Where everybody can be authentic to be who they are
Yet another petition saying ignore those uppity women. This one is strikingly crude and badly written for purported academics. It’s also of course a crock of shit.
As academics, researchers, teachers, professional staff, and practitioners in the Higher Education sector, we are compelled to write to rebut the arguments put forward in the article published in the Sunday Times on 16th June.
Compelled? Really? Who is compelling them? What are the sanctions?
They don’t mean are compelled, of course, they mean feel compelled – which is where this whole disagreement started. Feeling isn’t necessarily being. Adults really are supposed to know the difference.
The article cited a letter signed by a group of about thirty academics who claim that Stonewall is stifling academic freedom. We entirely reject the position taken in the letter that promoting an educational environment free from harassment and bullying via the Stonewall Diversity Champions programme contradicts the principles of academic freedom.
Ahhhhh but that’s not the position taken in the letter, now is it. Naughty. Of course the letter doesn’t advocate an educational environment full of harassment and bullying.
The letter muddles the distinction between the concept of academic freedom, and the statutory public sector equality duties of higher education institutions. For the former, the right to conduct academic debates, research, and publish activities without fear of retribution by those in power, is the cornerstone of the academy. Whilst the latter relates to the institutional duties towards legally protected groups to eliminate discrimination, harassment and victimisation, promote equality of opportunity and foster good relations through the practices of higher education institutions. Debating gender pronouns within an academic context is part of academic freedom whereas the refusal to respect the gender pronouns of an individual to be used in class is not.
But the right to force people to refer to an individual as the sex that individual is not is an absolute right? Why is it? Who says it is? Why don’t we get to resist this move to compel us – literally compel this time – to counteract our own perceptions every time we mention This One Special Person?
Calling it “the refusal to respect the gender pronouns of an individual” reverses the agency at issue here. Respecting the gender pronouns of an individual isn’t a real thing; it’s a political invention and a way to force unwilling people to pay extra attention to narcissists. In ordinary life we don’t “respect” people’s pronouns, we just use them as a convenience to avoid having to repeat people’s names every time we mention them. That’s it. It’s just a convention of grammar. “Respect” has nothing to do with it. A politics that is all about trying to ruin the lives of academic women over pronouns is a politics that needs to be shot into the sun.
Stonewall provides a holistic and systematic approach for Diversity Champions to assess their policies and practice against each other through the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index (WEI). Participation in the WEI is voluntary but enables public, private and third sector organisations to evaluate and share good practice. This benefits not just members of the LGBT+ communities but all staff and students by fostering a more inclusive organisational culture. We are deeply concerned that a false claim of victimhood, under the guise of academic freedom, risks being legitimised to discredit universities and Stonewall when recent news and data about the experiences of LGBT+ communities show increasing levels of reported homophobic, biphobic and transphobic hate crime, harassment and discrimination.
And the solution is pronouns? Get a grip.
We unapologetically advocate for an academy where debates are intellectual and ethical, where everybody can be authentic to be who they are, and where everyone treats each other with respect and dignity.
What does “where everybody can be authentic to be who they are” mean? Can white people who feel a strong affinity for black culture demand to be treated as black because that’s the only way they can be authentic to be who they are? No. They’d be slapped down hard if they tried. Can white people who have one Sioux or Cherokee ancestor five generations back demand to be treated as Native American because that’s the only way they can be authentic to be who they are? Nope. In both cases, the rest of the world would say no, that’s not authentic, that’s the very opposite of authentic, so cut it out. But a man who says he’s a woman? Oh that’s completely different, because [insert something here]. “Authentic” my ass.
We also encourage our colleagues in the sector to challenge prejudice and aggression towards trans and all other minoritised groups. We stand in solidarity with trans staff and students and will continue to challenge views that run counter to our goal of an inclusive academy.
Not inclusive of people who disagree with us though. Of course not.
English, as opposed to languages such as German and Spanish, does not have gender, let alone gendered pronouns. English has sexed pronouns.
I can’t help but think back to the First Great Atheist War. (The one about accommodationism vs shrill mean Gnu Atheism, not the one about “but we can still treat women like shit, right?” which I count as the Second).
A favorite ploy of Team Accommodationism was to blur the distinctions between a public discussion of an issue and direct personal bullying. The sentiment that “I’m glad that there are people who are publishing books and op-eds and giving speeches that assert that religion is false or even delusional” was greeted with “oh, so you think it’s ok to barge into a hospital room and tell my dying religious grandmother that the faith she holds so precious is false and that she’s about to become worm food?” Whereas in fact, actual instances of Gnu Atheists harassing believers on a personal level were so rare that Wally Smith felt obliged to invent one.
