Quote: "noted transphobe attempted to disrupt one of the panels" at FWSA UK Conference!

When is the next UCU leadership election? They really need to get rid of this shill

It won’t happen for a while, I suspect. Several of my colleagues are all agog at having another strike.

I’m a UCU member and I know the theory of withdrawing labour and the power of solidarity, but the campaign at the moment is not the hill I want to die in.

I'll wager nobody there was fit to clean my shero, Sheila Jeffrey's shoes.

"why are we including men pretending to be women?", seems to have been the question.

She has already pissed people off by going on a nationwide tour but not visiting a single ‘newer’ or post-92 university, despite them making up a huge chunk of the sector. Her excuse when challenged was that she didn’t think they had lecture theatres big enough to host the audience she was going to pull in.

That seems just a teensy bit arrogant.

The used to call us 'noted Feminists' sometimes, when they were being nice. I do not remember Feminists ever being referred to as 'noted man hater' the way they are freely slandered by being called "noted transphobe" these days.

I've realised that I think of Dr Jane Clare Jones as a sister. And not in a feminist way, just as a sister, because it was such a relief to know she was there, in the way that my big sister being somewhere makes me feel better too.

Nb: I am probably older than Dr JCJ but approximately 10% as badass.

[Tries to remain objective]

Also, I just saw on twitter that Jane Clare Jones was there at the conference and will hopefully write about her experience! I really look forward to that! Apparently it all made her despair. I know the feeling and I wasn’t even there...

bd67th I don’t think it’s for a while. She has just been elected. Although she is taking a bit of a risky line on a pensions dispute that’s brewing so she might fall from grace when that inevitably goes tits up. She has no experience of leading or even being in a union but wrote a PhD on pensions so her focus is almost purely on that and not the many other issues affecting academics. She has already pissed people off by going on a nationwide tour but not visiting a single ‘newer’ or post-92 university, despite them making up a huge chunk of the sector. Her excuse when challenged was that she didn’t think they had lecture theatres big enough to host the audience she was going to pull in. That’s obviously bollocks because most of them are the same size as older unis. She really embodies some of the worst things about the whole woke movement and her call on twitter to have Dr Louise Moody sacked and tagging her employer at the time was unforgivable.

So I am keeping my fingers crossed that we will at some point get a sensible leader.

Away thank you and solidarity to you too . I do follow Dr Em and I saw the stuff about suffragettes. It’s so true- I have seen it time and time again where they try to throw mud at the women who often risked absolutely everything to get basic rights that they now take for granted. To apply woke standards that have only been around the last five years or so to these women and label them ‘problematic’ is so ignorant. It shows such little understanding and often it is conflated with race issues that applied in the US at the time but not in the UK, claiming that the UK suffragettes didn’t want black women to have the vote and other idiocy. It makes me despair. I am young-ish myself, in the same age bracket as many of the panelists. I just can’t understand the wilful ignorance and also the aggression levelled at anyone who dares disagree. It honestly shocks me and I am not that easily shocked! I thought academia was a place for robust debate but it is shut down immediately. I am quite a logical person and I can’t just accept irrational arguments just because someone screams in my face that I have to. I have no issue with trans people existing or otherwise. I am just frightened at what passes for feminism and puzzled why people can’t see the harm in what they are promoting. The ‘you should die in a bin’ language that gets thrown at anyone who doesn’t agree with sex work for instance is astounding. I wish I had got to experience real feminism. When I was at uni, feminism was a dirty word associated with being ugly and a man-hater and it was the height of lads mags. Now, everyone claims to be a feminist but it’s become an empty concept. I can’t figure out which is worse tbh.

The women who walked out of that room need to be known as what they are: they are patriarchists the very antithesis of feminists.

What is today known as "Gender Studies" is patriarchism.

The same union leader who says she will do nothing to protect female academics from being harassed and bullied for not fully buying into gender ideology.

When is the next UCU leadership election? They really need to get rid of this shill.

What did Julia Long say to cause the mass exodus?

'Twas ever thus, I think ... I remember my little corner of the women's lib movement at university in the late 70s, where people would use emotion to turn an argument.

I wonder if it's because:
we're talking about lived embodied* expierence

• we've all (even a lot of tough feminists) tended to internalise the socialisation to be "nice" - which in latter years has turned into "kind" or kindness, as you point out.

No-one expects all members of other kinds of revolutionary protest movements to all be ethically and morally and personally pure

Just women.

I was having an interesting conversation with @DrEM on TWitter this morning about the way that non-historians keep on throwing incorrect made up facts at the early 20C suffragettes in a way that no progressive 'woke' person ever undermines the CHartists for example. I don't know if Dr EM posts here, but she's a good person to follow.

Of course, my consciousness raising group in 1978 didn't involve influence on laws, regulations, or careers. NOwadays this emotive (as opposed to emotional) dynamic can do real damage.

