Page 3 | Cambridge University LGBTQI+ students: we are not attempting to silence free speech, we just want to deplatform Helen Joyce

snurtifier · 2022-10-18T09:11:51+00:00

Helen Joyce has been invited to talk at Gonville & Caius College next week. This has provoked the usual outbreak of virtue signalling and the following response from "college LGBTQI+ officers". It is pretty much the full bingo card. Warning: contains complex mental gymnastics. ^Dear all,^ ^It has come to our attention that Gonville and Caius college, and the Divinity faculty, are hosting a speaker event on the 25th of October platforming Helen Joyce. This event has also been promoted by the Fac Bio to natural sciences, medic and vet med students. The title of the event is ‘Criticising gender-identity ideology: what happens when speech is silenced.’^ ^Helen Joyce is a ‘gender critical’ activist, whose work largely focuses around anti-trans rhetoric and trans-exclusionary radical feminism. “Gender identity ideology” is frequently used as a dog-whistle for transphobic sentiment, cloaked in the language of free speech and scientific inquiry. It goes without saying that this kind of rhetoric is fundamentally against what we as LGBT officers stand for, and we are unanimously disgusted by the platforming of such views by Caius and the promotion of the event by the various faculties. Transgender identities should not be put forward as a subject for debate, and their existence is not an “ideology.”^ ^Colleges, and the wider university, have a duty of care to their students, no matter their gender identity. By inviting speakers with inflammatory and bigoted views to speak, the staff involved are allowing transphobia to proliferate within the university, lending it a level of credibility, and crucially, potentially putting transgender students in harms’ way. Transgender people are an at-risk minority group – according to the Stonewall School Report 2017:^ ^92% of trans young people have thought about taking their own life;^ ^84% of trans young people have self-harmed; and^ ^45% of trans young people have tried to take their own life.^ ^Further to this, just days before the event was announced, the Home Office published the past years’ statistics on hate crimes in the UK, which revealed that transphobic hate crime has increased by 56% from last year, with 4,355 reports being made in England and Wales. In light of these statistics, the platforming of a speaker with these transphobic views takes on a particularly alarming salience.^ ^Freedom of speech, of course, is protected in law; Helen Joyce has the right to speak as she pleases. The core of the issue we take is with the senior staff and fellows who have chosen to platform this speaker, which we consider a violation of their duty of care. To invite a speaker whose publicly expressed views include advocating “reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition” both legitimises active transphobia and also alienates and hurts transgender individuals on a personal and emotional level. Furthermore, the fact that this has been promoted to medical students, who will inevitably treat transgender patients in their future careers, presents a further risk to trans individuals not just in the university, but in the wider community, with the potential for wide-reaching and long-lasting harm.^ ^This is not an attempt to silence free speech, but rather, us exercising our own right to that speech in the face of an event which is, in our view, not only irresponsible but actively harmful and cruel to the transgender students at Cambridge. Trans people deserve a university experience as comfortable, safe, and joyful as everyone else, and the University should take an active role in ensuring that – a role that they have, on this occasion, failed to fulfil. It is for these reasons that we implore Gonville and Caius to reconsider their decision to platform Joyce.^ ^If any individual feels unsafe, upset or troubled by this event, please talk to someone – your college LGBT officer, an SU representative, a college or university counsellor, or a charity helpline. We have attached some resources at the end of this letter.^ ^With love and solidarity,^ ^The college LGBT officers^

ChocFrog · 20/10/2022 23:38

So weird to see a hate campaign attacking the career of a lovely woman of great integrity, signed off “with love” 🙄

How deluded are these echo chambers.

ideasmirrour · 20/10/2022 23:01

Maybe if they didn't always use 50,000 words, when 20 would do, these ideas would be less likely to misinterpreted.
**
No doubt the full nuanced magnificence of Derrida is misunderstood by the peasants, however as a peasant I think that philosophers who dick around with concepts questioning objective truth (which then become mainstream), can reasonably be accused of inspiring the current harmful denial of objective truth by social justice activists.
**
Ideas as viruses. This is where it led. He might not have anticipated it or wanted it but he is in part to blame.
**
He did also wang on far too much about violent hierachies and binaries of oppression which seem frighteningly familiar.