It seems to me that the same thing is being done here. Academics who are just doing what academics do by questioning claims in the appropriate public/academic spaces are being treated as if they are walking up to individual people and saying “I deny your humanity!” The fact that some people take offense to anyone, anywhere voicing an opinion they don’t like is being cited as justification to shut down that opinion.
Did you hear that? A million irony meters spoiiinging as one.
Which, as I mentioned in another thread, is almost entirely down to self-reporting of anything the ‘victim’ perceives as a transphobic (like the TRAs care about the homo- and bi- parts) hate crime – a dirty look, a tut, a mistaken pronoun – along with the police’s guidelines to not question the assumption of the person doing the reporting.
We’re neck-deep in bullshit and they’re still piling on more.
Screechy @ 2 – yes. Nail on head.
I was gesturing toward a related thought yesterday when I wondered why Chris Bertram thinks academic discourse will make any difference to ordinary encounters on the street or the bus or in the pub.
I suspect the use of the passive voice—“We are compelled”—-serves to give them deniability for what they affirmatively mean to put across: “Look what you made us do.”
A favorite ploy of Team Accommodationism was to blur the distinctions between a public discussion of an issue and direct personal bullying.
Oh, nicely spotted.
Reminds me of what I would have said during the Accommodationist Troubles if I’d had the concepts and vocabulary I had today: The worst of the accommodationists were in fact covert narcissists. They trafficked in reversals, and called their opponents exploiters and abusers. They happily did this while dishonestly twisting what more forthright people said, and by working to silence them. They made it, in some spaces and for some time, illegitimate to speak candidly without being accused of being a monster.
It was social narcissistic abuse.
Yes and they did it in a whole slew of major media outlets, too, yet we nobodies were accused of bullying them. Reversal much?
Where everyone who believes gender is essential can be authentic to who they are, and everyone can bow down to the dominant narcissism.
Irony meter thoroughly shattered. This is exactly what the writers of the letter were advocating for, and exactly what the trans lobby is demanding not happen; the writers of this letter apparently want to appear reasonable to outsiders who aren’t following that close and have forgotten the details of what the original letter said, because it isn’t much on their radar screen.
So these writers claim they are all for that, and act like nobody is trying to shut it down. Every conversation I have on this issue with someone relentlessly pro-trans-inclusion does the same thing. Lesbians can decide who to have sex with, but oh, some of them are calling trans-women men, and that after showing an attraction to them…and implying that these are people who have gone through bottom surgery. Trans-activists aren’t trying to erase women, they are only trying to get recognition of their own womanhood. And so on. Argue one thing, then when you are challenged, pretend your argument was something else.
Well sorta. At the risk of getting all lecture-y, English is still gendered in that it has words that are not definitionally sex related (e.g. penis / vagina) but are associated with a sex anyway. It used to be much stronger – not surprising given that it is a Germanic language – but the components referring to grammatical gender (i.e. objects that do not have a sex but are referred to as if they do) have been heavily reduced.
Another way to look at it is that the neuter gender has grown to encompass almost every noun, leaving only those with natural gender (i.e. people and animals with discernable biological sex), ships, and sometimes nations.
And my computers, Holms. We definitely refer to each of our computers as “he”, but the mouse is “she”. Appropriate, really, since the mouse does so much of the work.
Ships and boats – cue Katherine Hepburn in Philadelphia Story saying “My, she was yar” about the sailboat she and Cary Grant had.
I hate it. It feels like some weird hidden joke against women.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HBUgdY9UNw
I’ve always suspected the boat thing was because men were handling them, controlling them, and they liked to think of it sexually – controlling a “yar” woman who would go where you told her when you wanted her to. And the context in which Hepburn uses it in Philadelphia Story is very much that meaning, since she follows that with a statement about how she wasn’t very “yar”. Why should she be?
Exactly.
We have the penis and the vagina. We have a penis and a vagina. We do not use different articles in such cases. We have a/an, but that has nothing to do with gender.
In Spanish, there is la tienda and el mercado.
re ships: if you ask the question, this is the kind of answer you get.
All too predictably.
I was familiar with neither “Philadelphia Story” nor the term “yar”, so I see the name of the short-lived Star Trek: The Next Generation character Tasha Yar in a new light. Thank you. My, she was Yar.