Shockingly reasonable
The BBC reports the Simon Fanshawe news with more restraint than usual.
Writer and activist Simon Fanshawe has been named as the new rector of the University of Edinburgh.
The former comedian, who now works as a consultant on diversity and inclusion, will take up office on 4 March following an uncontested election.
Second sentence in they admit he’s a diversity and inclusion boffin, which kind of pre-empts claims that he’s a right-wing fiend. Good job.
After a lot of neutral factual detail they get to the pachyderm in the parlor.
Mr Fanshawe has a long history as an activist for LGBT rights but has in recent years become a critic of Stonewall, the organisation he helped found.
In a newspaper article in 2022, he said Stonewall had become a “propaganda machine that preaches extreme and divisive gender ideology under the guise of ‘factual’ information.”
He said the organisation’s views on transgender rights had become ideological and were “fast eroding women’s rights and their protection in female-only spaces, as well as posing a potential risk to children, who might be led to believe that irreversible medical intervention is the solution to common adolescent insecurities about identity.”
I wonder how many outraged junior BBC staff are fuming at that reasonable account of his views.
University of Edinburgh lecturer in Trans Studies Dr Gina Gwenffrewi condemned the appointment. Writing on X, formerly known as Twitter, she said: “This is an outrageous declaration of contempt by the University of Edinburgh for trans people.”
That’s the harshest paragraph in the piece, and it’s clearly Gwenffrewi speaking rather than the Beeb. I wonder what she talks about in her lectures.
Final paragraph:
Women’s rights campaigners For Woman Scotland congratulated Mr Fanshawe and described him as a “lovely, thoughtful man who will be an asset to Edinburgh University.”
Has the BBC turned a corner at last?
And yet according to the X message shown in the 175 days since.. post from earlier:
Is it safe to assume that by ‘without any apparent election’, what Dr. G. actually meant was ‘We messed up and didn’t think to nominate a candidate for the post from Team Trans so I’m just going lie by insinuating that the University engaged in subterfuge by secretly appointing Fanshawe’?
‘lecturer in Trans Studies’ enough said….
Gina Gwenffrewi does indeed have an entry on the University of Edinburgh website:
There are various other references to Gwenffrewi on the website but I cannot find any page where this person is described as a Lecturer in Trans Studies. Gwenffrewi does have an administrative position as co-director of the Scottish Universities’ International Summer School.
What even is/are Trans Studies? Do universities have departments of them?
Ophelia @ #4
Not in the UK, I believe. I think the Univ of Arizona may come closest with their Trans Studies Research Cluster:
Hm. I wonder if anyone at Arizona’s LGBTQ+ Institute can tell me who these Q+ people are. Especially the +.
It’s all so very nebulous.
NightCrow, #4:
Thanks largely to the BBC’s exquisite political satire, The Thick of It, these days I tend to think of the word ‘cluster’ in a rather different context from its traditional meaning, one that makes me suspect that the research group in question might just be, in the words of Nicola Murray*, an omnishambles wrapped in a clusterfuck.”
*played to perfection by one of my favourite actors, Rebecca Front.