only small numbers, in widely spaced patches). Civilization is another story. Its dependence on the combination of cheap, reliable energy, and immediate access to material resources on a planetary scale makes it vulnerable to disruptions of either. The unacknowledged and unprotected foundation of all of this economic activity is a healthy, thriving biosphere, which is needed to keep the soft, squishy humans who think they’re in charge alive.

A healthy biosphere means leaving leaving large swathes of Earth “undeveloped” so it can go on doing what it’s doing, unhindered. Civilization doesn’t do well with “undeveloped,” as it regards such “unused” spaces in much the same way an artist or writer might look at a blank canvas, or empty page, believing its plans for use can only ever be an improvement on what is already there. There’s always that urge to fill in this supposed emptiness, to “improve” the “wasteland, ” and the inability to know when to leave well enough alone. We’ve developed powerful tools and technologies, and claimed exclusive, unlimited ownership of the entire planet before we’ve even learned about everything that constitutes it and how it all works together. We’re clever, but not smart. We aren’t living up to Linnaeus’s wildly optimistic species epithet of “wise,” and have made insufficient progress towards his injunction to know ourself. We’re a bunch of hyperactive, barefoot, psychotic apes with nuclear weapons, throwing our weight around in a house of glass.

The normal operation of civilization, which is now geared to a recklessly dangerous degree towards maximized, short-term returns for only a few, is destroying this biogeochemical foundation. Civilization is autolytic; it is consuming itself, and there’s more concern about who will extract the most out of the world before the whole Ponzi scheme collapses (this is called “winning”), instead of the fact that that this collapse is hastened by continued pursuit of business as usual itself. It’s a game of musical chairs being played by chainsmokers on board the Hindenburg, where the last one left with a chair congratulates himself on his entreprenurial accumen and asbestos underwear, even as the chair he’s on ignites beneath him.

Now to see if I can tolerate reading all of Grace Lavery’s Address to the Genderariat.

The emergence of a liberal ideology of trans rights over the last two decades has precipitated a crisis in higher education. The purpose of my lecture today will be to sketch the contours of that crisis as I see them, and to propose a couple of possible ways forward.

The trouble is though, it’s not a liberal ideology. Very much the opposite. It’s dictatorial and punitive, not liberal. It rests on bullshit claims and personal fantasies, which are not good foundations for a liberal ideology.

…there is in this room some number—perhaps a sizable number—of people who are perturbed by the growing conflict between certain members of the LGBT community and certain feminist activists and organizations. I hope to offer an account of that conflict that differs from the mainstream account, with which everyone in this room is familiar: that by insisting on the axiom that “trans women are women,” LGBT activists have engendered a set of conflicts between the rights of women and trans rights. In fact, no such conflicts exist, and the widespread attempt to diagnose them, however well-intentioned, has had the effect of weakening the women’s movement throughout the UK.

[Bronx cheer] Of course such conflicts exist. His presence is a conflict; his giving this talk is a conflict. He is displacing us. That is a conflict.

I do not believe that most of those responsible for this schism are feminists—many are simply reactionary trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos and Graham Linehan; some others are opportunistic centrist journalists like Helen Joyce and Jesse Singal; and still others are conservative ideologues like Toby Young and Rob Liddle.

Graham is nothing like Yiannopoulos. Helen is not “opportunistic” (and by the way what about the opportunism of “Grace” Lavery himself?).

However he admits there are some feminists who don’t bend the knee to him.

My argument today is not complex, and it is more or less encapsulated in the title of the lecture. Over the last decade, trans civil rights claims (particularly those of trans women, and especially those of trans women who love women) have become the scapegoat for an increasingly pervasive anxiety: that young people, or social media, or young people on social media, are incapable of rational thought, and their modes of reasoning need to be radically suppressed for the good of their blameless victims, which are sometimes figured as “women,” sometimes as “the university,” sometimes as “children,” and sometimes as “lesbians.” In order to defend this facially rather improbable account of the world, the gender critical movement must maintain a constant state of battle-readiness: always ready to swarm some graduate student on Twitter, to circulate some collection of memes that prove that trans teenagers are more likely to detransition than is widely believed, or to smear anyone who contradicts any of their positions as a rapist, a pedophile, an apologist for rapists or pedophiles, a misogynist, a wife-beater, a homophobe, or all of the above.

