"University should be where we are challenged - read more, learn more, know more, have arguments with people we agree with, disagree with, add to the culture, not detract from it...
...I have seen a shift in students ability to engage - in the last couple of years many students feel they have a right not to be offended. I find THIS offensive. "
"I suppose I have ended up being a gender critical feminist - I have always been a feminist, but I feel this must be another dimension to my feminism that I hadn't otherwise explored, partly in reaction to this lunacy. I was shocked by the trans student feeling that their...
...opinion should be weighted more valuably than any other student or teacher in the class - there is such a narcissism attached to this attitude - and it is really hard to know how to navigate it for the best. This student was 18 years old, by the way."
"when the idea that repeating the phrase "TW are women" will make it so, is offered up as a fact, when language to describe our experiences as women is being eroded by a bullying lobby that doesn't seem to actually understand language, meaning, and the history of women's rights"
"I have a supervisor who goes to great lengths explaining that woman doesn't just mean female etc etc at the start of her work *on women* (men, in contrast, are of course left unexplained)"
"I am increasingly being turned off the whole enterprise of feminist academia because the basic premise that 'woman' isn't an objective category just makes a mockery of entire disciplines which deal with logic and causal claims, and exposes the whole endeavour of feminist...
... research as fraudulent (if academics who don't think women objectively exist can nonetheless make an entire career out of talking off the backs of them, what sort of pointless racket is this?)."
"And just yesterday I saw that even the usually very sensible Chatham House has released a set of guidelines on gender research emphasising how important it is to recognise 'woman' can mean all manner of things. Should women scholars who don't subscribe to this idea...
...cancel their membership and stop submitting publications to them then, if this is the guidance?
I despair at how intellectually shallow all of this is becoming but more than anything else I feel a deep, rumbling sense of unease and alarm at the spectre of otherwise...
...intelligent people essentially going along with the idea that women are not necessarily an objective human category (and with such speed and ferocity!)."
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"My faculty (UK university) suggested turning all toilets into unisex. In a meeting with other managers I asked if they had done an equality impact assessment. I was thinking about ensuring adequate provision for women and people with disability...
...I didn’t even know about GRA debate. Anyway I was shouted down for being transphobic. The loos are now unisex and as I expected the presence of urinals means that women now have fewer toilets than before as they don’t want to walk past men at urinals."
'We have "women and non binary seminars", "women and non binary" study groups. There are no "Men and Non binary" groups, of course. Men are the default and everything else just goes into “other”.'
The gcacademianetwork.org makes for depressing reading. This extract is illuminating. It illustrates an unwillingness to apply the concept of 'intersectionality' globally, and it shows that decolonising the curriculum is pointless as long as you subscribe to trans ideology.
It is surprising to find the 'colonial attitude' among the young and well-educated, not just among older Brexit voters. But the glorious past is constantly being invoked: the Empire spirit, the Blitz spirit. Mark Francois and Boris Johnson want to make Britain great again.
So before you decolonise the curriculum, try to get rid of the colonial attitude.
Midwives told to say 'chestfeeding' instead of 'breastfeeding' in gender-inclusive move @LBClbc.co.uk/news/breastfee…
'Terms such as "woman" and "father" will also be superseded by "woman or person" and "parent", "co-parent" or "second biological parent" respectively.'
If TW are women and TM are men, then the terminology doesn't need to be changed. + remember that Freddie McConnell wanted to...
be listed as the 'father' of the child. So why not stick with 'mothers and fathers'?
The 'additional persecutions' stem from using the traditional terms 'mother', 'breastfeeding', etc.
If we change language for one minority then justice requires that we do it for all others.
Defining Transphobia in the Labour Party A Consultation: Responses should be sent in confidence to admin@labourtransequality.org.uk by 1st March 2021
Would be good to send them your views - I will
'Some people may have transitioned from expressing themselves in their birth sex into living in their preferred gender identity while others have not. This is a personal decision which is acknowledged in the Equality 2010 and Gender Recognition Acts 2004.' Wrong! The GRA...
prescribes that you must live in your preferred gender for two years, before applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate.
Teetzel, p. 435/6: 'Despite the ample media attention that
Radcliffe, Navratilova, Davies, Holmes and others have received, they continue to push the narrative that their voices are being silenced and ignored.' Well, the reactions they got for speaking out, shows that they...
...are right. Pressure on sponsors, etc. is an attempt to shut them up. That's why athletes who are still competing will not talk about the issue of transwomen athletes.
This morning I remembered the famous quote from Wittgenstein (§ 38): 'For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.' And then looked at the German: 'Denn die philosophischen Probleme entstehen, wenn die Sprache feiert.' A metaphor reconceptualises reality, ...
...it creates distance - and insight - by linking two disparate realms. But Anscombe creates more distance by changing the metaphor. She may be right to chose 'language goes on holiday', but we could be closer to the German original 'feiert': 'language is having a party' or
'language is celebrating'. Going on holiday gives it a different flavour.