The War over Academic Freedom | Hacker News Reader

The War over Academic Freedom

newstatesman.com

51 pointsmissinfo82 comments

I don’t really understand the whole trans thing and why it’s suddenly become the job of the whole world to reinforce someone’s self conception. Lots of people have body dysmorphia and think they are morbidly obese. Some will even go so far as to buy XL clothing and larger toilets because they think they need them. But they aren’t obese, and nobody is expected to treat them like that.

For the sake of one group, we’re expected to accept an ideology and we’re now supposed to use language to fit within the boundaries of this ideology. Anyone who expresses skepticism can expect to be fired, harassed or simply brow beaten into lip service on the premise that being skeptical is hateful and bigoted. This isn’t how you gain acceptance, it’s merely compliance. It creates a culture of lip service, resentment and subversion.

I don’t hate the trans crowd. I simply think the notion of gender is baseless and the tactics many of their activists use are misguided and obnoxious.

First of all it is sad to see a comment like this under yet another throw-away account. Just say what you want, using your regular account. The worst that can - and possibly will - happen is that you get shadowbanned in which case you just create a new account.

There are a number of current theories around the woke phenomenon, of which the "trans movement" is but one exponent. Vivek Ramaswamy (writer of "Woke, Inc." [1]) sees it as an outgrowth of a corporatist agenda which is meant to channel public outrage - which was turning against them, viz. Occupy Wall Street - towards shallow social causes to draw away attention from a corporate power grab. James Lindsay (of New Discourses [2], Cynical Theories [3] and the grievance studies hoax fame) sees it as the latest iteration of a Marxist-inspired agenda intent on domination or, lately, as a deflection manoeuvre by the ruling class to try to steer society away from the second enlightenment where the marketplace of ideas will become a reality. Vladimir Putin - yes, the Russian president - compares it [4] to the ideology which led the Bolsheviks to hijack the Russian revolution for their own purposes.

All of them are right, in their own ways. Corporations have jumped on the woke train, often using it to deflect attention away from whatever nefarious activities they're up to. There is no doubt about the fact that its proponents lean strongly to the left in their political opinions and favour Marxism or one of its many offshoots over other ideologies, nor over the fact that they're intent on injecting their ideology into all aspects of society - just like the Bolsheviks did in Russia after the revolution.

Whether what we're dealing with here is an astroturfing movement created to drain the public of the will to resist, a new religion running amok, an aggressive political movement intent on domination or a combination of such I do not know, I suspect this actually depends on whom of the 'woke' you ask. What I do know is that the more people get drawn in to this movement, the more true grief it will cause, both for the people who are deluded into assuming whatever identity is being foisted upon them as well as for society at large.

It is time to speak up, time to speak out against this divisive ideology which only serves to keep the public angry and confused, this ideology which tears apart communities, which threatens to dissolve whatever semblance of cohesion we have left in society. It is time to realise this has nothing to do with race, sexual orientation, ethnic background, nationality, skin colour, religious affiliation or whatever other identity category might be brought to berth. It is a power grab, pure and simple, by any mean necessary and no matter the cost to those who are being used as tools, as 'useful innocents' (or, more often, 'useful idiots') [5].

[1] https://www.vivekramaswamy.com/wokeinc

[2] https://newdiscourses.com/

[3] https://newdiscourses.com/books/

[4] https://www.dailywire.com/news/putin-warns-wokeness-is-destr...

[5] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/08/22/useful-idiot/

"protesters overtook the campus square, setting off pink and blue flares, while Stock cancelled her courses and followed police advice to stay off campus and secure her home. I asked a protester whether the demo was designed to be intimidating. “We’re standing still,” they said. “Her presence to us is intimidating.” Emphasis mine.

Is there a word to describe this? This frame of mind is deeply disturbing to me and it seems very insidious. I believe people need a term in order to understand the behavior/mindset that is being displayed here. And, to be able to inform others about it.

I believe that traditionally would be called a violent mob.

That would fit in describing the action, but I'm trying to get at the mindset of these people. The kind of self-righteous, belligerent, insolent, and 'we are completely innocent and have no culpability whatsoever because you made us do this' attitude I'm seeing. I can jot down synonyms for hours but I still don't feel like this truly captures and categorizes what we are seeing here. Maybe I'm asking for too much, but I feel like this can be described with a single word instead of merely trying to describe it at length.

Religious authoritarians. Puritans.

Theological adherence is a spiral. They have an absolute doctrine. This is what happens when you shift your moral philosophy to doctrinal adherence. Introspection is not needed when you are a perfect adherent to the one true faith.

It should also be noted that religion is older than language and has a basis in biology. Just because they do not fit the modern legal categorization of religion does not mean that culturally it is not the same.

I don't really follow the academic freedom debate that closely, but I did notice that in the video that was circulating yesterday regarding a protest at Netflix over this class of issue, one of the protesters was saying "Repent, motherf*ker! Repent!" The "repent" language does seem to have a strong religious authoritarian quality.

My pet theory is that puritanism is an inherited trait (not sure if genetic or cultural). america has a lot of it due to its history. The descendants of the puritans have given up all sense of religion, which actually, for them, was a net benefit, since having an external, well-organized religion actually would pull them back from their religious zealotry (by discouraging pride for example).

Now, completely unmoored from their actually somewhat stabilizing traditions, these children -- already predisposed to puritanism, zealotry, etc -- have taken up new belief structures, except now there's nothing to bring them back to reality.

While no doubt there is a genetic component it would be less precise and more likely just account for a general authoritarian personality. I think this shift is too sudden to be attributable to genetics. The work of Robert Putnam on the decline of social trust in the west is more likely to be the cause.