What a flippant way to describe the conflict – as well as inaccurate. What a male-centric way to ignore women’s concerns about our rights and change the subject to some mythic fretting about the social media habits of young people.

…the GC movement is not merely a threat to academic freedom, it is the greatest threat in a generation: not only have GC academics created a system whereby one teaches one’s students best when one teaches them at gunpoint, not only have they done so to the great delight of conservative politicians who despise the cultures of learning that have been sustained by the higher education sector, but they have done so while persuading liberal media outlets like the BBC and the Guardian that the students really do need to be put down for the good of the country. 

Ok that’s enough of “Grace” Lavery.

The second point-hiss in the Open Democracy hit piece on Kathleen Stock is a complicated but trivial story about Nathan Oseroff accusing Stock of “publicly advocating bigotry and intolerance” and Brian Leiter saying Oseroff should be fired from his job as an editor at the American Philosophical Association blog, which eventually he was.

Leiter defended his actions, telling openDemocracy that Oseroff-Spicer “repeatedly abused his position at the APA blog”.

The events led both Oseroff-Spicer and his partner, a trans man, to conclude “philosophy just was not the right place for either of us”.

Or to put it another way, he and his partner weren’t the right people for philosophy.

Next up:

Christa Peterson, currently a final-year philosophy PhD student at the University of Southern California, has become an expert on the impact of ‘gender critical’ thought in academia, having clashed with ‘gender critical’ philosophers since the movement came to prominence.

Well, she’s become an “expert” in bullying people who don’t grovel to the ideology.

In 2021, she was invited by a group of postgraduate students at the University of Sussex to present her research on anti-trans thought in philosophy, scheduled at the same time as Stock was meant to give a talk.

Cute. Of course Peterson jumped at the chance to bully Stock more than she already was, which was a lot.

She agreed, but then received concerned emails from the organisers. “My sense is that the students were getting pressure from the administration to cancel it,” she said. “They were sent the university’s conduct guidelines and were told they were responsible for everything I said, and that it could not be an ‘anti-Kathleen’ talk.”

Peterson broadened the scope of her talk to cover anti-trans thought in academia more generally. “I changed the subject of the talk in response to these concerns – which is a clear-cut academic freedom problem,” she said. “I was very worried about getting them in trouble.”

Except it’s not an academic freedom problem because it wasn’t an academic event – it was just Peterson talking to some students at their invitation. (I think it must have been organized as an online “presentation of her research”; I doubt the students ponied up the cash to bring her to Brighton and then send her back again.)

Stock told openDemocracy that Peterson’s talk was “certainly not a standard academic event in any sense” and added: “I am told it took place without any interference from management, so I am not sure I understand what she is now complaining of.”

The revised talk, given in the summer of 2021, went ahead without issue, but weeks after resigning from Sussex, Stock told The Times that she “went off sick with a breakdown” because of it. She told openDemocracy: “The timing by the organisers was intentionally hostile to me, as was the nature of the invitation as a whole.”

All because she doesn’t agree that men can be women.

In November 2022, an academic article in the journal Impact referred to Peterson’s invitation to present her research at Sussex as part of a campaign of “bullying” directed at Stock. The authors, Alice Sullivan and Judith Suissa, both influential ‘gender critical’ thinkers, omitted Peterson’s name and credentials, calling her simply “a Twitter-troll primarily known for her obsessive interest in Stock”. Sullivan had previously called her a “loony grad student” on Twitter.

Peterson says she complained to Impact about this portrayal of her in January of this year and was told she would receive a quick response, but has still not heard back. Impact has yet to respond to requests for comment from openDemocracy.

But the article didn’t name her. Peterson on the other hand has named Stock in public.

The dismissal of her work by senior academics has left Peterson concerned about her career opportunities. “I’m going on the job market this year and these people keep saying my academic work is bullying and harassment,” she said. “I will not apply to jobs in the UK. I think most departments would have at least one person who would have a real problem with me being hired, because they think I’ve been bullying Kathleen Stock for years.”

I absolutely think no one should hire Peterson for an academic job. I think she would be extraordinarily bad at it.

Peterson is not the only researcher into ‘gender critical’ academics who has felt pressured by a British university to soften their academic work on the subject.

Open Democracy really should look into the pressure on gender critical academics before it worries about pressure in the opposite direction.

Grace Lavery, a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, gave a talk in 2022 at University College London (UCL) about what she called “the mortal threat to academic freedom in the United Kingdom that has been mounted in recent years… by an alliance composed of the gender critical movement and the managerial class of administrators that govern the UK [higher education] sector.”

