I refuse to be bullied into silence

PROFESSOR KATHLEEN STOCK was ostracised and denounced by 600 colleagues because she dared to challenge the trans orthodoxy sweeping Britain

Professor Kathleen Stock was given an OBE in the latest New Year Honours List

I was proud to be given an OBE in the latest New Year Honours List. I was delighted for my profession, too – it’s rare for philosophers to get much attention. It might sound strange, then, to say I felt a pang of anxiety when I first heard the good news towards the end of last year, and again when it was made public on January 1. I knew there might be a price to pay for getting such a public honour. And thanks to the trans lobby and its increasingly aggressive behaviour, I was right.

The OBE came as a result of my campaign for academic freedom and, in particular, the freedom to examine the demands of influential trans pressure groups such as Stonewall.

So it was no surprise when, just a few days ago, I opened my emails to find that more than 600 people had signed an open letter denouncing me.

These were not hardened campaigners or activists – rather, the letter had been signed by fellow philosophers who pronounced themselves ‘dismayed’ that the Government had chosen to honour me for my ‘harmful rhetoric’.

The letter accused me of ‘transphobic fearmongering’, of helping to ‘restrict trans people’s access to life-saving medical treatment’ and of serving ‘to encourage the harassment of gender-non- conforming people’.

It was incredibly distressing to see blatant lies promoted as fact. But the letter also demonstrates what a disastrous mess we are in when it comes to talking about sex and gender.

The effects of this lobbying can be seen everywhere. From placing trans women – some of them sex offenders – in female prisons, to the rise of ‘gender-neutral’ toilets and changing rooms, to trans women being placed on shortlists for women’s prizes and a rethink of women’s sport, the alterations have been rapid and seismic.

The Stonewall campaign group has been particularly influential with its simple and powerful message – that trans people are an intensely vulnerable minority and that to help them, we must recognise individuals’ ‘gender identity’, not biological sex, wherever possible.

Government departments, the judiciary, media organisations, schools and – most significantly for me – universities have embraced this message. I abhor discrimination against trans people but I also believe we should be free to examine the effects of changes, including any costs to women and the rights of gay people, and to the health of children wishing to change gender.

As a lesbian with teenage children, these topics are close to my heart. As an academic philosopher whose job it is to investigate truth, they are even closer. I believe we should be free to discuss these things in public.

Yet, as I’ve tried to explore the issues, I’ve faced complaints, disciplinary investigations, student protests and constant defamation from some colleagues.

This isn’t the first open letter against me from academics – there have been several others. I’ve also been no-platformed more than once – banned from public debate because I dare to step outside the narrow trans orthodoxy. Only a month ago, I had an invitation withdrawn from an international conference series because a fellow speaker claimed my presence (on Zoom, in a different session, to be given in a different month) made her feel unsafe.

A book of interviews was dropped from publication by Oxford University Press, partly because I was going to be included. And when I was asked to be a keynote speaker at the Royal Institute of Philosophy last year, 5,000 people signed a petition saying I shouldn’t have been invited. Happily the organisers stood firm.

In all such cases, my actual views have been severely misrepresented and my motives demonised.

All of this takes an intense personal toll. When academics make false statements about me, alleging that I’m a transphobic bigot, presumably they don’t care about the effects on my life.

Yet people believe what they read, especially when endorsed by seemingly authoritative academics.

I’ve stopped attending philosophy conferences as I can’t cope with the ostracism and dirty looks. I walk around my own workplace at the University of Sussex with a sense of dread.

Two years ago, I was shocked when the campus security manager advised me about the emergency phone system and arranged to have a spyhole put in my door.

When, at a later graduation event, I was taken aside by security and told the quickest way to get off the stage in an emergency, I was no longer shocked – the experience had become commonplace.

As had being told I was being ‘manipulative’ whenever I wrote or talked about the personal cost of the campaign waged against me. Hilariously, the authors of this latest open letter didn’t even seem to bother to find out what my views actually were, describing me as ‘best-knowm… for opposition to the UK Gender Recognition Act’.

In fact, I’m on record as saying that, although I think it is confusingly worded, I have no problem with the existence of the Act which gives trans people the possibility of a Gender Recognition Certificate. This means that, for legal purposes, people can have a new ‘acquired gender’ which is not the same as biological sex.

