The Phipps file
The Telegraph article that Priyamvada Ghopal mentioned:
The Telegraph has spoken to academics, who wish to remain anonymous, who claim that Prof Alison Phipps, a former colleague of Prof Stock’s, was one of those leading the criticism of her, which ultimately led to her resignation.
Prof Phipps was a professor of gender studies at Sussex University, and has recently taken up a post as professor of sociology at Newcastle University.
Now, it has emerged that she posted a series of tweets suggesting that “gender critical feminists” are also “racist and ableist”, and accused colleagues of being “bigots”.
Screenshots of the now-deleted tweets show that in January, Prof Phipps wrote: “I’d be interested to hear how many people with a prominent ‘free speech warrior’* at their workplace – whether that’s a racist, a transphobe and/or another flavour – have been subject to threats or official complaints from said warrior after criticising them in public.”
She followed this up with an asterixed “*bigot” and with another tweet saying: “(Any resemblance to my own workplace is, of course, entirely coincidental).”
In another tweet, posted in July 2020, Prof Phipps said: “Of course ‘gender critical’ feminists are also racist and ableist: their politics based on entitlement to define, speak for and dominate others makes all sorts of things possible, and a one-dimensional analysis of gender means a lack of intersectionality across the board.”
Except “of course” that’s not true. It’s not even a little bit true.
In January 2020, Prof Stock challenged Prof Phipps to a debate, saying: “Each time a news article about gender critical academics comes out, you tweet that Sussex Uni trans students and staff are made unsafe by us.
“Instead why not engage with me in public debate at Sussex or elsewhere?”
Prof Phipps responded: “‘Reasonable debate’ cannot counter unreasonable ideas. History has shown this repeatedly. Insisting on ‘debate’ is about giving credibility where there is none.”
So the thing to do is lie about gender critical academics on Twitter.
Prof Phipps wrote the book Me Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism, which questions whether white feminists need to ask themselves whether they are causing harm when they fight sexual violence.
She’s the sociologist of Karen.
“White feminist tears deploy white woundedness, and the sympathy it generates, to hide the harms we perpetuate through white supremacy,” she wrote.
The book, which faced criticism after it was recommended in an Oxfam staff training document, says “privileged white women” are supporting the root causes of sexual violence by wanting “bad men” imprisoned.
The book faced criticism after people read it, because it’s so bad.
I don’t get it.
“White women” — and only White women? — are not allowed to fight sexual violence? What harm do any women “cause” when they fight sexual violence? Are more Black, Latina, Asian, Indigenous, or other women harmed, when White women — among other women — fight sexual violence? Is it that White women harm men by not wanting to be subjected to sexual violence … at the hands of men? What’s wrong with wanting to remove sexually violent men from general society? Esp since it doesn’t appear that there is any effective way to render them non-violent against women? How does it “perpetuate White supremacy” to take measures against sexually violent men? What’s the point of attacking White women — and only White women — for fighting sexual violence?
I’m not seeing any connections. The statements don’t make any sense. I don’t get it.
No, I don’t get it either, and I did some furious posts on the subject when the book came out. I think it’s utter bullshit and a creepy opportunistic look-at-me stab in the backs of women. I find Alison Phipps really despicable.
Here’s one of the posts, which led to a lively discussion.
She holds the Do It To Julia chair.
“She holds the Do It To Julia chair.”
And is a Senior Fellow in Being a Transmaiden.
Not sure what people here think of Angela Nagle, but she nailed this “I’m ashamed of being white” stuff in “Kill All Normies”.
When someone like Alison Phipps states white women are bad, she isn’t trying to help women of colour.
Instead, Phipps is saying how *superior* she is to other white women (especially ones like Kathleen Stock, who won’t join with the Identity Politics/ Purity Spiral movement).
This ostensible expression of self-hatred is in fact a gesture of superiority. It’s similar to medieval kings who washed the feet of the poor once a year, in order to publicly flaunt their wealth on the rest of the year without criticism.
Yes indeed. Phipps is all about positioning herself as better than Those Other, Bad Women.
Indeed she is.
Also, Phipps’ criticisms of perceived “abelism” ring hollow when we learn about some of the attitudes of the gender ideology movement that she supports.
Dr. Helen Webberley, (of Mermaids infamy) when asked about autistic children in an Facebook meeting, said “Who put them on the spectrum I’d like to ask?” Johanna Olson-Kennedy followed this with “There are people whose symptoms of autism go away when they are affirmed in their gender.”
https://www.transgendertrend.com/stonewall-autism-stonewall-schools-guidance/
The whole claim that Special educational needs and disability (SEND) children and adolescents are really suffering from gender dysphoria, and that “gender affirmation” methods will cure them, is false and insulting to disabled people. It’s just another version of the “drinking bleach cures autism” nonsense. Not a squeak out of Alison Phipps about this, of course.