> attributable to genetics.

I didn't claim it was genetic (I did at first, but then edited my post). It could be cultural too.

I'm not convinced it's cultural by way of inheritance. If anything it's the decline of traditional culture. A power vacuum that consumerism does not fill.

Maybe behavioral is the right term. It's clear to me that parents can pass on behaviors.

I agree... the decline of traditional culture means that there's nothing to ground these people.

>It's clear to me that parents can pass on behaviors.

Absolutely.

Check out: https://www.puttingourdifferencestowork.com/pdf/j.1467-9477....

That paper is fascinating. Have you read any of Putnam's books? Are there any you'd recommend?

In the context of civic engagement the only work by Putnam I could suggest is Bowling Alone. I also recommend Pew Research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-po...

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-...

It seems to be a combination of authoritarian personality and a disconnection from physical reality. This is a mob that was formed online and mostly consists of privileged, coddled minds. That's why they are so fragile and equate mere disagreement with violence.

> religion is older than language and has a basis in biology

This is the giant gaping hole in the ideas of enlightenment atheists like Sam Harris that think that we can just dispense with religion already. Religion will have us, via that label or otherwise; if you think we can elucidate our way out of the need to communicate and share our most base values you are simply mistaken. Religion is simply the name we use for the foundation of the basic human values, rejecting it wholesale because "religion" is a bad word to you after you've seen the sins of our ancestors is shortsighted and opens you up to attacks from a religious perspective.

It's true that religion has stagnated, but that means we need to evolve religion into its next phase, pretending that what we're reinventing is not religion does nobody any favors.

I wouldn't say religion has stagnated, it's more of an invisible force. For example in the quote "like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children" it refers to the Roman God Saturn, a God of a religion that had been dead a thousand years and was never followed in France. Of course much like Indo European language descends from a common source so do the Gods, so the Celts would have an equivalent. This shows that Religion never disappears and only morphs with time. Atheism as practiced by the Sam Harris types is an appeal to rationalism divorced from any semblance of community and thus doomed.

> Religion is simply the name we use for the foundation of the basic human values

Is it? Doesn't religion imply belief in some kind of deity? Whereas you can have values without such a belief.

It is. If you examine the proto indo european pantheon you will find that the many gods are merely archetypes from early societies everyday life. Religion exists as stories to guide the human experience and is the cultural tradition of tens of millennia. The difference between god and man was intentionally blurred.

Religion.

What you are describing is zealotry, and these activists are zealots.

Witch-hunt.

Probably a German word for this. I agree, it's weird and new. It seems a combination of:

1) projection (I am actually doing the thing I am accusing you of)

2) Kafka Trapping (your denial of this accusation is evidence in and of itself that you are guilty of this accusation)

3) ritualistic enjoyment (just plain old schadenfreude?)

Witch-hunt.

"This is not activism". Here is President Obama speaking about this so called wokeness in Academia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM

Is there something particularly insidious about this protest? It stands to reason that any protest would find conflict with the person whose actions are being protested. In the political sphere, there's enough police protection that the people involved can still get to work, and this wasn't provided by the campus police. It strikes me that these protesters aren't that different than any others, but the security on campus is lacking so that they've had access to, for instance, deface the professor's office door.

There's nothing insidious about the protest itself. There is something wrong with the mindset of the protesters. "I'm not being violent for having a protest; you're being violent for existing in my vicinity." That's... abnormal. Also ridiculous.

To be clear, the quote implied the protestors weren’t being violent at all, right — at least in their view. Are we on the same page about that?

Edit: I guess I’m not understanding your point. To me the protester’s narrative is “This is a nonviolent protest of a faculty’s exclusionary viewpoint,” which doesn’t seem that abnormal to me. What do you think I’m not seeing?

Well... setting off flares isn't the same as punching or shooting people. It's not directly violent. But it is kind of threatening, because they can point those flares at you, and it may hit you, and that's not going to feel very good (at best). So there's kind of a threat of violence, but not actual violence.

And, yes, I think that in their own mind the protesters were either completely innocent of violence, or else completely justified in the implicit threat of violence because the mere presence of the opponent was so threatening.

It's kind of like a guy with a gun on his hip, complaining that a gun control advocate is threatening him by wanting to take away his gun.

Yeah, the flares do add a level of spectacle. Do you see the 2nd amendment protests then as similarly abnormal?

See, to me, any protest involves a mob, and I would be concerned for safety of the target regardless of whether people had guns or flares or fists or rocks, you know?

I see a mob with fists as a level of threat, rocks as a higher level, and guns as an even higher level.

My previous post had a flaw, though. I was thinking of fireworks that shoot something that burns and explodes, which flares are not. Flares are a lot less dangerous than that, and are not much of a threat. (I guess you could throw it or shove it in someone's face.) So my analogy with 2nd-amendment-vs-gun-control kind of breaks down. I'm leaving the previous post unedited for history, but it was wrong.

So at that point... you've got a group that is protesting, and they claim they aren't marching, so they aren't really threatening anyone. But at that point, they're still present. That is, by their own logic, where someone else's presence threatens them, well, they're present, so they are a threat too, right?

So, even though my previous post was wrong, the protesters' logic still doesn't make any sense.

Right. The result of the protest is an unsafe environment for the professor. My point is just that any protest I can think of, whether it’s outside a government building, a business, or on a college campus, involves being present, so it doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. That’s not to say I condone an unsafe work environment, to be clear.