…

When the editors of Think Pieces, an in-house journal at UCL, asked Lavery to produce a written version of her talk, she was happy to oblige – but started to become concerned when, months after she submitted an article, it had not appeared. Lavery understood editors feared they could face legal action for running the piece as was, something UCL appeared to confirm when we asked about the article, telling openDemocracy that it “must carefully take other factors into account when publishing articles including the risk of legal action against the institution”.

Lavery instead published the article on her blog in June. “It was the first time I’d ever heard of university administration actually intervening in the normal course of publication of work,” she said.

I bet he was thrilled. (We’ll have to read the article. Later.)

Another academic who says her career has been affected by her support for trans rights is Newcastle University sociology professor Alison Phipps, who was head of gender studies at Sussex University when Stock was teaching there. Phipps has been a vocal trans ally for the past decade, which she says has meant “some academics working on violence against women give me a wide berth, as do some third sector organisations”.

Ok so why doesn’t that give her pause? Why doesn’t it worry her that academics working on violence against women give her a wide berth? Why doesn’t it cause her to think again about her work?

According to Phipps, ‘gender critical’ women in her field “tend to set the mainstream agenda, with very few people willing to risk their own careers by challenging them openly”.

What??????

It. is. the. other. way. around.

Oh please.

Open Democracy does the big Reverse:

Cancel culture? Trans-inclusive writers say they face abuse and censorship

They face abuse and censorship? You mean they engage in abuse and censorship.

Students and academics say they are bullied and threatened with legal action for opposing ‘gender critical’ views

And Open Democracy pretends to believe them.

Sussex English undergraduate Katie Tobin was among the first to experience such a backlash when she wrote an article in late 2018 for the Sussex branch of The Tab, a student newspaper conglomerate with a presence on dozens of UK campuses.

Tobin’s piece concerned an email Stock had sent the entire Sussex philosophy cohort defending her views on trans rights. In her article, Tobin said Stock’s email had “created a hostile and unwelcoming atmosphere” for trans students, and that her comments about trans issues had been “extremely detrimental” to their welfare.

In other words Tobin wrote an article bashing Stock…and Open Democracy is pretending Tobin is the one being bullied.

When the article was published, Stock responded on Twitter: “This is not OK @TheTab. I will be seeking legal advice.” In a tweet that Stock ‘liked’, a supporter of hers wrote: “Tobin is clearly a homophobe and misogynist”, and called the article “slander”.

At that point, Tobin said, she started getting a “flood” of “horrible messages”, including death threats. She filed a complaint with the university about Stock instigating a pile-on against her.

Tobin trashes Stock, Stock pushes back, Tobin pretends Stock is the baddy here, Open Democracy pretends the same. It’s remarkably brazen. Do they think we just won’t notice the part about Tobin’s article accusing Stock of creating a hostile atmosphere?

Sussex concluded that Stock was not responsible for the abuse Tobin had received, and that she had not been unprofessional or engaged in bullying. Tobin was, however, given £250 as compensation by the university.

After she put a target on Stock.

The university’s response to Tobin appeared to set a precedent, In October 2021, when students put up posters reading “IT’S NOT A DEBATE. IT’S NOT FEMINISM. IT’S NOT PHILOSOPHY. IT’S JUST TRANSPHOBIA AND IT’S NOT ON. FIRE KATHLEEN STOCK”, an art history lecturer at Sussex tweeted that “security rushed to remove them at 8am”.

And???? Do universities normally allow posters attacking individual professors by name?

There’s more. Then there’s Christa Peterson. Then there’s Grace Lavery. Then there’s Alison Phipps. This may take some time.

Not the future any more.

All drainage systems have their limitations and New York City’s is 1.75 inches of rainfall per hour. Unfortunately for many New Yorkers, the storm that deluged the region on Friday dropped more than two inches between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. — and then kept on coming.

The limit on the capacity of the city’s network of drains, pipes and water-treatment plants is the main reason New Yorkers across all five boroughs suffered through flooding. And this probably will not be the city’s last bout with heavy flooding as it plays catch-up with the pace of climate change, experts said.

“This changing weather pattern is the result of climate change, and the sad reality is our climate is changing faster than our infrastructure can respond,” said Rohit Aggarwala, commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection.