A key point here might be that he doesn’t in fact “deny objective truth”. And “Violent hierarchies” — isn’t the entire point of gender critical feminist thought that the hierarchy between men and women is both a “binary of oppression” and essentially* *a violent one? One of the essential core aspects of Derrida’s thought is that binary oppressions are not just symmetrical intellectual games, but asymmetric relationships of real oppression, involving violence, political, social and economic control - eg of men over women. The very point that gender critical women make against transactivists who pretend that oppression is not real and the binary opposition of sex doesn’t exist.

Ditto the binary sex/gender, which gender ideology tries to pretend is interchangeable and meaningless — deconstruction, in contrast, argues the complete reverse. It’s not “postmodern”. The feminists who were most influenced by Derrida were eg. Cixous, Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, who are also regarded with horror by gender ideologists, for the crime of suggesting that men aren’t women and vice versa (all three now also derided as proponents of the dreaded “essentialism”; and for the crimes of “erasing queer and trans folx” by holding to the notions that women exist, bodies exist and we are also uniquely oppressed by men on that basis).

One of the reasons Derrida’s thought isn’t expressible in twenty words is that it isn’t remotely reducible to some pop-culture caricature of “well he said there’s no objective truth!” Misrepresenting, getting wrong, or repeating misleading caricatures of ideas (especially without reading and understanding them), is one of the aspects of gender identity ideology that we rightly excoriate. We shouldn’t be doing this either. It makes no sense to complain about gender ideologists simply repeating inaccurate caricatures just because they fits in with their biases, if feminist women who should know better do the same.

Baaaaaa · 20/10/2022 21:34

ideasmirrour · 20/10/2022 17:55

Well, to start with, one theorist or strain of thought can perfectly well be informed by a predecessor, without the two being much the same (or indeed much alike at all). One philosopher may take very different things from multiple previous philosophers with whom they simultaneously disagree. That’s very common in the history of philosophy.

Foucault and Derrida are completely different kinds of thought (they disliked each other’s work); and queer theory is not gender identity ideology (indeed, you would find little in common between Sedgwick and Butler, in many ways; and not much obvious correspondence between either and current gender identity ideology — Butler’s early work even runs counter to much of the activists who claim to love her!)

A great deal of the current gender identity ideology is itself a cobbled-together set of lay ideas simplified by being churned around on the internet. It bears as much relationship to genuine academic thought as Liz Truss’s ideas on economics do to Hayek. One might dislike both, but in no way could they be considered the same thing — even if Liz Truss thinks they are.

So: the danger is of conflating several different things, here (and the Stanford EoP is of necessity an outline resource primarily written for analytic philosophers about continental philosophy: it isn’t particularly great on every topic. Indeed, the persistent mischaracterising of Continental philosophy as fraudulent, by Anglophone analytic philosophers trained in a fundamentally different discipline, is at the root of the anti-Derrida movements the OP mentions upthread.)

I do, however, agree with the comparison with a theological split between the ideas of the masses and the debates of the theologians. In this case, though, there are still many within the academy who are not taken in — but also don’t wish to see genuine philosophical and critical thought misrepresented — especially by those who, if they understood it better, might well agree. (Derrida and poststructuralism have been the bugbear for decades now, each time by people who don’t really understand it —so tagging it on to gender ideology is a bit of a tired move, too.)

And students certainly don’t get this stuff from academic discourses or critical theory or anything else. They arrive with it and stubbornly refuse to be challenged on it. It’s been circulating on the internet in places like Tumblr for nearly ten years now; and I can guarantee you that the anime teens on Tumblr are not reading poststructuralism. The source of this is porn and neoliberalism, and not the delving into the minutiae of linguistic structures in Levi-Strauss for the fun 😂

I don’t deny that there are useful idiots in the academy who also perpetrate this stuff. They tend not to be those who have a deep knowledge of Continental philosophy, however 😂 Very much the reverse. (And often, scientists, for some reason, are the most taken in by it all.)

Show quote history

Maybe if they didn't always use 50,000 words, when 20 would do, these ideas would be less likely to misinterpreted.

No doubt the full nuanced magnificence of Derrida is misunderstood by the peasants, however as a peasant I think that philosophers who dick around with concepts questioning objective truth (which then become mainstream), can reasonably be accused of inspiring the current harmful denial of objective truth by social justice activists.

Ideas as viruses. This is where it led. He might not have anticipated it or wanted it but he is in part to blame.