I wonder what she means by “ableism” then.
“Trans women are women just like Black women and disabled women are!”
HA! THAT’S RICH. What is a woman?
STFU TERFS!
Like men becoming women?
Compared to the denial of sex and the exclusion of “sex” in the calculus of interectionality? And the misapplication of the concept of intersectionality altogether?
Why do they always have to be at universities I’ve worked at? Annoying.
Gender enthusiasts seem very keen on throwing around accusations of ableism at the moment. I suspect it’s pointless to over-analyse it. For the most part, I think it’s thrown in (and then endlessly repeated) either just because mud sticks or because it’s actually quite a confusing accusation and it takes a little thought to work out whether ableism has occurred in a given case or not.
I struggle with that myself; discrimination on the grounds of disability is a different sort of thing to discrimination on the grounds of race or sex and this just makes the already tortured analogies scream even harder for the sweet embrace of death.
I’ve found the best defence is to call their bluff; they don’t usually answer and if they do, it’s absolutely safe to point and laugh without needing to rebut.
Call their bluff and when it shows up put it on the naughty step FOR ETERNITY.
“Gender enthusiasts seem very keen on throwing around accusations of ableism at the moment. I suspect it’s pointless to over-analyse it. For the most part, I think it’s thrown in (and then endlessly repeated) either just because mud sticks or because it’s actually quite a confusing accusation and it takes a little thought to work out whether ableism has occurred in a given case or not.”.
I’ve never seen any gender-critical feminists express hatred, or advocate discrimination against disabled people.
By contrast, this whole process of putting gender non-conforming and disabled children and teenagers on a path that will likely leave them infertile as adults…sounds an awful lot like a woke “Buck v. Bell “.
I wonder if the thought process is something like: You evil TERFs think that it is bad when we sterilize and medicalize gender-non-conforming children. Why is that bad? Why is it bad to be infertile and sick? Why isn’t that just as good and just as normal as being fertile and healthy — are you ABLEIST or something?
Cloudy:
In case I’ve caused confusion: by “gender enthusiasts” I meant trans activists and their enablers, not gender crits. I haven’t seen any gender critical people expressing hatred or advocating discrimination against disabled people either.
Trans activists certainly do and in various ways, including the one you describe.
GW:
Yes, I’ve seen that, too.
The main theme is that disabled people are being used as a tool to make bogus, insulting arguments, much as Bruce illustrated wrt black women and much as they use people with DSDs. Speaking for myself, I can say that disabled people don’t like being used in this way any more than do people of colour or with developmental disorders. As usual, for all their accusations regarding GCs’ supposed love of dehumanisation, this is a fundamentally and hypocritically dehumanising position.
And it leads to bad analogies.
All I was suggesting is that TAs’ motivation for sprinkling ableism into their arguments might be due both to “ableism bad” and “ableism confusing”.
I say “confusing” because disabled people can’t really be said to share any cultural background. I have little in common with a blind person or an autistic person, for example, so insults to their disabilities are not insults specific to me. But those ‘trans-abled’ buggers who cosplay in wheelchairs or able bodied athletes who try to compete in disabled categories feel much more insulting to me personally.
So while it’s racist to make assumptions about people because of their skin colour or sexuality or sex or age (including whether they’d be insulted by something), there are some things that are likely to be insulting to all black people, say, or all people of colour. The history of their oppression is shared, or at least similar.
I’m not quite sure that it’s the same for disabled people. We have no shared history of oppression as a class. We’re routinely discriminated against and the world is not designed for us, but it’s not oppression and the experiences of individual disabled people can have very little in common.
And this makes their use in analogies more confusing, I think. When a TA says that lesbians not wanting sex with men is “like racism”, or that the trans rights movement in general is “like the gay rights movement” then we see the analogy immediately. It can be quite compelling…. until we give it an instant’s thought. But similar analogies with disabled people are much more confusing because it’s a fundamentally different sort of class with a different sort of history. It’s much harder to say “wait, no, it’s not like that”, which is why it’s a useful analogy to throw into an argument; there’s no immediate rebuttal.
And some people are super careful of what they say around disabled people, much more so than they are around people with other protected characteristics.
I’m aware that I’m rambling a bit and not explaining myself well. TL;DR, trans activists are dishonest arseholes who will use anyone and any strategy to get what they want.
“Cloudy:
In case I’ve caused confusion: by “gender enthusiasts” I meant trans activists and their enablers, not gender crits. I haven’t seen any gender critical people expressing hatred or advocating discrimination against disabled people either.
Trans activists certainly do and in various ways, including the one you describe.”
No problem. I gathered you were talking about trans activists and their enablers there.