Amid outrage
York Vision, one of two student papers at the university of same, has a think piece on Julie Bindel and student censorship. It’s not very good.
An event with Julie Bindel hosted by Uni of York’s Free Speech Society was postponed at the last minute amid safety concerns and outrage from staff and students at the University.
What “safety concerns”? Did someone – anyone – think Julie was going to throw a bomb or pull out a handgun or poison the refreshments? As for “outrage” – pull your fucking pants up and stop whining.
Inviting Julie Bindel to a free speech event was always going to end with protest and uprisal.
“Uprisal”? Anyway, the only reason it’s true that it was predictable that whining pants-falling-down students would make a big stink about the privilege of a talk by Julie Bindel at their uni is because they’ve developed a very peculiar and warped idea of what is acceptable in public discourse and what is not. Threats and fake “outrage” are fine if they come from the right kind of “allies” while saying that men are not women should be dealt with by the police.
Bindel is known as a self-proclaimed “political lesbian”, promoting the kind of feminism that excludes several of its members.
Learn to write ffs. You don’t need “known as” and “self-proclaimed” in the same sentence. It’s both overkill and contradictory (if she’s known as why does she bother to self-proclaim?). We get it: you think she has no right to call herself a political lesbian, and you’re too thick and uninformed to see what’s wrong with that idiotic sneer. And what does “several of its members” mean? Members of what? Feminism? How would being a political lesbian exclude several “members” of feminism? Bindel is a political lesbian, and you children don’t even understand what the words mean.
They claim she “gained prominence” by writing a particular article for the Guardian, which is just pig-ignorant. She’s well-known because she’s written many articles and books and they’re high quality.
Bindel wrote an article for Unherd, entitled “Why York University de-platformed me”. By stating that she has been ‘deplatformed’, Bindel is alluding to cancel culture. This simply is not the case. Bindel has been blocked from an event at the University for fears of student safety and security. The concern is for the students, not for taking away Bindel’s platform.
Jesus god. How did these children get into any university at all? “It is simply not the case that Bindel was de-platformed, she was de-platformed.”
The issue here is that instead of promoting healthy debate, inviting Julie Bindel to the University puts a marginalised group of individuals in a situation that is likely to be hugely triggering.
And if those marginalised individuals are not triggered we will do our very best (which is pretty bad) to make them triggered.
In response to the event, the University of York’s feminist society released a statement on the event, stating that:
“The views shared by both Free Speech and Julie Bindel do not reflect the views at FemSoc. [We] believe that by giving this individual a platform to speak at the University, it is extremely damaging to the growing trans community at York.”
Yet more illiteracy. Use your words.
Bindel goes on to claim that “the fact that [she] is a woman of working-class origin, an out lesbian, and a lifelong feminist is obviously irrelevant to these privileged kids who think being pansexual or non-binary is an oppression.”
As a white cisgender woman, Bindel needs to recognise her own privilege before she calls out students for theirs.
Telling feminists that being a “cisgender woman” is a form of privilege is telling them that women have privilege over men, that men are the oppressed class, that feminism=sexism. The last thing women “need to recognize” is that women as a class oppress men as a class.
Feminism should encompass everybody, regardless of their background. Feminism is not feminism when trans women are excluded.
No it shouldn’t. The reason is the “fem” bit. Feminism is about and for women. Feminism gets to be about its own thing just as other social justice movements do.
says the alleged writer of the piece, without acknowledging their own privilege.
And now I see there are two writers, both known as self-proclaimed women.
That the universities keep caving to TRAs and cancelling events out of a concern for safety when it’s the TRAs themselves who are making the threats is so craven, and only encourages more such bullying.
There isn’t a single pronoun jackass who knows what feminism is, and certainly not better than Julie Bindel. All the transplaining in the world won’t change that. Believing that transwomen are women is a personal choice (a terrible one) among other personal choices. Along with the illiteracy, the arrogance is profound.
I remember having my concerns about trigger warnings and safe spaces dismissed as unfounded fears drummed up by right-wing scare-mongering.
There are things about which I would have preferred to be proven wrong.
Remember when papers had editors? Jeez, this is more like someone’s hurriedly-written tumblr than a paper.
Holms: I imagine that editing anything by or about the transies is frowned upon.
Nullius:
The bit about being triggered struck me, too. Aside from the dubious understanding of what being triggered means, what do they mean? (Ugh. That was a nasty sentence…)
What traumatic experience would be brought to mind by the proximity of someone with whom they disagree about some things saying things with which they may possibly disagree? If Bindel said them in Leeds, rather than York, would that make a difference? Would it be less triggering? How far away does one have to be? And is the suggestion that there are things about which you may be wrong really so traumatising? Really?
Dear me, we can’t expect university students to know what words mean. Or to find out what they mean. Or to use them accurately in a polemic. Or to pull their pants up and stop whining.