Nor, for that matter, have I any objection to the Equality Act’s inclusion of gender reassignment as a ‘protected characteristic’. I enthusiastically support it. Trans people deserve to live free of any violence, harassment or discrimination. My objections are against proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act and to the Equality Act in favour of something called ‘gender identity’, which, as described by Stonewall, is ‘a person’s innate sense of their own gender, whether male, female or something else, which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth.’ One problem with gender identity, as described like this, is that it is supposed to be an invisible inner feeling. So, in my view, it becomes far too easy for anyone to say they have this inner feeling, and ‘identify’ their way into women-only spaces and resources.

Stonewall says that to be a trans woman, you don’t need to have surgery, take hormones, or have any outward appearances in particular – it’s just who you are inside. But as I explain in my forthcoming book Material Girls, I don’t think inner feelings are a good basis for legal protections.

Such detailed arguments were apparently irrelevant to my academic critics in their haste to make an example of me.

As my friend and sociologist at University College London, Professor Alice Sullivan said last week in an acerbic reference to 17th Century witch trials: ‘The important thing is not what Stock actually thinks but rather, whether or not she floats.’

However, the greater harm here is the chilling message sent to other academics and students: toe the accepted line or this will happen to you. Indeed, it is happening to other academics.

For having views like mine, Oxford historian Professor Selina Todd now has to have security for her lectures, and Alice Sullivan has been no-platformed from an event on data collection and the census.

Almost every week, I receive emails from frightened academics concerned about what is happening but who feel unable to say so. This sinister suppression affects all of us, not just those who work in universities. There is an obvious cost to democracy.

We have seen widespread changes to policies on women’s spaces and resources so that, now, gender identity is the official criterion of legitimate access.

Essentially, if you feel like a woman, you can now go into a woman-only space, however private. Such measures affect half the population but have been made without considering whether women consent to them or not.

There is also a threat to data collection. We are already losing crucial information about the impact of biological sex. This matters because being male or female influences a huge range of different outcomes, including medicine, employment and susceptibility to sexual violence. We need to track these differences.

And we are set to lose even more data if the census authorities stick to their current plan of interpreting ‘sex’ in the 2021 census as ‘gender identity’.

In truth, public understanding about science is at risk. It is mind-boggling to me that during a global pandemic which affects men and women differently and is notably more threatening to men, some schools are telling children that their feelings about gender identity matter more than facts about their sex.

This effect of such thinking is most obvious in women’s sport, where people with male physiology are now permitted to compete against females on vastly unequal and sometimes dangerous terms. Stonewall is currently backing the inclusion of trans women in women’s contact rugby, apparently oblivious to the risks posed to women players.

Yet another potential cost is to children’s health. This was recently indicated by the judicial finding that under-16s with gender dysphoria – a sense of distressing unease because they feel there is a mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity – are unlikely to be capable of informed consent to so-called puberty-blocker prescriptions.

Until this finding, psychologists at the Tavistock Clinic in London had been dispensing puberty blockers to children since 2011, even telling them that such drugs act only as a harmless ‘pause button’ for puberty.

I believe that this worrying practice might not have been permitted for so long had normal levels of public scrutiny been allowed.

These are only a few of the risks we face when our institutions – be they medical, legal, sporting or educational – decide that gender identity is more important than biological sex without considering the consequences.

People such as me are going to carry on thinking and writing about these risks, even if many of our colleagues would prefer us to shut up.

I’m afraid we can’t afford to stop. The costs to the public are too large to do otherwise.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9155659/I-refuse-bullied-silence-PROFESSOR-KATHLEEN-STOCK.html

The Vile Racism of a Biden Nominee

When an atteMpt to valorize blacks tends to indicate the opposite. A black lady reveals herself as exceptionally ill-informed

Imagine if, in 2016, Donald Trump had put forth a nominee to head the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division whose body of work included the following statement:

Melanin endows whites with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities — something which cannot be measured based on Afrocentric standards.

Setting aside the scientific idiocy of the statement, it’s hard to see it as anything other than the very definition of racism. And had anything like this ever been put on paper by a Trump nominee, the nomination would’ve been pulled as soon as the outrageous utterance came to light. But swap out the word “whites” for “blacks,” and replace “Afrocentric” with “Eurocentric,” and we’re looking at a verbatim quote from a Joe Biden nominee — to head our nation’s powerful civil rights enforcement apparatus, no less.

Granted, Kristen Clarke coauthored these words back in 1994 as part of a letter to the editor of the Harvard Crimson. But she did so as president of the university’s Black Students Association. That’s her name at the bottom of the letter, and those are her words. And they’re repugnant.