He did also wang on far too much about violent hierachies and binaries of oppression which seem frighteningly familiar.

Ofcourseshecan · 20/10/2022 19:53

And this is the same students union who did their best to get a college porter Kevin Price sacked because, as a city councillor, he refused to recite the new articles of faith: “Transwomen are women, transmen are men, non-binary individuals are non-binary”.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8883575/Cambridge-students-demand-transphobic-Labour-politician-loses-college-porter-job.html

The Daily Mail said this was about trans rights, whereas Kevin Price (he resigned from the council over this issue) was clear that the council’s policy was a threat to women.

Ofcourseshecan · 20/10/2022 19:35

LexMitior · 18/10/2022 13:37

Cambridge going seriously downhill if this is the standard of thought. Why are all these very intelligent people so frightened? Presumably their little absolutist mentality cannot stand a little discussion. Suggests there should be much more of it, not less.

Yes. The allegations made without any evidence, the use of fake stats that have long been disproved … and these are an elite?

On the other side, the college sounds sensible. From the Varsity article: Caius told Varsity: “Gonville & Caius College prides itself on being a welcoming and inclusive community. The event on October 25 is an external event hosted by Professor Arif Ahmed, a Caius Fellow.

“It is not a College event. We support free speech and would encourage those within the College community and wider society to challenge views they find reprehensible through debate and to celebrate our diversity.”

For once, the words inclusive and diversity being used correctly, instead of meaning “grovelling to the gender police”!

Are academics starting to regain some backbone?

ideasmirrour · 20/10/2022 17:55

liwoxac · 20/10/2022 10:42

I think you're wrong about Derrida and gender ideology, albeit in an interesting way.

Here's something from Stanford (probably the best online Philosophy Encyclopedia, for those interested; see Stanford trans philosophy):
" Queer Theory roughly applies to theoretical work, typically informed by Foucault and Derrida, that aims to study and “deconstruct” heteronormative ideology. It emerged in the 1990s through thinkers such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick."

Judith Butler, as any fule kno, is in many ways the Mother of trans ideology ... and, yes, she follows Derrida in being, as you say, "deeply sceptical of gender identity ideology" How can this be?

What is going on? As follows (roughly). Actually, currently there isn't a single unified 'gender ideology' at all. There are two modes, operating under a single brand. What's more, these two modes are mutually incompatible ...

The academic, Butlerian mode of gender ideology follows Derridean post-structuralism in having no truck with notions of identity - of necessity, given its roots, we could say. But what we might call the popular mode of gender ideology bases itself thoroughly on this very notion of (gender) identity. (I imagine old Jacques smiling at this conjuctive disjunction. Scoundrel that he was.)

Can these two modes be reconciled? I suspect that not. (Although each of them is nonsensical, albeit in different ways, and we might link them by an ex falso quodlibet.) But it is one of the many trahisons des clercs committed by queer theorists that they do not apply their theory, at least in public, to the popular - and societally influential - mode of gender (-identity) ideology. (Shame on them.)

I sometimes think of this state of affairs as akin to what often happens in (other?) religious ideologies: the simple faith of the masses based on notions excoriated (but not publicly) by the clever theologians. Certainly that was the case in the Roman Catholicism of my long-ago youth. Plus ça change ...?

Show quote history

Well, to start with, one theorist or strain of thought can perfectly well be informed by a predecessor, without the two being much the same (or indeed much alike at all). One philosopher may take very different things from multiple previous philosophers with whom they simultaneously disagree. That’s very common in the history of philosophy.

Foucault and Derrida are completely different kinds of thought (they disliked each other’s work); and queer theory is not gender identity ideology (indeed, you would find little in common between Sedgwick and Butler, in many ways; and not much obvious correspondence between either and current gender identity ideology — Butler’s early work even runs counter to much of the activists who claim to love her!)

A great deal of the current gender identity ideology is itself a cobbled-together set of lay ideas simplified by being churned around on the internet. It bears as much relationship to genuine academic thought as Liz Truss’s ideas on economics do to Hayek. One might dislike both, but in no way could they be considered the same thing — even if Liz Truss thinks they are.

