Gender Study Ban

Yes, KataraJean, very much so. As usual, I see this through the lens of my own religious experience - there are those who study Christianity with a certain amount of objectivity - some of them are believers, certainly, but they employ a credible amount of academic deliberation which means they address the hard questions unflinchingly. The 'Big Bang' theory came from a believing Catholic as I recall.

But you also get a significant amount of pseudo-academia within the Church, where 'true believers' take snippets of things that come from the context of longer academic discourse, often out of context, and you end up with Creationism because the word for 'day' in Hebrew can also mean a longer period of time and so forth.

With Genderism it's the same. Gender Studies has useful things to say, but is being roundly co-opted to serve the cause of people who already have invested their worlds into a belief that men and women are defined by gender roles. It becomes part of a strange new establishment faith, much more conservative than much we have seen in the West for many a year.

X post Funky

‘First they came for the’ gender theorists doesn’t work because the gender theorists already came for the women’s studies departments and destroyed them.

Women’s studies departments are as susceptible to the biases of precarious academic funding structures and academic favour and fashion as other areas of academia. This happens in the sciences and other academic areas too- things come in and out of academic prominence. Not saying it’s a good thing. But not unique to women’s studies and not the same as what is happening now in Hungary. If there were women’s studies departments going they would be similarly targeted.

‘First they came’ is absolutely apt when politicians seek to dictate who can study what. Politicians targeting academia has obvious and very worrying historical precedents.

The people who want to abolish gender studies won’t respect or support women’s studies either. #justsaying. Don’t congratulate this fascist.

Not at all Almondcandle. Left-wing, Jewish and Communist scholars were purged or forced into exile pre-1933 (see Richard Evans). Consider Albert Einstein, for example.

So who remained as part of the Nazi party were those who had not been purged - the Nazi party took over universities, not the other way around. Academics remaining were told to follow the party line or go to concentration camps. Of course some were followers of the party, many others simply stayed silent for many of the same reasons people do not speak out about things today (family to feed, fear).

The largest professional representation in the Nazi party were doctors and psychiatrists. This makes sense as eugenics which become racial hygiene and led to the Holocaust was (pseudo-) scientific (see Robert Lifton). The entire racial hygiene project was created by those groups not ‘academics’ who are a broad and diverse group. The doctors and psychiatrists may have been in university clinics, but they were also in state insured medicine, the army medical corps, psychiatric facilities and most importantly, government departments. They were also supported by captains of industry who relied on slave labour of those deemed ‘lesser’. And indeed the military.

So I cannot see any merit in what you are saying that the academy was responsible for fascism. I can see some parallels, but not in closing down the subjects doing the analysis.

I am reflecting a lot on what FloralBunting says about the difference between those doing the analysis and the true believers. True believers in ‘gender’ have always been there - in the late nineteenth century, they simply believed that women should not go out unchaperoned or have the vote or own their own property or get divorced and many other things. And then there are the people who try to explain, criticise, challenge those beliefs who also use the language of gender, without necessarily endorsing the concepts. Is that sort of what you meant?

Thumbs down from me. This is not a solution.

I stand with the bonkers ridiculous mad crazy damaging gender studies crowd on this one.

Academics were more likely to be members of the Nazi party than ordinary people.

And when Jewish academics were expelled from German universities you would have needed a sensitive microphone indeed to hear the support from those left in post. At least a lot of Soviet scientists saw Lysenko for what he was; “Aryan Physics” involved two Nobel Prize winners.

Depends where you look. The Khmer Rouge destroyed educated people wherever they found them.

I mean, yes, I can quite clearly see that in a well funded, state backed academia, there is enormous potential for abusive control and for academics to be the puppets in that endeavour.

But equally, upholding liberty and free enquiry in all spheres of life includes, rather obviously, academia.

If you cannot freely investigate the means by which Gendered expectations work, how can you possibly work against the nefarious intent of those who gleefully promote them?

I know it's really unpleasant to deal with opinions that are hugely objectionable, such as those of Genderists who insist that woman = subservient etc. but the only way to defeat ideas is through research and argument. Oppression and suppression are entirely the tools of the fascist.

All very well when you agree that certain views should be suppressed, not so helpful when you find yourself unable to speak out against your oppressor.

Re Judith Butler here is an interview with her. Inasmuch as I can make anything out of her gobbledegook word salad she is very much a genderist.