(I've been horrified to read accounts of that YAniv person's Human Rights case, or the abuse & harassment thrown at CAroline FArrell)

I know Ms Farrell sometimes posts here, and I know she can't really talk about anything at the moment, but strength to you, sister. And to Dr. Louise Moody

Away I am sure we do. The ‘whisper-network’ is pretty strong with a lot of them. Typical schoolgirl bully behaviour. I think it would have been extremely difficult to have stood up to them and not walked out which is probably why only older more established women stayed.

First of all, it’s a relevant point raised by the question. How, by continually arguing that women’s issues are not important enough, because we’re not as oppressed as others seemingly are, are these people promoting feminism? Feminism is about the liberation of women, not the endorsement of whatever comes out of a woman’s mouth just because she is a woman.
Secondly, oh my god, I have heard misogynistic questions at conferences that would turn your hair white. Did anyone stand up and walk out? Did they fuck.

Some of these women are very hypocritical in that they will talk about ‘known predators’ in the academy but will collaborate with them and publish with them if it advances their own careers. They will happily apply for funding that gives them teaching buyout, ie the labour of a precarious worker. They will include MacBooks in their costing analysis in return for cutting the length of the research assistant’s contract. They make noises about ‘fuck the REF’ but aim to build their profile nonetheless. They are no better than anyone else but they act like they are.

The whole thing is quite infuriating. The performative upset on twitter about how dreadful this was and how they can’t believe how these Nazis can be allowed to exist and how it feels like literal violence. I saw someone describe it as ‘I say I am hurt, therefore I must be in the right’. So much stuff about pain and tears and nausea at hearing someone ask a question. Totally skews the balance between them and the person asking the question.

Pota2 I suspect we know some of the same people and secret Facebook discussions ...

Interesting, it seems that older women continued sitting in. It was only in my late 20s that women I knew started opening up about the sexual assaults and rapes that they'd experienced. It was later still when I had children and was also a carer that I really understood the impacts of the patriarchy. These young women are relatively naive and inexperienced, they have little concept of the patriarchy. Good for Julia and Sheila, standing up for females as always.

The tragic thing is that they think they are. They spend their time trying to work out a hierarchy of oppression, telling ‘white feminists’* to shut up, decline invitations to speak, accept their privilege etc, while completely missing the point that they are missing so many opportunities to get the message out there. Instead, they actively and enthusiastically participate in all the things that are shit and oppressive about academia but think they have done their bit by sitting in a room for a few hours, bleating on about being radically kind. Lots of sycophantic stuff about how great one of the speakers, the union leader, is. A ‘true feminist’ apparently. This is the same union leader who used twitter to bully and harass a precariously employed disabled woman at York University who had apparently misgendered Lily Madigan. The same union leader who says she will do nothing to protect female academics from being harassed and bullied for not fully buying into gender ideology.

• obvs doesn’t apply to them. If you’re white, middle class and one of the cool girls and say the right things, you can basically do everything you tell others they can’t do. That’s why they all adore Phoebe Waller-Bridge and hold her up as some sort of feminist icon despite her being white, rich and upper middle class.

If all you have to do is ask a basic question to make them walk away, they aren't going to get much done, are they.

Way to fight the patriarchy.

Ooh this is interesting.

Was the walkout a historical 'reference' to the time when Julia Long suggested men might like to leave a screening of the film Lesbiana in solidarity with women?

Which tbh I think was a bit daft.

Probably not, in that none of the tweets mention it.

The resemblance grows every greater to religious cults: this is moral shunning.

Shunning can be the act of social rejection, or emotional distance. In a religious context, shunning is a formal decision by a denomination or a congregation to cease interaction with an individual or a group, and follows a particular set of rules. It differs from, but may be associated with, excommunication.

Social rejection occurs when a person or group deliberately avoids association with, and habitually keeps away from an individual or group. This can be a formal decision by a group, or a less formal group action which will spread to all members of the group as a form of solidarity. It is a sanction against association, often associated with religious groups and other tightly knit organizations and communities. Targets of shunning can include persons who have been labeled as apostates,

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunning

I've never heard of FWSAuk. Is it influential?

One of the tweets claims Julia has links to neo nazi's.

Sigh

Hope these privileged little twerps never actually meet a real neo nazi

The conference was organised and attended by the biggest examples of libfems you can find. It’s comical really that they talk about being radical in the academy but basically also admit they want to uphold all patriarchal values but with a side order of ‘being kind’. It’s hypocritical nonsense and it’s not feminism either. I know some of the people on the panels and they aren’t even kind, like they claim to be. Tip: if you’re going to endorse ‘radical kindness’, it’s an idea to not engage in bullying behaviour yourself.

This is feminist women treating another woman as an object.

I think this describes just how deeply the men are in control of what they call their "feminism".

I think we just call it what it is: men's rights activism.

It isn't any kind of feminism in any way at all.