So: the danger is of conflating several different things, here (and the Stanford EoP is of necessity an outline resource primarily written for analytic philosophers about continental philosophy: it isn’t particularly great on every topic. Indeed, the persistent mischaracterising of Continental philosophy as fraudulent, by Anglophone analytic philosophers trained in a fundamentally different discipline, is at the root of the anti-Derrida movements the OP mentions upthread.)

I do, however, agree with the comparison with a theological split between the ideas of the masses and the debates of the theologians. In this case, though, there are still many within the academy who are not taken in — but also don’t wish to see genuine philosophical and critical thought misrepresented — especially by those who, if they understood it better, might well agree. (Derrida and poststructuralism have been the bugbear for decades now, each time by people who don’t really understand it —so tagging it on to gender ideology is a bit of a tired move, too.)

And students certainly don’t get this stuff from academic discourses or critical theory or anything else. They arrive with it and stubbornly refuse to be challenged on it. It’s been circulating on the internet in places like Tumblr for nearly ten years now; and I can guarantee you that the anime teens on Tumblr are not reading poststructuralism. The source of this is porn and neoliberalism, and not the delving into the minutiae of linguistic structures in Levi-Strauss for the fun 😂

I don’t deny that there are useful idiots in the academy who also perpetrate this stuff. They tend not to be those who have a deep knowledge of Continental philosophy, however 😂 Very much the reverse. (And often, scientists, for some reason, are the most taken in by it all.)

ScrollingLeaves · 20/10/2022 15:30

RoseslnTheHospital· 18/10/2022 10:35
I cannot get over how some students believe that some people having a discussion, that no one is forced to attend or participate in could make them feel unsafe or somehow cause them harm. How is our society producing adults with so little resilience and robustness?

The way the words ‘unsafe and harm* are being used here is ridiculous. It is just seems to be a thoughtless repetition of what is bandied about. Can’t students at Cambridge think and write for themselves?

I am not an academic but if anyone used those words so redundantly in an essay I was marking I’d tell them to try to be more exact about what they mean.

MangyInseam · 20/10/2022 14:39

I sometimes think of this state of affairs as akin to what often happens in (other?) religious ideologies: the simple faith of the masses based on notions excoriated (but not publicly) by the clever theologians. Certainly that was the case in the Roman Catholicism of my long-ago youth. Plus ça change ...?

I don't see this as a religious phenomena. It also happens in terms of philosophy and how it trickles down to the masses, and even science. If you go asking the general population about common scientific frameworks that inform how they see reality, they will often be quite different than what scientists who operate in the relevant area say.

Certainly the popular concept of what science is and how it operates is not particularly in line with what a philosopher of science would say, just look at the "follow the science" rhetoric in the pandemic.

Christianity historically, like a lot of other religions, accepted that this kind of gap was a reality that had to be managed, I am not sure we are better off for assuming we can close that gap even though widespread public education makes it seem possible, at least theoretically. My suspicion is though that very high level abstract thought is not accessible to everyone and maybe no one is able to get to that level in every discipline.

Kellie45 · 20/10/2022 14:09

ScrollingLeaves · 20/10/2022 12:12

according to the Stonewall School Report 2017:

92% of trans young people have thought about taking their own life;

84% of trans young people have self-harmed; and

45% of trans young people have tried to take their own life.

Has anyone got the real facts around regarding this moral blackmail?

What a shame that these students at Cambridge University believe cancelling the speakers is the answer rather than proving the speakers wrong.

This Swedish Study is a follow up study and the mortality rate of trans gender people following transition shows it is not the panacea it is made out to be.
Results

Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden | PLOS ONE

journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885

Excerpt:
The overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up (aHR 2.8; 95% CI 1.8–4.3) than for controls of the same birth sex, particularly death from suicide (aHR 19.1; 95% CI 5.8–62.9). Sex-reassigned persons also had an increased risk for suicide attempts (aHR 4.9; 95% CI 2.9–8.5) and psychiatric inpatient care (aHR 2.8; 95% CI 2.0–3.9). Comparisons with controls matched on reassigned sex yielded similar results. Female-to-males, but not male-to-females, had a higher risk for criminal convictions than their respective birth sex controls.

Conclusions

Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group.

And we believe Stonewall?

TheBiologyStupid · 20/10/2022 12:37

Oops, I meant to add that your post was very interesting, liwoxac, especially the comparison between the theologians and pew-fillers and their gender ideology counterparts.

