Biggus Titus of Oxford University

And before people come for me - it’s not because this is a transgender individual, it’s the provocative nature of the giant breasts and cleavage, which appear to be perpetually on show, the attire that almost no woman would ever wear in a professional environment precisely because it would either attract unwanted attention, be perceived negatively, or make men take her less seriously. It’s so in your face. And it’s designed to make people so uncomfortable they wouldn’t dare make a fuss. This is not someone just quietly going about an innermost identity. It’s a performance in which we are all unconsenting participants in someone’s fetish.

OMG thank you @Forecastsayssnowbutthereisnosnow!

I do not know this individual but have many LinkedIn contacts who do. As such, his material creeps into my LinkedIn feed where I find it utterly disarming. Yes I could hide it etc etc, but then I wouldn’t be able to keep a watching brief on what my (almost entirely male) friends and colleagues are actually saying in support of this behaviour.

I do not understand how anyone can view this as anything other than gratuitous and/or fetish-driven behaviour. Clearly it’s performative and a challenge to how people, especially women, respond. Are we going to make a fuss? Are we going to accept him as a female presence?

I personally feel very threatened by the behaviour of this individual and utterly powerless to say anything at all.

Has he told you he’s a transwoman?

They're the ones that call themselves transwomen. We just call them men. Try mentally inserting the word 'man' everytime you see the word 'transwoman' and you will soon get the gist of what is going on here.

I'm definitely not 'nice' to fetishists or misogynists or homophobes. I hope you aren't either.

No you haven't been naïve, you been manipulative, you've tried to normalise abnormal behaviours, there's only ever one reason to do that.

Your faux contrition is just more manipulation, it's an attempt to deflect blame on to anybody who's called you out on your bullshit.
I don't mind one little bit that you think I'm 'not very nice'.

To be fair lady1576, this was "not a very nice" post either. Maybe people have responded to you in the tone of this very first post of yours on this thread.

😂
We're listening - and watching - and drawing some very accurate conclusions about what is happening here.

Surprised to see someone actively in favour of this man's behaviour. But thank you - it's quite the education to see in real life the lack of boundaries and unthinking support for the socially unacceptable.

You mean organise a campaign of harassment against a trans person.

when someone tells you who they are, listen.

Agreed. The key thing is context. It's inappropriate to wear certain clothes in work, whether you're male or female. Where that line is drawn will depend wholly on context e.g. if you work in a beach bar, wear a bikini. If you work in an office, don't.

Anyone who can't navigate the social contract (male or female) based on context deserves pulling up on it. Even my daughters have noticed how totally inappropriate some of the (young female) teachers' clothes are at their school. I don't think either of them knows where the line "should" be in the context of teachers in a school, but they both seem to agree on the examples that cross it.

Unfortunately it sounds like this lecturer is wearing these kind of clothes on the days when young children are present too. IIRC there was a PP who said they saw him on an inset day and other children were also at the event. He would presumably have been told that children were coming in that day.... yet still deemed the outfit appropriate. An odd decision.

that’s been the problem for years though: women being nice, feeling forced to be nice, to be kind, to be affirming and validating. It’s why we’ve got to this place where entitled blokes wear big fake tits in public and women don’t bat an eyelid because they’ve been conditioned to be compliant. Fuck being kind.

To people not well-versed in this discourse, it does seem like some feminists are against transwomen. That doesn’t make me a man or a supporter of this man! Or his mum! But I see the issue is not with transwomen but with men who enjoy overstepping boundaries around sexuality and gender in ways that are sneaky and take advantage of woke ‚do-gooders (really hate that insult). posters here have suggested some helpful areas for me to inform myself better. Thank you for that. You‘ve definitely given me a lot to think about. Definitely why is he doing this is a simple but very good question!! So yes, I think I was being quite naive. I still think a few of you are not very nice though…

Well women do do that sometimes. But I agree it‘s not a good thing to do and I agree with your point. I mean we don‘t like to hear that men are being made uncomfortable by how girls dress in school for example, but I do think some dress is not work appropriate, and I would definitely say his dress is not work appropriate.

Thank you Amaryllis, my mind boggles at how my undergraduates would have reacted... (not to mention the Faculty's Advisory Board who I'm seeing afterwards 😳)

Sorry @Igmum it was a joke. No knitted dildoes round here, suffragette colours or plain, not even a sparkly sock and a couple of pompons.

But there are some quite interesting freedom of expression questions here.