The letter, in fact, is little more than a semi-coherent screed that thrashes around between racist pseudoscience and pathetic blame-whiteyism.

First the pseudoscience: “Some scientists,” they claim without attribution, “have revealed that most whites are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcification [sic] or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent, Asians 15 to 25 percent and Europeans 60 to 80 percent. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between Blacks and whites.”

Now the blame-whiteyism: “Liberal whites underestimate the damage which racism causes on the minds of Black children, and conservative whites know all too well how to enlarge that damage. No matter how rich or supportive a Black person’s home might be, by the time she is ready to take the SAT or apply to college, she has struggled far more extensively than any white person of the same social and economic background.”

As a student, though, Clarke wasn’t content to merely castigate whites generally. She seems to have had a heightened animus toward Jews. Indeed, she once invited a raging anti-Semite to speak at Harvard, a former Wellesley College professor named Tony Martin — a man who authored a manifesto called “The Jewish Onslaught.” When the criticism came down, she vigorously — albeit sophomorically — defended him: “Professor Martin is an intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact.”

Got that? He’s an intellectual. Incidentally, if you missed Tucker Carlson’s Monday night takedown of our nation’s would-be civil rights top cop, it’s worth watching:

Carlson covered Clarke again last night, but this time he focused on her obsession with skin color when it comes to hiring airline pilots and on her dishonest Wikipedia biography, which doesn’t have a peep about her racist past. It’s also currently locked, so no one can correct it. Clearly, the Left is circling the wagons.

Despite their best efforts, though, it appears that Clarke’s troubling past has caught up with her just in time for a contentious confirmation. As The Washington Free Beacon reports, “Though the incendiary statements are more than 25 years old, several of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees were grilled over comparatively tamer items they wrote as college students, prompting public apologies and even a withdrawal. If confirmed, Clarke would shape federal litigation strategies and lead enforcement of the nation’s civil-rights statutes.”

Are her quarter-century-old comments disqualifying, or is there a statute of limitations on black supremacy? Not according to Clarke’s own standards, as Paul Mirengoff points out at Power Line. Hey, what’s good enough for a Trump judicial nominee is good enough for a Biden civil rights nominee.

With a racist like Clarke at the helm, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division would once again count by race, once again weaponize our nation’s civil rights laws, and once again favor certain racial groups at the expense of others. For the sake of decency, let’s hope her nomination gets pulled or, better yet, goes down to bipartisan defeat.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/77002-the-vile-racism-of-a-biden-nominee-2021-01-14

Politico Staff Revolts After Ben Shapiro Authors Newsletter

Politico is defending its decision to allow The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro to write Thursday’s Politico Playbook after staff spoke out against Shapiro.

“Opposition to impeachment comes from a deep and abiding conservative belief that members of the opposing political tribe want their destruction, not simply to punish [President Donald] Trump for his behavior,” Shapiro wrote.

“Republicans believe that Democrats and the overwhelmingly liberal media see impeachment as an attempt to cudgel them collectively by lumping them in with the Capitol rioters thanks to their support for Trump.”

His participation in Thursday’s Playbook sparked a backlash internally among Politico staff who said that Shapiro should not have been allowed to guest-write the newsletter.

The Daily Beast reported that one staffer said in a Politico company-wide Slack channel that Shapiro has a “long history of bigoted and incendiary commentary.”

“It has clearly generated a wave of negative attention, and I fear it’s already overshadowing a lot of great work being done by journalists across this newsroom,” the staffer said, according to The Daily Beast. Several dozen of this staffer’s Politico colleagues reportedly upvoted this comment.

Another staffer reportedly responded to this comment, saying, “This is especially confusing given the newsroom’s welcome efforts over the last year to cover issues related to race in a more intentional, elevated, thoughtful way.”

Politico defended its decision in a statement released Thursday.

“We have taken great care to assemble a roster of guest authors who are prominent thinkers and writers and represent a range of perspectives,” the statement said, according to Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple. “What sets Politico apart in this intense political and media moment is that we rise above partisanship and ideological warfare—even as many seek to drag us into it.”

“It’s a core value of the publication that is unchangeable, and that above all protects our ability to do independent journalism,” the statement continued. “It’s a part of our mission.”

Top editor Matt Kaminski also told staffers in a Thursday meeting that Politico stands “by every word in there,” noting that it was “very closely edited,” according to The Daily Beast.

“Mischief-making has always been a part of Politico’s secret sauce,” he added. “We were an upstart. Some of that sensibility is always going to be a part of this publication.”