I loathe her. When I first started posting here several posters were fans of hers for that "perfomativity" crap. I suspect because it academically legitimised sneering at feminine women (mindlessly ) "performing femininity".

Turns out those rad female stalwarts like Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond were doing feminism wrong according to Butler.

Verso
www.versobooks.com/blogs/2009-judith-butler-on-gender-and-the-trans-experience-one-should-be-free-to-determine-the-course-of-one-s-gendered-life

But they didn’t come first for the scholars. Academics were more likely to be members of the Nazi party than ordinary people. Much of the ideology and supporting Facts’ was invented by academics. Academia is part of the state.

Thank you for the clarifications! I don’t have time to reply properly but wanted to acknowledge. It raises lots of questions for me.

I agree entirely about the Mermaid’s session. Women do not choose the sexist claptrap which is framed as the Barbie end of the spectrum, and the abuse, pay gap, etc which women suffer regardless of how they present.

What is eye-opening for me is who ‘likes’ posts which support this agenda, for example, the long thread ‘explaining’ the Mermaids one, which did not get the criticisms about lack of awareness of structural oppression at all.

I think what sticks in my throat, however, is the support for banning an entire university department because it is gender studies. Gender studies is a rich vein of scholarship and has brought many insights which people use now in every day life.

It does not have to be ‘first they came for the genderists’ - but it is ‘first they came for the scholars’. And those scholars have and do look at women’s position and the way language and discourse shapes women’s experiences institutionally, culturally and economically. As I said above, universities should promote critical thinking, not close it down.

I suppose I would 'Genderist' as a term for the entire quasi-religious edifice. Just as with other religions, there are the hard-core fundamentalists, and there are the more reasonable middle ground. And there are those who study the underlying belief system who may or may not subscribe to the beliefs at all, but can act as influence or critic of the beliefs.

With the topic of Gender Studies, it seems you have people who approach it very analytically, with a deconstructionist eye, and you have people who approach it from the perspective of the true believer.

This particular backlash is due to the enabling behaviour of the true believers, and as many of us have predicted forlornly, the backlash will be quite indiscriminate.

Pencils Thank you for the link to the interview. Butler points to the mismatch between her work on gender from 1989 and its interpretation by some people today- her writing has neither legitimised nor brought into reality a lot of the things ‘she’ is being blamed for.

Aside from that, Butler’s academic work is also notoriously hard work to navigate so it isn’t logical to hold her personally responsible if people put 2+2 and get 5 out of it when she meant = 4. And certainly, obviously, getting a 4, or a 5 from an author’s work is not a justification for trying to impose authoritarianism on others’ speech or justification for TRA’s (male) violence.

Katara I use ‘genderism’ sloppily as shorthand only because I can’t think of a better way to describe it- TRAs are the extremist activist end of a (let’s call it) genderist spectrum which has an academic discursive aspect at the opposite (and benign) end.

There is an increasingly authoritarian (over language) and worryingly influential/growing middle ground where certainly some academics are, but I find it worrying because this is where the TRAs are attempting to lead public services -schools, hospitals, charities etc. This includes views that would undermine the reality of biological sex etc etc.

Who exactly are ‘genderists’?

What I mean is people who believe in 'gender identity'.

This is the trouble with the word gender, it means too many different things. Is it a polite euphemism for sex? Is it socially constructed sex roles? Is it an innate and immutable inner identity? Different groups of people use the word to mean very different things and when those meanings get conflated we enter dangerous territory.

Participants in the Mermaids training session were asked to think of their gender identity as an innate 'brain jelly baby' but were then asked to decide where, on a scale of socially constructed sex role stereotypes, their brain jelly baby fitted. This would be laughable if it didn't end up with a load of kids being put on a pathway towards experimental surgery and lifelong medical treatment.

I think the word gender is a lost cause. I think there are now far more people using it to mean an innate identity than there are people using it to mean sex roles. Probably most people just use it when they mean sex.

I get what you're saying about sex roles - that it can sound as if they are innate. I think this is an easier thing to clarify than the gender vs. gender vs. gender distinction which will always have us talking at cross purposes.

‘First they came for the’ gender theorists doesn’t work because the gender theorists already came for the women’s studies departments and destroyed them.

