Universities will be the last bastion of gender ideology and the denial of women's rights

Bridget, your reasoning re. Jo Phoenix seems sound to me.

(As does your thinking on the wisdom of putting yourself through the wringer for an unnecessary degree IMO, if it helps!)

Thanks @RedToothBrush , he might be okay then, fingers crossed.

End of primary. I suspect it will take 7 or 8 years for the house to fall down so to speak.

Thanks for your thoughts @BridgetPhillipsonIsACowardlyJobsworth .
May I ask what is it about Reading that makes it a contender for you?

I am watching the Educate, Motivate thread already 😉.

I wish I thought Ike @AmaryllisNightAndDay but, like Bridget, I think the mental gymnastics around language would make my head spin and I would find it impossible to keep it up. The hyper vigilance would finish me off at my age!

Not only would DD & uni be affected by all this, but also me & my work. Which is even more serious, as I need to change jobs and sadly education is probably the only sector where I stand a chance of finding employment.

@RedToothBrush , can I ask how old is DS? Do you think things will have changed enough for the better by the time it's his cohort's time?

Well, you have years (decades?) of experience and maturity now. So you can keep your powder dry and figure out the local landscape before you decide to when and how to speak out or to act. It also depends on what kind of PhD you're planning to do, if gender theories are directly to relevant to your research then you could choose your supervisor accordingly and avoid those whose publications are full of queer theory and woo-woo. Especially if you are paying then you can interview them!

Policies are usually worded so as not to pin themselves down to meaning anything either way.

As a student yourself you will be in a strong position to make a fuss about whatever makes you feel safe and validated - except if you are teaching undergraduates. You can terrorise the staff and other PhD students with your own views on gender but you are not allowed to offend anyone with lower academic status than your own because that will be treated as bullying. Blimey. I didn't realise I genuinely believe it works that way until I typed it out. But I do.

Though if the mere thought of HE makes you tired already then it's probably not worth it. A PhD is a long hard slog even for the most enthusiastic!

I wouldn't worry. As a student you will have a lot of leverage over staff. Over the last decade or so whatever you might imagine from the outside to be the normal authority structures have been throughly undermined and backchannelled by everything from DEI to student satisfaction surveys. And if you're paying for yourself then that gives you enormous leverage.

Go wherever you like and be the change you want to see!

Michael Gove once said "we've had enough of experts" and everyone scoffed.

But he had a point in terms of a class of people thinking their political views were the only ones that mattered and they knew best.

It is becoming more and more apparent how distortion and manipulation of data and information without accountability is having real world negative consequences because basic critical thinking and accountability isn't ALSO being applied.

Universities seem to be massively behind the curve with this realisation and understanding of its social impact and consequences. Perhaps because it's them that have deliberately set up this system of status over substance and they are integral to it.

I was never a fan of Gove and the original comment context was farcical in many ways particularly in hindsight of what happened next from listening to people who weren't either experts or people with a clue. Gove's problem is he is actually super clever but lacks life experience in certain areas and over estimated his ability and knowledge in dealing with Europe. He and all his Brexiteer mates missed one particularly crucial detail that others did identify - NI. And he assumed that's they'd be people with much more ability would come through to forge a post Brexit future. Which of course never happened in part because those with a ability were culturally alienated.

My overall point being that the divisiveness of everything and the way in which sections of society have become arrogant and out of touch with no accountability IS the central issue of all our current politics. Large numbers of stakeholders (aka The General Public) were dismissed as not being important/ having anything worth saying whilst arrogant middle and upper classes (of all political persuasions) thought they knew better and didn't have to listen.

Universities are really the epitome of the whole mess and problem. And that's also why they will end up sucked up into the backlash to the extent they will. Theyve left themselves vulnerable because they've forgotten the essential tennant and principal of education to critically think and constantly revisit and revise your thinking in case you have missed something rather important a d crucial.