I don't think there is a right word, but I recognize this behavior from history books. During the French Revolution the participants were similarly convinced they are doing the right thing, and they reinforced each other's views. The crowd had a feeling of a common cause and their combined strength. They believed that by beheading Marie Antoinette they are doing everybody a favor. Similarly during the Russian Revolution, the masses believed they are fighting for a great cause, some even died for it. But the revolutions are usually eating its children, and similarly now the revolutionary feminists of yesterday are being eaten by even more progressive trans activists. As Ricky Gervais said, the same will happen to the latter one day. [0]

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/ric...

"A l'exemple de Saturne, la révolution dévore ses enfants"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Mallet_du_Pan

Crybullying comes to mind. It lacks the connotations of puritanical self-righteousness underlying these sorts of protests but it is a term that has been popularized in response to this sort of behavior.

I don’t know the word for it, but virtually every conflict in history was predicated on the defense of something greater.

For self actualization people need something to strive for, some conflict. This is universal.

The mindset seems to be that the existence of ideas that disagree with my perspective is violence toward me. The most succinct term I can come up with for this is "five year old".

For an actual description, it almost has to have "narcissism" in it, doesn't it? "X narcissism"? Can anyone come up with the right value for "X"?

> The conflict dates back to May 2018, when Stock published a blog post that calmly raised concerns over the shift to self-ID. “Some have pointed out,” she wrote, that “this change in the law will allow some duplicitous or badly motivated males to ‘change gender’ fairly easily,” putting women at risk not from those who are trans but from predatory men.

People (in the US) panicked when a black man danced with a white woman because "women need to be protected." People panicked when gay couples asked for the right to get married because "marriage needs to be protected." It's always the same fake concern, changing the subject so as not to deal with the actual problem at hand, the treatment of certain kinds of minority people as lesser than others.

With trans people in particular the concern always seems to be that trans people somehow open the door to this kind of predation (see the "bathroom bills" in America). But why is that trans people's problem? A predator is a predator and should be dealt with as such. It has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not a trans person deserves the simple dignity of being recognized for what they really are (human people), rather than what is convenient for old-fashioned people to see them as (second-class citizens who are "confused" and don't know what is good for themselves).

>It has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not a trans person deserves the simple dignity of being recognized for what they really are (human people), rather than what is convenient for old-fashioned people to see them as

Maybe part of the issue is the way that activists have dishonestly sidestepped any debate over sex/gender by pretending that its "settled science" (it's not) and implying violence to anyone who questions their inane demands.

Being recognized as a "human person" does not entitle you to arbitrarily reengineer norms to your taste. The psychotic desires of a tiny, mentally ill minority (the DSM reclassification was pure politics, transgenderism/body dysmorphia are obviously mental illnesses) should not supercede the rights of the overwhelming majority to feel safe. And whether you wish to acknowledge it or not, a stranger's flopping dick makes the average woman uncomfortable in spaces that have been reserved for them (bathrooms, locker rooms, etc).

We should be offering these people CBT or some other conventional treatment for them to accept themselves as they are, not encouraging them to mutilate themselves with hormones and SRS and forcing society to indulge in their delusions.

The question of "what are you afraid of" stands even in your interpretation. It's tough to say this out loud, but almost every illness is uncomfortable to look at. (Note: the endless debate about whether the "trans illness" is that the body is wrong or that the brain is wrong about the body is not relevant to my point, it suffices only to recognize that something is wrong.)

Lost limbs, burns, skin conditions, non-contagious hacking coughs, every neurological motor disease (which cause strange movements), many sensory conditions (which result in lack of awareness and awkward moments), cognitive conditions which usually result in strange behavior, in one way or another... I have a hard time imagining an illness that would increase people's desire to be around you. The unpleasant reality is that the herd wants to eliminate its weaker members, and we can either embrace that and end up like the Nazis (who exterminated people with physical imperfections and encouraged people who fit their narrowly construed "normal" to breed), or we can resist that part of our nature and be reasonable and kind. Not every part of human nature is good; all evil is done by humans, and everything that humans do is in one way or another a facet of human nature.

There's no clear distinction between the innate desire to get rid of trans people and the innate desire to get rid of anyone who isn't physically or mentally what we're used to, or even the desire to hang around beautiful and intelligent people and leave the ugly ones out. Consequently, it deserves a lot of self-reflective skepticism - because we already know that many of the other behaviors it leads to are harmful even to those who practice them, and beyond that to those who suffer from their practice.

Nobody here wants to “get rid of trans people”, and I think that turn of phrase pretty clearly demonstrates what I’m concerned about. A lot of people have become convinced that, if you don’t agree with their relatively new (and evolving!) ideas about sex and gender, the disagreement by itself constitutes violence against trans people. That mindset seems fundamentally incompatible with academic freedom on gender issues.

I see what you're saying, but "getting rid of trans people," is not an academic issue. It's an issue of whether you invite them to parties, or try to push them out because they make you uncomfortable. We should not let the meta-meta-debate (the debate about whether or not we should be allowed to debate the metaphysical structures of the issue at hand) distract us from the decision we really need to make, which is how to act towards others when they are standing right in front of us.

I really don't know what you mean by "distract" here, because this isn't an issue of some hypothetical in the future. The source article describes a professor who's been analyzing a concrete decision we need to make (what the process should be for legally changing your gender), and protesters who strongly believe that she should not discuss this decision if she doesn't agree with their perspective on it.

Here's what I mean by distract: all of the protesting, all of the comments about the protesting, the entire edifice of cultural activism and reactionary counter-activism, is operating on a level that's totally disconnected from helping anyone.

