Another hon in the Mitfordian sense:

One Tuesday evening last month in his mother’s house on the Wirral, the recently ex-Harvard philosophy professor Jimmy Doyle took to X to say, at last, what he really thought about the state of free speech in American academia.

In one tweet he wrote: “For unrelated reasons I’ve resigned my position at Harvard. But I haven’t been able to speak frankly with anyone for [about] five years. And it’ll be hard to forget the spectacle of this nation’s intellectual elite enforcing moral auto-lobotomy as a condition of entry to polite society.”

In another he identified exactly what he had been unable to be frank about. He accused the trans movement of “provoking the most obvious social contagion since the Children’s Crusade”.

To his surprise, many of the (many) responses were non-hostile.

At Harvard, he says, there was just one person to whom he could speak frankly. This was Alex Byrne of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a prominent critic of transgender rights who last month outed himself as one of the anonymous authors of the Trump administration’s report on gender affirmation care for children. Byrne, he says, earned notoriety for saying what “no one would have batted an eyelid at ten years ago”.

Or twelve, or fifteen. The monstering was well under way ten years ago.

Byrne’s wife is Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist who in 2021 said on Fox News that it was a big mistake if medical school professors were shying away from using scientific terms such as “male”, “female” and “pregnant woman”. She left her job at Harvard in 2023 claiming a lack of support from colleagues when she was attacked for her remarks. She had been left with “no choice” but to leave.

Steven Pinker, Harvard’s superstar psychology don, took her side, but he was “one of those too-big-to-fail guys” and more or less alone.

Pinker also took Jerry Coyne’s side when the Freedom From Religion Foundation monstered him. Isn’t it bizarre that there’s a “side” that insists men can be women?

When he first taught in America, constraints on academic free speech were few. Had anyone, until a decade ago, said someone with a penis was a woman, they would be asked what on earth they meant.

Again: more than a decade. Not a lot more, but a decade ago the fire had enveloped the whole house.

“And it’s not as though the introduction of that proposition into the discourse was accompanied by any kind of explanation or justification. I mean, in logic, an axiom is a sentence that you can assert without having to prove it. The point of an axiom is that it’s a proposition on the basis of which you can prove or justify others. If you didn’t have any axioms, you wouldn’t be able to prove anything interesting. But the slogan ‘trans women are women’, that couldn’t possibly have entered the discourse as something that people had arrived at a consensus about.

“And I think that’s a pretty dangerous position to be in with regards to free inquiry.”

…

He says he once had a trans student, a young father, who asked to be called “she/her”. He would have been in a “world of trouble” had he declined but is still in two minds about whether he should have. “‘Why be an arsehole?’ is a legitimate question independent of any ideological considerations. But on the other hand, it’s one thing to be an arsehole but another to be required, on pain of ostracism, not to be an arsehole.”

I don’t actually think it’s being an asshole to refuse to pretend a man is a woman. It may feel like being an asshole in the moment, but when the dust has settled, who is really the asshole? Someone who doesn’t call a man a woman, or a man who expects people to call him a woman? Trying to oblige people to call you something you’re not is an asshole move. Not hurting people’s feelings by calling them ugly or boring is one thing, and pretending they’re the sex they’re not is another.

Although he is a new entrant to the public trans debate, he has a personal reason to know the territory. His sister, Ursula Doyle, worked at the publisher Hachette in London, where she acquired a book by Kathleen Stock, the British philosopher who resigned from the University of Sussex after being attacked by colleagues for her views on gender.

Doyle, who suffered online abuse for her part in the book’s publication, left Hachette last year claiming she had been treated “as an emotional basket case who made a fuss about nothing”, and brought a (now settled) employment tribunal case against her employers. Her brother is a fan of Stock’s, trans-critical writers such as Graham Linehan and Hadley Freeman, and his sister.

Team Trans-skeptical. We have the best jokes.