TheBiologyStupid · 20/10/2022 12:30

as any fule kno

Thanks, liwoxac - I haven't seen Nigel Molesworth quoted in ages. 😀

TheBiologyStupid · 20/10/2022 12:24

A university is a community of scholars. It is not a kindergarten; it is not a club; it is not a reform school; it is not a political party; it is not an agency of propaganda. A university is a community of scholars.”
Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899-1977).

Hutchins was appointed President of the University of Chicago at the age of 30. During his sixteen years in the post he was active in developing the institution's strong freedom of expression rules.

His influence can be seen in the University of Chicago's 1967 Kalven report, which stated: "A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.”

(Apologies for the duplication, as I posted the same quotes on another thread about the capture of academics.)

ScrollingLeaves · 20/10/2022 12:12

according to the Stonewall School Report 2017:

92% of trans young people have thought about taking their own life;

84% of trans young people have self-harmed; and

45% of trans young people have tried to take their own life.

Has anyone got the real facts around regarding this moral blackmail?

What a shame that these students at Cambridge University believe cancelling the speakers is the answer rather than proving the speakers wrong.

This Swedish Study is a follow up study and the mortality rate of trans gender people following transition shows it is not the panacea it is made out to be.
Results

Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden | PLOS ONE

journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885

Excerpt:
The overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up (aHR 2.8; 95% CI 1.8–4.3) than for controls of the same birth sex, particularly death from suicide (aHR 19.1; 95% CI 5.8–62.9). Sex-reassigned persons also had an increased risk for suicide attempts (aHR 4.9; 95% CI 2.9–8.5) and psychiatric inpatient care (aHR 2.8; 95% CI 2.0–3.9). Comparisons with controls matched on reassigned sex yielded similar results. Female-to-males, but not male-to-females, had a higher risk for criminal convictions than their respective birth sex controls.

Conclusions

Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group.

Catabogus · 20/10/2022 11:51

Adieufattummy · 19/10/2022 19:17

The Master and Senior Tutor have capitulated to the students

twitter.com/camradfems/status/1582760543496343553

very disappointing

I am really, deeply shocked and disturbed by this.

CoffeeIsForClosers · 20/10/2022 11:20

HipTightOnions · 18/10/2022 16:59

This is not an attempt to silence free speech [...] It is for these reasons that we implore Gonville and Caius to reconsider their decision to platform Joyce.

-No wonder they have trouble with logic and reality...

Perhaps they are in favour of free speech as long as you do it on your own in a soundproof room.

Reminds me of that Clash lyric:

"You have the right to free speech
As long as
You're not dumb enough
To actually try it..."

Kellie45 · 20/10/2022 11:11

The whole lunatic idea of cancelling someone because they have a different opinion which is quite peaceable is crazy. If people might be upset by hearing Helen Joyce then for goodness sake don’t go and hear the lecture. If somebody might be driven to suicide by somebody saying that a woman is a woman then it may be that that person is in need of therapy not a course at university.

SirTiffikate · 20/10/2022 11:00

Academic freedom is the freedom for scholars to pursue truth and understanding according to established scholarly conventions, without interference. This includes through teaching, research, publishing and public engagement. Universities have a legal obligation to uphold it. The academic who organised this talk - Arif Ahmed - is exercising his legal right to academic freedom (which is different from Helen Joyce's right to freedom of expression). He's organised a public talk which is something academics do all the time in their pursuit of truth and understanding.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm interested in how that email from the master and senior tutor squares with Caius College's legal obligation to ensure that Ahmed is enabled to pursue truth and understanding without interference. They seem to be encouraging the attempted interference, and failing to maintain organisational neutrality - using their first names doesn't make them less responsible for a circular email they send round.

liwoxac · 20/10/2022 10:42

ideasmirrour · 19/10/2022 19:35

Disappointed at the weaselly capitulation by Caius. Ridiculous!

As an aside, though, @snurtifier, Derrida has absolutely nothing to do with gender ideology. He isn’t even a postmodernist, if you dislike postmodernism. He’s effectively writing in a Hegelian Marxist tradition, and would have been deeply sceptical of gender identity ideology, which can’t really exist at all under deconstruction. If you know Derrida well, you’d be unable to believe in any gender identity ideology.

Doesn’t help to aim at not just the wrong target, but also at a form of thought that would be explicitly against gender ideology and in fact undoes all the genderists’ claims.