I agree sexual predation is an overblown concern; my primary concern is that total unrestrained integration with society will exacerbate existing biological sex disparities:

- trans women will have an advantage over biological women since they will be physically stronger on average

- trans men will have a disadvantage compared to biological men since they will be physically weaker on average

So basically, spaces traditionally carved for biological women could now be usurped by physically stronger self-IDing men in the pursuit of fame, profit, etc.

I'm fine with trans women participating in sports, for example, but I don't think it's fair for self-IDing trans women to compete directly with biological women.

If only there were a way to falsify self-ID claims with physical evidence, this would be a much easier problem.

I think your physical strength argument, which bears the mark of having come from the sports debate, applies only to the sports debate and not to anywhere else. Where else is physical strength used competitively (it must be competitive, or else one person's success would not hurt anyone else) to obtain fame and profit?

Also, league divisions are not done on the basis of physical strength. Should men who are classified as having innately low physical strength (through some kind of genetic or hormone test) be allowed to join the Women's leagues?

If this design were taken to its logical conclusion, we would be calculating an innate ability for every athlete based on our best understanding of genetics and biology to subtract from their score or add to their time. Then, the best athlete in the world would be some fat guy from Odessa, who can't run a 10-minute mile but is related to people who can't run a 20-minute mile. I'm not entirely willing to discard this suggestion - obviously he deserves more respect than someone who was born faster than he is but never trains - but it would change everything about the way sports work.

I guess my point is that if we make it a law that trans men and trans women must be treated indistinguishably from biological men/women under all circumstances, that even more bias in favor of biological males is going to creep into society anywhere physical strength or endurance matters (sports, military, manual labor, search and rescue, firefighting, etc.).

I think it's totally acceptable that your success in those areas (with the possible exception of sports, i.e. due to weight classes) should be determined by your performance and not at all by your category. After all, it sounds absurd to even point out that there are no welterweight wars.

Possibly. A few other hypotheticals:

Do you think a biological male would be tempted to self-ID as a trans woman if he thought it would give him an advantage getting into a prestigious university like MIT?

Do you think a biological male would be tempted to self-ID as a trans woman if he thought it would give him an advantage getting into a prestigious diversity-conscious STEM company like Google?

Basically, I'm just concerned that if self-IDing has no downsides and only advantages, it will be gamed to the detriment of biological females.

Diversity-conscious admissions/hiring is essentially about trying to compensate for past disadvantages. Gender and race are used as proxies, but they're obviously lacking in many ways (the woman's parents could have both been engineers, she could have been surrounded by pro-STEM culture, the native pacific islander could be a millionaire, he could have been to the most expensive private schools in existence) - so I think the right thing to do would be to detach disadvantage estimation from narrow self-reporting and base it on credible signs of disadvantage, like growing up in a neighborhood with a lot of crime.

That's probably never going to happen, though - anything that cut across the real lines of advantage and disadvantage would mean the Google executives establishing the policy would be hurting their own kids the most.

> Do you think a biological male would be tempted to self-ID as a trans woman

Tempted to? Yeah, sure. Actually go through with it—identify themselves to others as a woman, live as a woman, and so on? Probably not. I don't think many could pull it off. And if you messed up, boom, fraud—out the door you go.

Couldn't you just self-ID to one gender, have your cake, self-ID back to your original gender and eat it too? It's not like there's a centralized record enforcing your gender. It's all the honor system. In this day and age you just declare your new gender/preferred pronouns/preferred name on Twitter and that's that. No prescription from a doctor, no legal name change, nothing. Just a tweet and you are done. Nothing is falsifiable.

> Couldn't you just self-ID to one gender, have your cake, self-ID back to your original gender and eat it too? It's not like there's a centralized record enforcing your gender. It's all the honor system.

No, I don't think you could. There's a certain assumption of good faith on the parts of the people you interact with—but once you demonstrate that you aren't acting in good faith, I'm not sure why anybody would believe you, or keep you around.

> No prescription from a doctor, no legal name change, nothing. Just a tweet and you are done. Nothing is falsifiable.

That's kind of like any sort of fraud—when you're applying for a school or a position, you can make up all sorts of things about yourself. If that's the route you want to go, I'm sure there are easier things to lie about. Just—don't claim that you invented post-it notes.

Traditions are almost always solutions to a problem. To change tradition we have to analyse the problem the traditional rule solved.

The reason why we have we separate bathrooms and locker-rooms is because there are two groups in society: one with dicks and one without dicks. The problem is that people with dicks can penetrate people without dicks. Obviously, not all people with a dick will do that. Even if the probability is small, the utility cost of unwanted penetration is so catastrophic that dickless people don’t want to be exposed in spaces where there are people with dicks.

A solution is to have two separate spaces. One exclusive for people without dicks and one where you can have either.

> But why is that trans people's problem? A predator is a predator and should be dealt with as such.

One inconsistency I've noticed with people making this kind of argument is that they don't extend it to cisgender men. If we don't intend to protect against predators on a demographic basis then why have sex-or-gender-segregation at all?

Not all moral panics are the same. Some are based in reality, some are not. Pretending that just because this is also a moral panic in some sense, there is no truth value to it, is just as thick headed as you accuse others of being.

"Physical danger" is not caused by someone having a different opinion. Nobody has the right to change reality to suit the fragile worldview they've created for themselves. Rather, any rational worldview should be strengthened by investigation.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will annihilate me.

Really? There seem to be some people who would like to do physical harm to those of differing opinions

There are. And when they try to do physical harm, we stop them. But don't blame the differing opinions.

This is a good point, it is not the opinion itself that leads to danger but rather the interpretation/perception of it by another party

My understanding is that in "queer theory" gender is 100% socially constructed. This essentially means "women" are socially constructed. It is hard to have feminism if you don't have "women". This seems to be at the core of the "terf" conflict.

