Meghan Murphy has thoughts on Everyday Feminism’s ridiculous withdrawal of Alice Dreger’s article, calling it news from the modern day witch hunt.

I don’t use the term “witch” lightly here. The McCarthyist campaign against women, particularly, who fail to toe the party line when it comes to feminism and gender is very much comparable to the witch hunts that extended throughout much of the 20th century. Women are quite literally being silenced and persecuted for speaking out against a kind of dogma that naturalizes the idea that innate gender identity exists from birth, as well as for the crime of understanding that, historically, women’s oppression has been directly attached to their female biology.

As feminists and as critical thinkers, it

Hoo-boy – it’s Alice Dreger’s turn again. Everyday Feminism asked her if they could republish a popular article of hers, she let them, they posted it – and then they unposted it. I bet you can guess why – no that’s silly, guessing has nothing to do with it. We know how things go right now, without guessing. Alice tells the story:

A few months ago, the blog site Everyday Feminism contacted me because they wanted to reprint my wildly popular essay, “What If We Admitted to Children that Sex is Primarily about Pleasure?”

I wrote back with some terms. They had to credit Pacific Standard for making the essay go viral. They had to mention my two most

Alice Dreger on Twitter:

From one of my close friends. I haven't actually read the Advocate piece. Why bother. pic.twitter.com/D50CmF4iuq

— Alice Dreger, Ph.D. (@AliceDreger) March 26, 2016

This is not a healthy intellectual climate. A political movement that can demonize and lie about an academic of Alice Dreger’s caliber is not going to lead us to a better world.… Read the rest

Dana Beyer rejoices at destroying academic careers.

Twelve years ago the Lambda Literary Foundation (LLF), which awards prizes to the best in LGBT writing, fiction and non-fiction, nominated the most scurrilous work of pseudo-scientific transphobic trash ever printed, The Man Who Would be Queen, by Professor J. Michael Bailey. I’ve written extensively about this book, as have many of my trans colleagues. The publication of the volume by the Institute of Medicine created a backlash and led to the formation of a coalition of activists which managed to get its views known at a time when we were not being heard. Led by Professor Lynn Conway, this formidable group of advocates not only tarnished the book and its

Alice Dreger has, with effort, learned to accept that historians are always too late with advice; people don’t listen until after it’s all over.

A group of transgender activists has achieved a major victory—the shutting down of the Child Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). Even better from their point of view, they got the head of it, psychologist Ken Zucker, fired.

The activists didn’t like Zucker because he never did subscribe to the “true transgender” model of identity, wherein you simply accept what any child (no matter how young) says about his or her gender. The transgender activists who called for his ouster insisted that Zucker was doing “reparative

In Galileo’s Middle Finger, one of Alice Dreger’s subjects is the stitch-up of the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticist James Neel by Patrick Tierney in his book Darkness in El Dorado and then by the American Anthropological Association which held a special session at its annual meeting with an open mic at which people were invited to trash Chagnon and they obliged. Dreger found overwhelming evidence that “the leaders of the AAA had to have known early on that Tierney’s book was riddled with errors” [p 175]. She quotes an email from one of the people in charge of the stitch-up, Jane Hill, to the primatologist Sarah Hrdy, who was invited to participate but declined:

Burn this message.