Show quote history

I think you're wrong about Derrida and gender ideology, albeit in an interesting way.

Here's something from Stanford (probably the best online Philosophy Encyclopedia, for those interested; see Stanford trans philosophy):
" Queer Theory roughly applies to theoretical work, typically informed by Foucault and Derrida, that aims to study and “deconstruct” heteronormative ideology. It emerged in the 1990s through thinkers such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick."

Judith Butler, as any fule kno, is in many ways the Mother of trans ideology ... and, yes, she follows Derrida in being, as you say, "deeply sceptical of gender identity ideology" How can this be?

What is going on? As follows (roughly). Actually, currently there isn't a single unified 'gender ideology' at all. There are two modes, operating under a single brand. What's more, these two modes are mutually incompatible ...

The academic, Butlerian mode of gender ideology follows Derridean post-structuralism in having no truck with notions of identity - of necessity, given its roots, we could say. But what we might call the popular mode of gender ideology bases itself thoroughly on this very notion of (gender) identity. (I imagine old Jacques smiling at this conjuctive disjunction. Scoundrel that he was.)

Can these two modes be reconciled? I suspect that not. (Although each of them is nonsensical, albeit in different ways, and we might link them by an ex falso quodlibet.) But it is one of the many trahisons des clercs committed by queer theorists that they do not apply their theory, at least in public, to the popular - and societally influential - mode of gender (-identity) ideology. (Shame on them.)

I sometimes think of this state of affairs as akin to what often happens in (other?) religious ideologies: the simple faith of the masses based on notions excoriated (but not publicly) by the clever theologians. Certainly that was the case in the Roman Catholicism of my long-ago youth. Plus ça change ...?

MangyInseam · 20/10/2022 02:47

Catabogus · 19/10/2022 07:48

I really don’t think I am saying that. In particular I would never want to see individuals banned - but I’m also not interested in “banning” topics either.

I think this clause in your PP If there is an interest in a topic like race and IQ, if there are scholars looking at this kind of question, who think it is important is doing a lot of heavy lifting - I’m saying we shouldn’t host/sponsor events on topics like race science where there is no serious academic interest (as far as I’m aware!) and the topic is being raised only by fringe/extremist groups. Let me stress again here that I don’t see Helen Joyce’s work like that at all.

It’s a bit like public funding of research, I guess: I would never want to see any topics “banned” but of course RCUK has to make decisions about which topics are worthy of million-pound grants and which topics are not. The ones that are fringe and pseudo-scientific or based on racist assumptions don’t tend to get the funding, and rightly not.

And no, there’s not a “closed group” making decisions; but I’m a HoD and of course together with my seminars and events colleagues we will decide which speakers to invite and which events to host each term.

Show quote history

But as you say, this already happens.

There are all kinds of polemical speakers who don't get invited to talk at universities because everyone knows they are intellectually lightweight.

But if professors, or students, are interested in hearing a talk, there is something that has caught their interest, even if it is more to do with it being culturally relevant at a particular moment.

This doesn't square at all with your argument that no one should invite speakers who might talk about something like Holocaust denial - or at least what some people define as Holocaust denial. Why not, if they are presenting some kind of serious or culturally important argument that academics or students are interested in?

TheBiologyStupid · 19/10/2022 20:06

TheBiologyStupid · 18/10/2022 15:47

Are there any statistics about how many "trans young people" have actually died by suicide? If it was anything like the stats the students claim threaten to I'm sure we'd be aware of it.

Show quote history

Best that I could find: Stats from Amsterdam Cohort of Gender Dysphoria study (1972–2017):

The prevalence of suicidality in trans people in suicidal ideation, suicidal attempts, and suicide death rates is studied in varying degrees and shows high variability in findings. [...] Since structured prevalence studies on suicide deaths are lacking in the transgender literature, an estimation comes from a limited number of studies reporting on suicide death rates in small study samples. Derived from a systematic review on suicidality in trans people by Marshall et al., suicide death rates varied from 0% to 4.2% in a sample of 24 post‐treatment trans people from Sweden (15). Six of these studies only included postsurgical people whereas two studies also included trans people who were only using hormones without surgery. However, studies differentiating the treatment stage during which death by suicide occurred are lacking. In addition, studies differentiating between suicide in trans women and trans men are scarce. While some studies found that trans men have a higher risk of suicide attempts than trans women other studies reported no differences in suicide attempts between trans women and trans men. Only one cohort distinguished suicide death risk in trans women and trans men and found that trans women had an increased risk of suicide death compared with trans men.