Ironically in critical race theory race is also socially constructed but racism forces race on people and therefore you must defeat racism before you can get to socially constructed race.

This all quite complex so apologies if I didn't get that quite right.

> My understanding is that in "queer theory" gender is 100% socially constructed. This essentially means "women" are socially constructed. It is hard to have feminism if you don't have "women". This seems to be at the core of the "terf" conflict.

TERFs don't actually disagree with this. They call themselves "gender critical" because they believe all gender roles are socially constructed and that the gender role we call "woman" was constructed so that females would be weaker than males and subservient to them. So when they see someone choosing to join that gender role they become very irked by it and can only explain it in terms of mental sickness or perversion. Likewise they see Female to Male trans people as somewhat more commendable since they are trying to escape the oppression of womanhood, but also bad because they are joining the enemy. Since Janice Raymond in the 70's their idea has been that they can completely eliminate transsexualism by abolishing all gender role distinctions.

Now in practice, TERFs/Gender Crits behave exactly like any other religious conservatives regarding gender. You don't exactly see them encouraging boys to dress like princesses but still identify as boys do you? Instead you see them championing people like Ken Zucker who advocates for feminine boys to be forced to behave in a masculine way, going so far as to deny them access to their mothers in some cases lest she encourage their girlish behavior. Instead they just advocate that gender isn't real therefore sex determines everything forever without making any attempt to open up sex roles to more modes of acceptable behavior.

Mainstream transgender organizations view gender as socially constructed but also related to one's own preferences and personality. Because of that gender may not always align with sex. They do not conflate sex and gender and do acknowledge that sex is a biological reality. They also don't imply that to have feminine preferences is to be lesser than someone having masculine preferences. The notion that transgender people think sex isn't real is a straw man argument. You can find people who say things like this but they don't represent mainstream thought.

What you're more likely to find really is that some trans people and organizations point to disorders of sexual development like androgen insensitivity syndrome, kleinfelter's, etc.... as a way of selling the idea that sex isn't so simple that people should have their entire sense of being and self expression stifled by the size of their gametes. To some people this line of thinking is persuasive, to others it seems like a sellout in that it has an element of nature over nurture to it, and to others still like conservatives and TERFs it's frustrating because it sort of messes with their "biological reality of sex" high ground they've tried to claim thus their most common refrain is to say that such disorders are so rare that they don't matter. (DSDs are about as common as red hair in the US population so make of that what you will). Nevertheless, even this type of argument is a far cry from saying that "sex isn't real" which is what trans people are often accused of.

> They call themselves "gender critical" because they believe all gender roles are socially constructed and that the gender role we call "woman" was constructed so that females would be weaker than males and subservient to them. So when they see someone choosing to join that gender role they become very irked by it and can only explain it in terms of mental sickness or perversion.

I think the logic is more: gender is socially constructed and generally harmful. And therefore we ought to deconstruct it rather than further baking it into our society.

> You don't exactly see them encouraging boys to dress like princesses but still identify as boys do you?

I think there's a big mix here. I think you'd find a lot of "TERFs" would support exactly this (take a look at someone like JK Rowling for example).

> Mainstream transgender organizations view gender as socially constructed but also related to one's own preferences and personality. Because of that gender may not always align with sex. They do not conflate sex and gender and do acknowledge that sex is a biological reality.

I haven't seen many people deny that sex is real, but I have seen a lot of people saying that it isn't socially relevant and that for example people ought to define their sexuality in terms of gender identity rather than sex.

> I think there's a big mix here. I think you'd find a lot of "TERFs" would support exactly this (take a look at someone like JK Rowling for example).

JK Rowling isn't really much of a radical feminist or a TERF as far as I can tell. She's just sympathetic to their views. The organizations that TERFs support and staff however do indeed do things like campaign to support Ken Zuckeresque conversion therapies for gender non-conforming youth.

> I haven't seen many people deny that sex is real, but I have seen a lot of people saying that it isn't socially relevant and that for example people ought to define their sexuality in terms of gender identity rather than sex.

Maybe you're alluding to something like the sports argument here? The transgender movement is a big tent that is made up of people who have no medical intervention or even gender dysphoria and also people who take cross-sex hormones and have gender affirming surgeries. The sports debate is muddied by the need to not alienate anyone. If you get down the brass tacks though, the real argument is about how much impact cross-sex hormones have on the performance of a body that has been through a testosterone dominant puberty.

The conservative position seems to be that being AMAB grants you superior performance at all times regardless of any other condition, which complete androgen insensitivity syndrome seems to contradict considering that CAIS girls have no physical advantages over XX girls despite their Y chromosomes. The most radical liberal position would be that all sports should be open via self-id. The real answer is probably that trans kids who never had an androgen dominant puberty should be allowed to play any women's sport and trans women who transitioned later should be allowed in some women's sports but not others depending on how much the development of their skeleton during puberty number one might impact their performance. This nuanced view is rare however as both sides keep taking more and more extreme stances to spite one another. Look at how in Texas a 7 year old trans girl is considered too dangerous to play softball with cis girls. That's obviously dumb but the conservatives proposed HB25 to send a message that trans kids aren't wanted first and to """protect le women's sports""" second (a distant second).

Nevertheless, self-id is one issue that has some real nuance but it's one issue in a whole constellation of other debates which have much less nuance and simply come down to: trans people look weird and I want them to not exist.

> JK Rowling isn't really much of a radical feminist or a TERF as far as I can tell.