And we still refuse to do anything about it, so expect more floods and droughts and lethal heatwaves.

The rush-hour downpour on Friday overwhelmed the 7,400 miles of pipes that carry storm water and sewage under the city’s hard surfaces to treatment plants or into the nearest rivers and bays. The runoff backed up into the streets, causing flooding that swamped cars and seeped into basements and subway stations in Brooklyn and Queens.

Note the sewage part. This is sewage that’s seeping into basements.

About 60 percent of New York City has a drainage system that combines storm runoff with sewage in the same pipes. When the flow through those pipes is more than double what the sewage treatment plants were designed to handle, the excess — a mix of rain and untreated sewage — goes straight into local waterways like the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, the East River or Jamaica Bay.

But as the sewer system backs up, some of that untreated wastewater winds up in the basements of homes and businesses around the city.

So that’s always nice.

Maybe we should all take up residence on cruise ships?

I feel like Stanley on The Office [US version] saying “Have you lost your damn mind?”

“Has someone said something that made you feel bad? Tell the police.”

It literally says that. It literally says that.

I can’t find another source for this clip so here’s this one.

It’s hard to hear what she says at the beginning. She says adults nationwide have been “calling out the student’s gender.” That, she says, “has nothing to do with the choices that student made relative to the assault. That student made an incredibly awful choice, and will have consequences that are ‘metted’ out, commensurate with that assault. However, this other piece, which is because the student has a particular gender identity, therefore -” emphatic shake of the head – “there is no connection, and that is the hate that we are dealing with right now.”

Now how the hell does she know there is no connection? How could she know that?

Is it likely that there is a connection? Why yes, I think it is (but I’m not so sure of it that I would go public saying emphatically “there is a connection”). I think trans ideology and “activism” teach believers and “activists” that trans people are The Most Victimized, and by a wide margin, and that they are uniquely vulnerable, or vunnerable as they say in the UK, and that because they are Most Victimized and uniquely vulnerable, they get to do whatever they want all the time. Which doesn’t sound much like being victimized, let alone most victimized, but there you go.

They just are, that’s all. Why are you so stupid? If I say they are, then they are. There’s nothing more to it.

Klyne-Simpson says she understands some people can feel uncomfortable at first if they have never met a transgender person before.

“But all it takes is education. Once you understand trans women are women, trans men are men, non-binary people are who they say they are, it’s as simple as that,” she said. “If you still feel uncomfortable after that, that’s on you, it’s not on me. I am who I am, it’s as simple as that. I just look different. That’s all.”

It’s so simple. You just say. Why are you so stupid that you don’t understand it? People are who they say they are. That’s how the world runs and how it has run for billions of years.

Kelli Paddon, B.C.’s parliamentary secretary for gender equity says situations like this highlight that it is important to continue working to advance transgender people’s rights.

“Trans people deserve to feel safe, welcome and affirmed for who they are. Trans women are women – period,”

See? She gets it. (Is a she, right? Men don’t spell their names with an i do they?) She says it, so it’s true. Period.

How dare anyone doubt or question something someone has said? It’s worse than murder.

More on the school corridor assault on a girl (that I meant to add to the post about it but ran out of time, sorry) in a suburb of Portland (Oregon):

School officials in Tigard-Tualatin, a suburb southwest of Portland, say the incident is now under criminal investigation. The attacker was arrested and is facing assault charges, said Jennifer Massey, the public information officer for the Tualatin Police Department; the case was referred to the Washington County Juvenile Department. The district would not comment on the specific disciplinary actions it had taken against the attacker.

Oregon Live goes off on what I consider a tangent, about a trend of brawls in schools and how schools are trying to cope. Then of course it goes off on that other tangent.

Video of the incident made its way around the Tigard-Tualatin community, and then to conservative commentators, who seized upon the appearance and clothing of the perpetrator and concluded without confirmation that they were transgender. 

There you go, that’s the important thing – Divine Gender. If “they” is transgender, probably “they” should get restitution from that girl “they” slammed to the floor and yanked around by the hair and punched repeatedly. It must be all her fault, not “their” violent sneak attack.

That assumption prompted an onslaught of furious, often profane calls to the district and to the school from people around the country, as those who encountered the incident online assumed wrongly that the perpetrator had been differently disciplined due to their supposed gender identity.

Do let’s stop talking about the violent attack on the girl and talk about the poor fragile perpetrator instead.