Glasgow Conservatoire accused of ableism and transphobia

“A non-passing trans woman — a biological male with traditionally male characteristics who identifies as a female — said the lecturer persistently referred to her as a man.“

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Every fucker in the country I live in now mispronounces my name (and spells it wrong too) unless I correct them 100 times. Could I have been filing complaints and extracting money for that this whole time?

Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spirit of our I bet not a single one of them is Glaswegian comrades.

(Is this institution the Goldsmiths of Glasgow, in terms of the contrast between it's students and the people they live among? I can't imagine many born and bred Glaswegians having much patience with this sort of self indulgent bollocks.)

Barack Obama challenges just this sort of nonsense:

www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50239261

Has anyone read the principles reply to the students that's attached to the students letter?

The 'Unconscious bias training' he's agreed to sounds a bit chilling.

I recommend reading The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt. It explores why young people might be behaving like this in American Universities, very interesting and actually quite worrying.
Bret Weinstein of the Evergreen College debacle also has some interesting stuff to say on the subject, there are interviews with him on you tube.

My name's Scottish, and no one can pronounce it. Glad to hear this gives me woke points.

I had a teacher in secondary school who once sent me out of the classroom. It was unfair. I DEMAND HER HEAD. SHE SHOULD BE SACKED. RE-EDUCATED. AND THE REST.

It's ridiculous and sad that so many students are so self centred and lacking empathy for their tutors. Do they really think the colour and gender identity of their tutors is more important than the quality of their teaching?
The cuddling a block of ice thing sounds boring as performance art and isn't new, plus she had an abortion not a miscarriage.
If I had got pregnant as a student I would have had an abortion but would have probably felt a hypocrite then pretending to be a bereaved mother.

Colin Macfarlane, director of Stonewall Scotland, said: “Our 2018 research found more than a third of trans students have been the target of negative comments from staff.

That's a bit vague and could just be the normal robust criticism of one's creations.

Well, it is art school, after all. This stuff is beyond parody by now. All their letter of complaint was missing was reference to running dogs, capitalist roaders and bourgeois lackeys.

I wonder what their end-goal is? What kind of society do they envision? Even when everything heteronormative has been queered and the marginalised have been empowered and pronouns have become sacred text, what then?

I'm not exaggerating when I say some sessions were just one long check in with a check out at the end.

Welcome to my life!

Maybe the whole thing is a piece of art.

A piece of something, anyway.

Oh god we did tireless never ending check ins.

And you weren't allowed to interrupt anyone and they could talk about WHATEVER they wanted for as long as they wanted and it just took as long as it took.
I'm not exaggerating when I say some sessions were just one long check in with a check out at the end.

Imagine it, performance art students given the floor for however long they wanted. And how they wanted it.

There's a part of my soul still there.

To be fair to the students their article seems more nuanced than the Telegraph article, especially since 6 complaints were upheld. Physically manhandling a student is never ok, mocking students with mental illness is never ok.

I do appreciate a lot of their complaints are nonsense, and the fact they submitted 100s of pages of complaints shows that. I'm another one echoing the fact that the vast majority of the Scottish population is white, non trans, with no obvious disabilities so it sounds like their staff reflect this. We have no idea if they have initiatives to make sure they are recruiting fairly from available candidates, but I expect the do monitor their staff on protected characteristics.

I'm surprised art students do check ins though, I did these studying counselling but have never heard of them anywhere else.

I'm not sure about the abortion one either.
Context is everything. Mine is only doing GCSE Art but I know her teacher gives her alternative ideas when she is planning.
She could have said "another way to approach this would be to" etc.

The whole lot is just entitled twaddle, who raised these idiots.

As mentioned by PP upthread it’s very like the Evergreen College story. Students at liberal arts colleges are tilting at windmills, they are actively seeking out oppression and exaggerate or straw man events to prove it.
I did my BA at Goldsmiths (Fine Art Practice and Contemporary Critical Theory) which is another high-pressured environment, thoroughly steeped in PoMo bullshit and political wokeness, yet it is somehow still not woke enough to prevent students from occupying a building in protest against institutional racism: www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/education/2019/jun/19/goldsmiths-anti-racism-protest-marks-100th-day-with-rally

Racism/sexism/homophobia etc clearly do exist in the world, seemingly some people are motivated to invent situations to ‘prove’ it, which ultimately has the opposite effect.

See also, the staging of fake hate crimes, such as the Jussie Smollett story: m.youtube.com/watch?v=nmQJfFumYg0

It's odd as well because this course is one of the most twaw places ever.
I went to a lecture once about how biological sex was a social construct and thinking that I must just be misunderstanding what was being said because it's gender not sex that's the construct. But no I wasn't. And that was at least ten years ago.

There are definitely some issues with the course but it not being woke enough is not one of them.

PS - here’s a handy calculator to see how oppressed you are: intersectionalityscore.com/

😂

I went to two prestigious art schools (fine art, rather than performing art) and harsh critique is what you sign up for. It’s not really personal but it feels personal because it’s about your art.

I would hope that legitimate complaints would be dealt with via the university’s systems for doing so, that this hasn’t happened leaves me thinking this is a case of aggrieved, entitled, brats.

I’d bet almost every arts lecturer has reduced a student to tears at some point, likely scores of students. It comes with the territory. I was already a single mum when I started my BA and spent a lot of time mopping up the tears of other students.

Dear me.

On an allied topic, I saw a news report or a tweet yesterday that said trans actors shouldn't just be cast as trans people, they should be considered for the whole range of roles. I was a bit . Aren't they also demanding that only trans actors should play trans roles? What happened to acting - have I misunderstood all my life that acting is about pretending to be someone else, who might be radically different from you?

There was also a news report that narcissists are happier than average because they get so much attention. No shit, Sherlock!

"The students complained that they had yet to receive an apology for the “unpaid emotional labour” they expended in the complaint"

If they're allowed to publicly flog the woman they're complaining about will they later complain that she didn't pay for the whip herself too?

And one complaint is that the Professor spoke out to students about her own experience of sexual harassment/assault in the arts as part of a conversation about #MeToo.

But that's wrong as it triggered the students and made one "cry hysterically on the street".

I have a very common first name that has two different spellings so people often jump the wrong way and a very common surname which is very similar to another even more common in this part of the world surname so people get it wrong all the time.

I'd have had a stroke decades back if I got worked up about these things.

People both constantly misspell my first name and mispronounce my last name. It has never occurred to me that this is some form of oppression or an insult. It's just a product of having a very unusual name. I love my uncommon first name.

A non-passing trans woman — a biological male with traditionally male characteristics who identifies as a female — said the lecturer persistently referred to her as a man.

If this individual plans to work in the performing arts I do hope they don't expect to be cast in female roles. It'd be like me, fat and 60+, uauditioning for Juliet.

Auditions are going to be extremely traumatic for them unless they accept the truth about their appearance.