Genderists are surely those who believe self identified claims to masculinity or femininity are a useful basis for meaningful classification system.

I would expect she is every bit as fucking angry as the next woman about the misogynistic shit being perpetrated in the name of TRA-led genderism.

Then she should bloody well say so, loud and clear.

And if her work has been misinterpreted by TRAs as justification for their batshit notion that sex is socially constructed then she should make it clear to them that this is not what she meant. She does talk a bit about that here when discussing the Brazil protests but it's the right wing who she says have misinterpreted her and it's still not clear exactly what she meant in the first place.

I don't want her silenced, I want her to explain herself. I want her interviewed on Woman's Hour by Jane Garvey -

'For our listeners, Judith - what do you mean by that?'

Who exactly are ‘genderists’?

Transgender activists draw on queer theory as much as anything else, I think. And a lot of it is highly untheoretical, or even anti-theoretical, it is just a statement of belief.

A lot of the language and concepts used to describe the structures of oppression come from gender theory. And the problem with calling it ‘sex roles’ is that absolutely sounds innate and biologically determined. The point of gender is precisely that it is socially constructed and malleable, and can be changed. I agree that the concepts of gender themselves have become almost an immutable category, but that shows the way in which gender norms are enforced. It does not make the theory wrong.

So the end point is that feminine gender norms become something men can wear too - nothing wrong with that. Where it falls apart is the next step that this makes these men women and the huge commercialisation of hormones and surgery as part of this. Which piece of gender theory argues this, as oppose to queer or transgender theory? I am asking a genuine question. Did this actually come from gender theory or another discipline, such as psychiatry or endocrinology?

For every person who has argued that we live at the level of textual and discursive symbolism, there has been another who had argued for material reality. Once you start taking about ‘genderists’ then you are lumping together a diverse set of scholarship and ideas and I am not sure how that is different from people who dismiss ‘feminists’ (also a diverse body). I think it is helpful to be clear who is meant.

YY. And a lesbian.

I think that JB's scholarship is pretty much obtuse, poorly written clap-trap. However, I disagree with the violent protests against her and also wonder if these would exist if she were not female and Jewish.

Also Skull you are spot on. If there was ever a ‘first they came..’ situation, this is absolutely it.

And people should leave individual academics the fuck out of it. Don’t agree with some of Judith Butler’s ideas?- fine. Argue your points.

When we are getting into people burning effigies of academics for having ideas they dislike, that’s totalitarian horror.

Judith Butler hasn’t written about any of this stuff for decades, as far as I know (not an academic, happy to be corrected) and I would expect she is every bit as fucking angry as the next woman about the misogynistic shit being perpetrated in the name of TRA-led genderism.

I’m so glad that we have a thread on this issue, i had been meaning to start one. This is obvious fascism. Politicians banning university subjects is an exceedingly fucking scary place to be.

This is the right wing backlash that was always likely to happen. It's not just happening in Hungary. Last November right wing christian protesters in Brazil and waved banners depicting her as the devil and telling her to 'go with your ideologies to hell.'

It's tempting to blame the gender ideologists for jumping the shark because they have jumped the shark. Doubtless the genderists will blame us because we happen to agree with the right on this one specific topic, although obviously for completely different reasons.

I'm no Judith Butler fan and I think gender studies is a pile of bull but this isn't OK. This is terrifying. It's not just the gender ideologists the far right are gunning for, it's LGB, women's rights, migrants ...

The problem is authoritarianism and censorship from both the far right and the far left.

The word gender is now a lost cause. Its meaning has become too contested.

*Just because the idea of innate gender identity is regressive bullshit, doesn't mean the entire concept of gender is bullshit. Gender is a tool of oppression that we really need to be able to name and discuss.

Otherwise we're left with only sex and all the differences between men and women in society are just sex - biological, innate and unchangeable. Which is traditional anti-feminism in a nutshell*

Yes. I think that 'gender' does make sense in a conceptual way when paired with words like 'power' and 'hierarchy'. This was the way it was initially used in feminist theory and women's studies. I'm not sure of it's genesis and how it came to be used alongside terminology such as 'sex-role stereotyping' and similar, but I do remember at the time that I found it useful to explain the way that women and men were socialised so that patriarchal power relations were preserved and reproduced. I also use the term 'gendered' to explain the process of gendering, which I think extends well beyond childhood and into adulthood.