Shapiro tweeted that the backlash over his appearance in Playbook proves his point on censorship.

“People losing their s— over me writing @politico Playbook this morning are pretty much proving my point,” he tweeted. “So keep at it guys, you’re doing great!”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/01/15/politico-staff-revolts-after-ben-shapiro-authors-newsletter

The paradox of ‘inclusive’ language

Gender-neutral jargon is about signalling who is in the know and who isn’t.

In a blow for ‘progress’ that nobody asked for, politicians in the US are waging war on gendered language. As part of a ‘diversity and inclusion’ push led by Democrats, gender-neutral terms may soon be expunged from the rules governing the House of Representatives. Not only are phrases like ‘chairman’ and ‘seaman’ for the chop, it seems, so too are apparently all gender-specific nouns and pronouns.

After a backlash from Republicans, Democratic House rules chair Jim McGovern – who unveiled the proposals with House speaker Nancy Pelosi last week – slammed the ‘extreme right’ for making a big deal about proposals aimed at making the House more ‘inclusive’ and ‘succinct’. But while swapping ‘he’ or ‘she’ for ‘they’, as the new rules propose, would arguably streamline things a bit, the same can’t really be said for swapping ‘niece’ and ‘nephew’ for ‘sibling’s child’, or ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’ for ‘parent’s sibling’, as is also proposed.

Once discussions about gender-neutral language centred on making sure everyday parlance wasn’t too sexist or presumptuous – saying firefighter rather than fireman, for instance, to avoid suggesting it is really a man’s job. Now, it seems, gender-neutral lingo is about expunging sex from our speech and interactions entirely, thus referring to everyone using catch-all and often ungainly phrases.

The proposed House rulebook has been talked up as more inclusive towards transgender people. That most transgender people would, presumably, prefer to be acknowledged as the gender they feel themselves to be seems not to have crossed Democrats’ minds. But then again, the new craze for gender-neutral language is not really about inclusiveness, as is so often claimed.

Many serious organisations have opened themselves up to mockery by making absurd pronouncements on language, when they really should be focusing on other things. Last spring, the United Nations put out a statement encouraging people to drop gendered terms, including ‘boyfriend’, ‘girlfriend’, ‘husband’ and ‘wife’, ‘if you’re unsure about someone’s gender or are referring to a group’. This, it said, would ‘help create a more equal world’.

Such prognostications were not that long ago mainly the preserve of students’ unions and campus officials. In 2017, it was reported that Cardiff Metropolitan University had issued a new code of practise, mandating PC alternatives to gendered phrases. If you’re wondering: ‘workmanlike’ was to be swapped for ‘efficient’; ‘manpower’ with ‘human resources’; and ‘right-hand man’ with ‘chief assistant’.

The embrace of such PC contortions by the political class is, at best, a bit stupid. Language does change over time, reflecting changing attitudes. But it is absurd to suggest that women’s liberation, say, will be tangibly advanced by memory-holing the phrase ‘mankind’. Plus, the trans people Democrats seem hell bent on ‘including’ probably have bigger things to worry about than if someone utters the dread word ‘aunt’ on the House floor.

Such proposals seem primarily to be about advertising the virtue of those making them; they will do nothing materially to improve people’s lives. But there is a nasty underside to this, too. Acts of ostentatious virtue-signalling kind of presuppose that everyone else isn’t virtuous – that we need to be hectored and have our awareness raised, from on high, whether we like it or not.

In this sense, ‘inclusive’ language is actually a social marker, distinguishing the woke from the unwoke. Indeed, the fact that so many gender-neutral terms are basically unpronounceable shows how exclusive they really are. Take ‘womxn’ and ‘Latinx’ – the trans-friendly, gender-neutral alternatives to ‘woman’ and ‘Latino / Latina’ respectively. Both of which look like typos to the vast majority of people.

In fact, these phrases are barely known about, let alone used, by those they are intended to apply to. According to the Pew Research Center, only 23 per cent of Hispanic Americans have even heard of the word ‘Latinx’, and only three per cent use it to describe themselves. While that word has become popular in activist circles, more than three quarters of ‘Latinx’ people have no clue it exists.

This is the paradox of inclusive language: it isn’t inclusive at all. It excludes the vast majority and bemuses those it is meant to ‘help’. And it speaks to how myopically, psychotically focused our political culture now is on language policing and performative virtue that it is even an issue at all.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/06/the-paradox-of-inclusive-language/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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