I agree, but I can tell you that a lot of my Facebook friends (who are all people I know IRL) who post pro-trans content have posted stuff calling her a TERF and/or transphobic.

> Maybe you're alluding to something like the sports argument here?

FWIW, I agree with your take on sports. but that's not what I was alluding to. I was alluding to my recent experience which is that it seems to be fast becoming socially unacceptable within large parts of the transgender movement to talk about someone's physiological sex at all (and I mean their current physiology as modified by HRT and/or surgery, not what they were born with). I have been called transphobic on numerous occasions for:

- Naming someone's sex

- Wanting to differentiate between those who have medically transitioned and those who have not yet, or don't plan to.

- For suggesting that hormones affect behaviour

- For expressing my sexuality (I am attracted to physically female people (cis or trans))

- For expressing my opinion that someone's gender identity (be they cis or trans) is only rarely relevant to me (as people have such different ideas of what it means to be a certain gender that their identity tells you almost nothing about them).

> Nevertheless, self-id is one issue that has some real nuance but it's one issue in a whole constellation of other debates which have much less nuance and simply come down to: trans people look weird and I want them to not exist.

I would agree that there a bunch of issues that simply come down to "trans people look weird and I want them to not exist" (as a somewhat effiminate man, I have unfortunately experienced some of this myself). However, I would suggest that there are also a bunch of issues from the other direction that simply come down to "I'm not comfortable with my body, therefore I don't want anyone to talk about bodies".

> I agree, but I can tell you that a lot of my Facebook friends (who are all people I know IRL) who post pro-trans content have posted stuff calling her a TERF and/or transphobic.

I do think she is pretty blatantly transphobic. I mean she wrote a whole novel which just rehashed the old trope from Dressed to Kill to drive home the point about how dangerous she thought it was for males to be in women's spaces. That's some commitment.

> FWIW, I agree with your take on sports. but that's not what I was alluding to. I was alluding to my recent experience which is that it seems to be fast becoming socially unacceptable within large parts of the transgender movement to talk about someone's physiological sex

Maybe that's true? Thinking on my own experiences, I transitioned mtf when I was a teenager like 15 years ago and since then I've blended in and lived a pretty normal life with a husband and an adopted child, I had some uncles and stuff who would bring up physiological stuff but only as a sort of gotcha or subtle dig at me or later my husband (to make it clear to him that despite being a masculine cis man they think of him as a homo). I think it's pretty common for trans people to be gaslit with like "yeah but your chromosomes are male so you're a male" in bad faith to the point where it always looks like a dog whistle when someone brings it up.

I'm sorry you had negative experiences as a feminine man. I can obviously relate. I think it's harder for feminine men who are attracted to women since as a gay guy before I at least had a community to be kind to me.

> I do think she is pretty blatantly transphobic. I mean she wrote a whole novel which just rehashed the old trope from Dressed to Kill to drive home the point about how dangerous she thought it was for males to be in women's spaces. That's some commitment.

I haven't read this novel, but if it's about males then why do you see it as transphobic rather than male-phobic? After all, Rowling almost certainly doesn't cis males in women's spaces either. To me it's not obvious why it would be considered acceptable to discriminate on the basis of identity differences, but not on the basis of physiological differences. Especially as to me it would seem that of the two, physiological differences (specifically testosterone levels) would be more likely than identity to affect aggression (incl. sexual aggression) and therefore the danger someone represents. (AFAIK (I read her "open letter") Rowling is quite happy for medically transitioned trans women to be in "women's spaces" - it is self-id without some kind of check that she opposes).

There is nuance to this debate in that a trans woman who is perceived as a woman is probably more likely to be targeted in an attack than someone who as perceived as a man (although we should note that this really is about the perception of others and not self-identity - and people may not be perceived as they self-identify). So I'm not necessarily saying I agree with Rowling's position, but I don't really see it as transphobic.

> I had some uncles and stuff who would bring up physiological stuff but only as a sort of gotcha or subtle dig at me or later my husband (to make it clear to him that despite being a masculine cis man they think of him as a homo). I think it's pretty common for trans people to be gaslit with like "yeah but your chromosomes are male so you're a male" in bad faith to the point where it always looks like a dog whistle when someone brings it up.

I'm sorry about your experiences with your uncles, that's really unnecessary. In particular, while ones chromosomes may have influence on phenotype I suspect it's rather a small one in the case of trans people.

Having said that, I think it's worth noting that for many people the physical aspects of gender are really much more important/interesting than the social aspects. For example for me personally, my gender has only ever really meant:

1. That I have a penis, and a certain hormone balance that subconsciously affect my perception and decision making in subtle ways.

2. That society treats me in a certain way and has certain expectations of me.

With regard to "how I see myself", to be honest I see myself as more similar to the average woman that the average man in most ways. But I still use the label "man", because my personal understanding of gender is that if I have the physiology that I do then I'm a man. That's just what "man" means to me.

I don't think gender needs to mean that for everyone, but I do think my understanding of gender and identity as a man is just as legitimate as a trans man's. And I also think (without assigning blame to any one party) that the fact that we're both using the same terms - "gender", "man", "woman", etc - to describe utterly different phenomena is problematic in aggregate.

More broadly, it seems to me that a lot of the conflict in the gender debate is that there are really two or three things going on:

- Physiological features

- Societal treatment

- Internal mindset and how one views oneself

In western societies we have traditionally labelled all 3 of these things as "gender" and assumed that they coincide. And now that we've realised that they don't always, we're fighting over which one(s) are "gender", and which one(s) are of legitimate social interest. Whereas in reality all 3 are of legitimate social interest, and all 3 have a justifying claim on the term gender.