That rigid, binary thinking is a real feature of the ideology, I think. You see it here all the time in this ridiculous good/bad, kind/bigotted, all/nothing polemical thinking, and the sheer hyperbole. At best, I think it reflects that naive it's-just-like-gay-rights thinking. At its worst... emotive attack is really the only way to defend a fairly reductive way of thinking that just doesn't stand up to more nuanced scrutiny.

I find it telling that the TRSOH response to the previously uncontroversial position of appropriate apparel for appropriate occasions was to jump straight to "people will have to wear uniforms for everything" - in the end, despite the claimed celebration of devil-may-care anything goes happy-clappy freedom, the mindset is rigidly binary.

You're either a glorious flower-child of the intellectual heights of flowing freethought, or you're a nasty bullying uneducated nonacademic bigot. Thus, you're either joyously on board with rainbow dildo giant tits rubber suits in the lecture theatre, or you're a Mao-suited straight-jacketed grey automaton.

I know, but we need to get back to fetishes being private as no one going out in public should have to take part in someone else’s perversion. The more this has been normalised, the more emboldened these men have become. If they have a problem in that they are only turned on by transgressing other people’s boundaries, then they need help. Maybe a men’s charity could be established that can fund research and treatment, along with appropriate support.

I believe the trans rights agenda has emboldened this particular man, who uses they/them in the bio someone posted above, so can claim to be under the trans umbrella and therefore one of the special people who must not be questioned. Not so long ago he would have been pulled aside and told his attire is completely inappropriate for work and making people uncomfortable. This was not a bad thing!

I'd missed this. I studied with him in the 90s, one to one, and he was fine with me. However, he was sleeping with one of my cohort, and mentally it did her a lot of damage. We all knew but didn't say anything which is awful, looking back. She has a successful academic career now, but god knows what the long term damage is. We were 19, he was in his late 40s/early 50s, and definitely in a position of power.

For me, any appropriation of womanhood is wrong, but assuming this man has body dysmorphia, a size A cup would be enough to 'live as a woman' surely?

The ONLY explanation for giant breasts is fetish and porn. So entirely inappropriate in the workplace.

The thing is, once you have made it acceptable for some men to have breasts in public - implants, stuffed bras, breast-plates, whatever, then when does it become inappropriate? Where is the line where you can say, no, that is inappropriate, in a work setting/around children/etc. We all know that the massive, comedy breasts are inappropriate but at what size does it switch from acceptable to unacceptable?

Breasts are extremely sexualised in our society. Our breastfeeding rates are very low. Women's breasts are not valued for the job they exist to do so what motivates a man to give himself the illusion of breasts? All of them, not just the ones who take it too far.

The bikini at a funeral is a really good analogy.

Clothing's coded to show consensus and mutual respect.

Funeral = bereavement & mourners = black or at least understated. To not do this is to undermine what the funeral is - and that could be intensely distressing for other mourners (unless there's a consensus that the whole thing should be a colourful celebration instead).

University = education & young people = practical but flexible. Again, to not do this is to, again, subvert that consensus.

And within all that, subversion has a place - Bakhtin and the carnivalesque is sooo interesting. But a key feature of that is that it's held in reserve as this liberating release that thereby sustains societal norms the rest of the time.

And ofc that's why you see people celebrating this as liberating, too - there's this naive assumption nowadays, riding high on the wave of the civil rights movements of the later 20th century, that norms are limiting and the dissolution of boundaries, progressive. And sure, that's often the case. Gay rights and Pride - right there's a carnival that, in its original incarnation, really did dissolve societal prejudice to establish a new, healthier norm. But that, with pomo theory, have somehow evolved into this naive assumption that norm = conservative = Conservative = BAD.

Logically, though, you can only take that so far - there's a point on the bell curve where things tip into chaos as there is no more "norm" left. But we need norms - they're what make up a society. We improve that society by negotiating new ones. That may involve playful subversion in the first instance, OK, but here, the subversion itself is supported by an authoritarian Establishment fury that's kind of inverting the usual trajectory of progress.

I mean, things like this haven't been negotiated, have they? Not when people are still fearful of discussing them - or, like Lady (we'd argue) don't fully understand the complexity of the issues surrounding them. Where this complexity has been systematically obscured by society's institutions (unis, the BBC etc.)

All a bit confused. Thinking "aloud"...

I can guarantee that many if not all of the young women who have to interact with this fetishist man as a result of their degree will experience this as sexual harassment.

It's funny how 'lived experience' is important until it's women being sexually harassed and then it's just put up with it.

I hope there are some young women undergraduates who are willing to don similarly outsized porn style fake penises to make a point. Apparently the Uni of Oxford requires staff to do sexual harassment training -it's obviously not very good, wonder how much it costs.