Pippa and Andrew are big sillies
Ewan Somerville at the Telegraph takes a cold hard look at that letter from “Pippa and Andrew”:
A Cambridge college master is engulfed in a transgender row with professors after boycotting a “hateful” gender-critical speaker.
It’s about the letter rather than the boycott. No one would have cared if Pipps and Andy had just stayed away.
Gonville and Caius College, the university’s fourth oldest, is hosting a talk on Tuesday by Helen Joyce, an author and former journalist at The Economist, about cancel culture.
And as we all know, her views are Unacceptable, Unapproved, Unendorsed. Her views are, in short, evil, the most evil views anyone has ever had, views that make Hitler and Putin look like Cookie Monster.
Tutors are even opening a “safe space” welfare tearoom for students during the talk, blaming “understandable hurt and anger for many students, staff and fellows at Caius” caused by the invitation.
Understandable? Go soak your heads, all of you. No it’s not understandable. Helen Joyce doesn’t advocate genocide or forced pregnancy or stoning women for not wearing bags over their heads. Helen Joyce simply doesn’t buy into the new and stupid ideology of magic gender, and she explains why you shouldn’t buy into it either. That’s all. The most you can say about her views is that people who have adopted the trans ideology feel angry about them, and that is nowhere near enough to justify fatuous driveling claims about students needing a “safe space welfare tea room” for fuck’s sake.
Now, in an unprecedented intervention, the college’s master Prof Pippa Rogerson – the most senior position – has emailed all students rebuking her own staff for hosting it.
Unprecedented. Nobody did this for workers, or women, or Jews, or immigrants, or any other neglected and despised set of people, but somehow pampered middle class people who think they’re the other sex merit all this screaming and tearing of hair and welfare tea rooms when anyone disbelieves their fantasies. The more trivial the cause the louder the wailing has to be, is that it? Compensation? “Well guys, this is really a pretty stupid banner to carry, so we’re gonna have to really ham it up to get anywhere. Let’s pretend opposition makes us disintegrate into tiny pieces before their very eyes.”
Prof Rogerson, writing alongside Dr Andrew Spencer, the college’s senior tutor, said that while freedom of speech is “a fundamental principle… on some issues which affect our community we cannot stay neutral”.
It’s a fundamental principle which we are going to ignore because otherwise trans people will disintegrate into tiny pieces before our very eyes.
Their letter, seen by The Telegraph, adds: “We do not condone or endorse views that Helen Joyce has expressed on transgender people, which we consider offensive, insulting and hateful to members of our community who live and work here.”
So what? Who cares? What’s their point? They don’t have to condone endorse views that other people speak aloud in talks at Cambridge. That’s not a criterion or filter for such talks. Their feverish emotions have nothing to do with Helen Joyce or her talk.
Ms Joyce, the author of best-seller Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, added: “When I was a student at Cambridge I would have been disgusted and embarrassed to receive a communication like that; Pippa and Andrew sound like CBeebies presenters.
“Why are they staying away? If they think I’m that much of a bigot they should turn up, hear what I have to say and tell me I’m wrong. A pair of intellectual cowards who do not deserve to be in two of the best jobs in all the world’s universities.”
Seriously. They sound like absolute chumps.
What sort of tea do they serve in a “Safe Space Welfare Tea Room” for Christ’s sake? Celestial Seasonings Herbal Comfort Tea? It actually sounds like something from a Douglas Adams novel.
Safe space welfare tearoom? Pretty low rent, if you ask me. A safe space welfare spa—or at a minimum, a safe space welfare patisserie—would show a much more robust commitment to soothing the delicate sensibilities of the socially just.
There’s definitely that, but encountering dissent, or really any contrary evidence, will also provoke cognitive dissonance and anxiety. The good kind.
Well, they’d have to come up with actual reasons she’s wrong, apart from her being a big meanie. That’s hard work, especially if you don’t have facts or arguments on your side. So cowardly and lazy. What actual, legitimate social justice movement would not jump at the chance to confront and rebut their opponents in a public forum? They have to inflate the threat level to “unsafe” to justify their refusal to engage with Joyce’s actual arguments. Refusing to participate, refusing to “legitimize” your opponents because they’re Evil, Nazi Bigots really only works if your opponents really are Evil, Nazi Bigots. This gambit backfires if attendees sitting on the fence discover that the person you’re trying to shut down isn’t the Horrible Monster you’ve made them out to be. This does your credibility and trustworthiness no good whatsoever, forcing you to go to even greater lengths to keep anyone and everyone from hearing the much less than murderous beliefs of your target(s). If you’ve used up all your rhetorical ammo on the authors of children’s books, professors, and journalists, what are are you going to do when the real Monsters show up? Who will believe you then?
Oh my god, I missed the topic of the talk in the post about the letter. A talk about cancel culture, and they decide to prove her right by publicly shunning the talk!
No doubt trans activists are playing word games by pointing out the talk is still going ahead and so cannot be considered literally cancelled. They ignore that this letter is part of the overall project to shut down an opposing point of view. Pippa and Andrew didn’t succeed in cancelling the talk entirely, possibly because the talk does not actually breach any university subject matter rule against e.g. hate speech, but you can bet they tried.
Yes, and since no one would have noticed their absence, they needed a better way to signal their opposition. A signal that is not noticed is not really a signal after all.
As it happens, I know the previous Master of Caius, Alan Fersht, very well. I should be very surprised if he went along with this nonsense.
I am missing old-fashioned Oxford dons, who would not exhibit themselves thus in public.
They would have merely raised an eyebrow if you passed the port wrong way.
Ah, but this is Cambridge: they don’t know these things at Cambridge. They even propel punts from the wrong end.
Grow a pair of ovaries, for Christ’s sake. Put a disclaimer on the announcement explaining that attendance is not compulsory and leave it at that.
When I was a student, I used to go along to talks I knew I was bound to disagree with all the time. One of the best parts of being a student was time, freedom and energy to do that.
I’m deeply offended much of religion, by quack remedies sold as medicine and by lies masquerading as truth. I’m sure those things are every bit as personal to me as claims about gender. But it didn’t occur to me to try to cancel those talks. Why would it?
Not that this talk is even about gender, of course. Doesn’t have to be because Helen.