I feel like there's a lot of unnecessary hurt and conflict caused by people trying to say for example "You have male physiological features" and other people hearing "You have male internal mindset". And I feel like if we came up with some way to disambiguate about which of the above we mean when we are talking about gender in a given context then it would help a lot. It wouldn't solve all our societal disagreements and prejudices, but I think it would help lead us away from slanging matches and towards productive debate.

> I have been called transphobic on numerous occasions for:

> - Naming someone's sex

Feels like a dog whistle when you hear it because in 99.9% of cases it isn't very germane to the discussion considering that we are talking about phenotypes and not genotypes unless it's talking about fertility or something.

> - Wanting to differentiate between those who have medically transitioned and those who have not yet, or don't plan to.

This is a fair thing to do. Julia Serano talks about the difference between classical "transsexuals" now usually called binary trans people and other people who may not have any sort of physical changes. So just bringing up that there are differences there isn't a big deal but it does put people on edge for a few reasons: 1.) the trans community is afraid of gatekeeping coming back in vogue and if you slice up trans people in any way it starts to feel like the old days when certain people weren't deemed fit for HRT or surgeries and 2.) needing to get expensive genital surgeries to get an "F" on your documents really hindered trans people's lives for a long time. I know it might be hard to imagine, but I had a friend who also transitioned as a teenager but who hadn't had her documents changed back in like 2010 and I went with her to try to help her open a bank account because she had never had one because she was so shook about the bad experiences she'd had with showing people her ID. She was shivering in the bank lobby with me there coaching her to try to give her courage. It's HARD to pass 100% as female and feel the vulnerability of that and then be outed as trans and have the vulnerability of that put on you too. Like suddenly not only are you in a feminine body but you also run the risk of being treated like a man which could lead to you getting hurt. I know that might sound hyperbolic but it's real. At least it was for us back in the day. When the Obama administration changed the rules on passports so we could get 'F' on them without bottom surgery it changed my life personally. I changed jobs after that finally after putting it off for instance because suddenly I could do paperwork without it setting off a huge firestorm.

> - For suggesting that hormones affect behaviour

This is obviously true but I do realize there are people who don't like that this is true for ideological reasons. I know zero trans people who haven't attested to having emotional changes on HRT though. And emotional changes obviously affect behavior.

> - For expressing my sexuality (I am attracted to physically female people (cis or trans))

What? Did they call you a chaser or something? Are you friends convinced that everyone has to be pansexual??? That sounds homophobic almost.

> - For expressing my opinion that someone's gender identity (be they cis or trans) is only rarely relevant to me (as people have such different ideas of what it means to be a certain gender that their identity tells you almost nothing about them).

I mean as someone who lived ~ 18 years being gendered male and almost the same time gendered female I can tell you that your perceived gender identity impacts pretty much every aspect of your life. And when I came out a lot of people who knew me from high school were like "oh that makes some things make so much more sense." So I think there is something to the idea that a person's internal feeling of themselves has some baring on how you might want to treat them or which lens you should view their actions through? I dunno.

It sounds like you're either an abrasive person who draws in conflict but doesn't realize this about yourself or your friends are particularly radical. I live in the Southeast where queer people seem to be a bit more pragmatic about things. Maybe I'm out of touch with how things are in more progressive environments.

It's not quite that simple, in that it's not a nonsensical statement that there's no difference between the biological sexes as the zealots on the opposing side perceive it to be.

It's more that the cultural perceptions and behaviors are socially constructed. The foundations of all of this are in Judith Butler (not coincidentally at Stanford) and Michel Foucault (not coincidentally French). In terms of race these two intersect (pun intended) with Kimberle Crenshaw.

You're on to the crux of the issue with the word "forces" though, because the abstract consideration of all of these things is a question of power and coercion. So people who find themselves at odds with the proposed new norms would be wise to read these foundational texts to understand where their adversaries are coming from.

In terms of race, this crosses paths with gender theory in the ideas of a professor named Kimberle Crenshaw, whose ideas were used to make the "preferential treatment" case back in a round of General Motors layoffs specifically, in which it was argued that by virtue of belonging to multiple disadvantaged groups, black women who were to be laid off from factory jobs were being unfairly persecuted (because the layoffs were done by seniority due to the union contract, and due to segregation and gender discrimination it was impossible for women or black people to have seniority at the time).

Which of course is true, on the surface. It was impossible for women, and black women in particular, to have seniority as GM factory workers. But it is all a very overt exercise in intentionally disregarding the root cause of the factory layoffs, and in any case was predictably rejected by the US courts who refused to oppress one group instead of another in court rather than in commerce. Similar court cases have failed for similar reasons in the EU. The fact that she was challenging a union contract in court is why she works at any Ivy League school which is funded by corporations who very much do not like union contracts. Similarly, tech companies sending out transgender employees to do their most publicly distasteful deeds (like Microsoft recently did with the .NET foundation) is not coincidental to Judith Butler being at Stanford. If Judith Butler's ideas were not amenable to the goals of west coast corporations Judith Butler wouldn't be at Stanford.

The root cause of the factory layoffs in the intersectionality case is the US empire post-WW2 had devalued its own currency to finance misguided and short-sighted wars like Korea and Vietnam. And the ruling class of the US was not going to pay for its own failed policies, it wanted its employees to pay and that's precisely what Jimmy Carter gave said ruling class, in the form of Paul Volcker.

All of this is worth looking at in considering how these cultural theories have managed to position themselves so favorably in the eyes of corporations and 3 letter government security/surveillance agencies. Culture wars are a grand misdirection, employed by corporations and governments to turn people to any sort of conflict that minimizes the class conflict which they truly fear.