Conclusions
We observed no increase in suicide death risk over time and even a decrease in suicide death risk in trans women. However, the suicide risk in transgender people is higher than in the general population and seems to occur during every stage of transitioning.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7317390/

So it seems that the evidence base consists of "a limited number of studies reporting on suicide death rates in small study samples", that higher male rates of suicide persist in transwomen, and that the elevated risk persists in all stages of transitioning including postsurgically.

Access to drugs and surgery certainly doesn't seem to be a cure-all. Maybe more investment in mental health services is the way to go. ¡Que sorpresa!

ideasmirrour · 19/10/2022 19:35

snurtifier · 18/10/2022 11:57

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Derrida Affair. In 1992 Jacques Derrida was nominated to receive an honorary degree at Cambridge. The nomination was opposed by a number of academics. Barry Smith wrote a celebrated letter to the Times portraying Derrida as a charlatan whose works had no traction within philosophy, only within cultural studies and so forth. Interviewed about the affair in 1997, he said of Derrida: "if you eliminate truth and reason - if you eliminate argument - then naked power is going to be the only thing left over as the means by which decisions can be made in society."

It feels a bit like Derrida has triumphed from beyond the grave. And these students are doing their best to prove Smith right.

Disappointed at the weaselly capitulation by Caius. Ridiculous!

As an aside, though, @snurtifier, Derrida has absolutely nothing to do with gender ideology. He isn’t even a postmodernist, if you dislike postmodernism. He’s effectively writing in a Hegelian Marxist tradition, and would have been deeply sceptical of gender identity ideology, which can’t really exist at all under deconstruction. If you know Derrida well, you’d be unable to believe in any gender identity ideology.

Doesn’t help to aim at not just the wrong target, but also at a form of thought that would be explicitly against gender ideology and in fact undoes all the genderists’ claims.

Adieufattummy · 19/10/2022 19:26

Yes, it’s still going ahead thankfully.

RoseslnTheHospital · 19/10/2022 19:20

But the debate is still going ahead? Or no?

Adieufattummy · 19/10/2022 19:17

The Master and Senior Tutor have capitulated to the students

twitter.com/camradfems/status/1582760543496343553

very disappointing

Catabogus · 19/10/2022 07:48

MangyInseam · 19/10/2022 02:14

Functionally you are absolutely saying people should be banned from speaking.

If there is an interest in a topic like race and IQ, if there are scholars looking at this kind of question, who think it is important, by definition it's not marginal. That is how the university works, and the public discourse more generally. If people are talking about it, it is in some sense important.

In your system, who would be the people who get to decide what is too niche, too silly? What would be the process to determine that? Who would decide where the lines are, or whether drawing those lines might have unexpected consequences in other areas?

The only workable option, the only transparent option, is through open public discourse. Otherwise you are talking about some kind of closed group who are making these kinds of decisions about what is important and what people can legitimately talk about. By what processes? Who knows. On what authority? Their own. With what special knowledge?

There is no system that guarantees that all people will only believe the right things. Which may seem like an excuse to limit what others can see right up until you realize there is no guarantee you will only believe the right things.

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I really don’t think I am saying that. In particular I would never want to see individuals banned - but I’m also not interested in “banning” topics either.

I think this clause in your PP If there is an interest in a topic like race and IQ, if there are scholars looking at this kind of question, who think it is important is doing a lot of heavy lifting - I’m saying we shouldn’t host/sponsor events on topics like race science where there is no serious academic interest (as far as I’m aware!) and the topic is being raised only by fringe/extremist groups. Let me stress again here that I don’t see Helen Joyce’s work like that at all.

It’s a bit like public funding of research, I guess: I would never want to see any topics “banned” but of course RCUK has to make decisions about which topics are worthy of million-pound grants and which topics are not. The ones that are fringe and pseudo-scientific or based on racist assumptions don’t tend to get the funding, and rightly not.

And no, there’s not a “closed group” making decisions; but I’m a HoD and of course together with my seminars and events colleagues we will decide which speakers to invite and which events to host each term.