> So people who find themselves at odds with the proposed new norms would be wise to read these foundational texts to understand where their adversaries are coming from.

I strongly agree but none of it is easy reading and I doubt the average person has the time to understand the nuances.

Agreed, that's the catch. It is difficult reading. I would argue that without a grasp of Hegel's basic theories you can't even start, and without a grasp of Marx's basic theories you can't get from Hegel to the modern age.

For anyone reading the comments, one of the best sources I've found, that remind me very much of my own days in formal humanities education so much that I find myself listening to the lectures more than once, is a youtube channel from a professor in the Pacific Northwest named Wes Cecil.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9ff15w4ufviWfv9UfIuByA

He has a whole series of one-hour public lectures (as in... targeted to the general public who may or may not have a humanities background themselves, not humanities university students who do) which cover the basic concepts of the most prominent figures in modern PHIL.

ps: he didn't get to Hegel until 2019 so it's not in the PHIL playlist on his channel [1]

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNhCCXlaR2s

>This essentially means "women" are socially constructed. It is hard to have feminism if you don't have "women". This seems to be at the core of the "terf" conflict.

Yeah, one thing I've noticed lately is that TRAs seem to struggle to provide a definition of what a "woman" is nowadays. It's apparently "a person who identifies as a woman", and that's literally it. Maybe there are some caveats for people who "obviously" adopt the title in some sort of bad faith (eg. to get lower insurance rates), but I imagine that even this makes activists uneasy. This is why we're seeing a spate of non-gendered neologisms being pushed - "birthing person", etc.

> This is why we're seeing a spate of non-gendered neologisms being pushed - "birthing person", etc.

Almost all of these neologisms are in place to create conceptual space for trans men in AFAB medical contexts and yet almost all of the criticisms are directed at trans women. The fixation on trans women at all times speaks to something more going on beneath the surface in these debates. I think that something is just digust and anger looking for post-facto reasons to lash out.

Like I said in other comments, I think self-id without any qualifications is "off". But the arguments being levied against it come attached to a lot of other arguments that are clearly motivated by hate and disgust at trans women rather than concern over this particular topic.

Like the people against self-id would also like to make it so that a trans woman who transitioned when she was 12 and adopted a child couldn't access a women's shelter for her and her child if she were to be abused by her husband someday just because she has a Y chromosome. This is obviously just as "off" as saying that any guy who says they are a woman can play college women's volleyball the next day.

Like seriously, "gender critical" people are so dead set on sex sex sex that they forget that most trans people aren't TRAs but rather just want to live normal lives and are rather invisible in society. The changes gender crits want to make will make their lives much more difficult which I think is the point right? Janice Raymond said that she wanted to see transsexualism extinguished by making it as costly and difficult as possible to be trans more or less in her book The Transsexual Empire....

It's cruelty for the sake of marginalizing a group out of existence. Very ugly stuff.

If it weren't for that, I think the debate around self-id would be a lot less fraught. It's depressing to me as a person who transitioned pre-2010. Life was more comfortable before all of this rage was unleashed on us. I went from never having to think about being trans to suddenly 15 years in having to think of it nearly every day due to the constant attacks and vitriol in the news.

Like even my husband's parents suddenly became open transphobes which was a shock. I've known them for years. Something very mean is going on that goes far beyond poor miss Stock's academic freedom.

>Life was more comfortable before all of this rage was unleashed on us. I went from never having to think about being trans to suddenly 15 years in having to think of it nearly every day due to the constant attacks and vitriol in the news.

Do you really think that this shift is reflective simply of an exogenous increase in rage towards trans people, and has little/nothing to do with the fact that there's been an obvious top-down push to yank the Overton window on these issues far to the left of where it was 15 years ago?

>My understanding is that in "queer theory" gender is 100% socially constructed.

Yes. Gender is a social construct. Sex is a biological construct. Sex is not gender, and gender is not sex. They are typically correlated, but are not the same.

>This essentially means "women" are socially constructed.

To a degree, yes. Obviously humans are primates that display sexual dimorphism by which the females of the species ideally possess a vagina, womb and two x chromosomes, along with other attributes differentiating them biologically from males.

But "woman" is an overloaded term which has never exclusively referred to biological sex, but also to the roles, duties and behavior by which societies recognize and classify gender. And the relationship between gender and sex is a cultural, not biological, imperative which can differ from culture to culture, and can change within a culture over time.

I just finished reading The Coddling of the American Mind by Haidt and Lukianoff. Fantastic book. Here’s the article from The Atlantic that started the idea: [1]. In the book the authors discuss exactly this phenomenon and some possible causes. I’m not going to do it justice, so just read the article.

I’d love to be a professor because research and teaching sounds like a delightful vocation. Things like this give me pause.

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod...

For those who want to protect academic freedoms, consider donating to FIRE (https://www.thefire.org/), a nonprofit that in many ways is the new ACLU. You can read about their mission at https://www.thefire.org/about-us/mission/

Nothing against FIRE, but they're an American org and this incident is taking place in the UK.

Some UK organisations in the same general purview: Counterweight, Academics for Academic Freedom, the Free Speech Union.

Well I will certainly trust any article that immediately resorts to commenting on the spelling of protestors.

> “Some have pointed out,” she wrote, that “this change in the law will allow some duplicitous or badly motivated males to ‘change gender’ fairly easily,” putting women at risk not from those who are trans but from predatory men.

Well I can't see why people would object to her implying that trans people are just male abusers looking for cover to assault women. Seems a totally apolitical stance to take

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