They deserve everything they have coming in my honest opinion. It's unfortunate that it's likely that my son will be in the cohort that ends up most effected in a few years time.

It is dreadful.

That's my general feeling.

Speaking from a purely practical (and somewhat urgent) perspective, I find myself unable to advise DD on next steps after college.

She's in Y12 and considering whether she should go to University. And I don't know what to say.

She's one of those kids who is not sure what she wants to be when she grows up and she is emotionally not as mature. But she'd probably benefit hugely from the relative independence of uni for the first few years as a young adult

She's thankfully safe form being influenced by gender woo now, after gentle conversations with me after events at high school and applying her own critical thinking. However, she's very much afraid of saying anything to her friends when the topic comes up, as they all seem uncritically genderist. (This includes not speaking up when a hobby group cancelled an event because it was extremely tangentially related to JKR. Other than rolling her eyes and telling me how stupid they were.)

I worry about how she'd fare at uni surrounded by such types (I did show her that Maeve Halligan clip BTW).

Off to Liverpool uni open day soon. If anyone has any insider info about things there I'd be grateful for any insights. Other candidates are Newcastle and Manchester. And perhaps Durham.

@DrBlackbirdI love your 'Regorm' typo. I wholeheartedly agree with you about the value of Third Level and there are those of us about who are trying to hold the line against this madness.

I'm still drumming my fingers waiting for policies to be updated post EHRC guidance. And we don't collect sex data on our employees, only gender. It's a sex pay gap not a gender pay gap as was confirmed the other day.

I worked in a large Uni in Australia a few years ago, and a dept of Health after that, in IT. In both public settings, money was found to update the systems to allow gender identity and preferred name to be added so as not to "dead name", or "misgender" the sensitive folks. These projects are complex because all the downstream systems must also be updated so that data flows correctly through them. It takes money and resources away from critical service delivery but no-one dared question the priority, it was just "the right thing to do". Part of my job was to review projects, and when I asked, in both cases, how it was determined these projects were needed, the answer was "we've recieved complaints". When I asked how many complaints had been recieved, in both cases it was 2, and they were anecdotal, nothing in writing. Complete fuckery.

I feel that universities have fucked themselves so badly in many ways they may not survive as any kind of center of intellectual life.

The problems with research. The watering down of courses and programs to suit unremarkable thinkers. Especially the loss of protection for controversial discussions. The flat political profile. Too much expensive infrastructure. Dependence on foreign students paying fees. Development of marketable and lucrative stupid masters programs with little worth. And more.

Tbh, although I was once someone who thought the intellectual life of universities was a kind of punicak of achievement, I don't know now if I am sorry if they fail. I think they are making society worse.

the really sad post on the 1st page about the girl whose friends have all moved on,

I felt when I read that, that it really should have been the OP for a new thread (not necessarily about universities) but about the consequences for those who take what for some is just juvenile fad, fake agreement with, as being the next real life direction they will take.

I wonder if any of the "friends" worry about her, and how her life is going.

This post reveals something and why I don't think it will be as long as some fear before the bubble bursts.

Some recent incidents in my dept have shaken even the most staunch trans allies.

And there it is.

At what point do we start to recognise transactivist violence and terrorism?

It WILL happen at some point.

There has been a number of incidents which have raised these concerns but nothing which reaches a level where it effectively becomes the smoking gun evidence that can no longer be ignored. But the spiral to that seems inevitable because these people are egging each other on further and further to out do each other and prove their belief to the cause.

In terms of the last bastion, the really sad post on the 1st page about the girl whose friends have all moved on, reminds us of who really will be the last man standing in support of this nonsense - parents. Some because they are desperate that it should have been worth it and some because they helped instigate it in the first place. They can't admit their own failings because of the harm done to their own children.

My specialist subject…….. (not really but I have worked in the sector).

Accommodation staff generally want students happy in their flats - because we genuinely want the best for them (and it makes our lives easier as well). They are very aware that female only accommodation is an absolute for some students, and that means no TW. We do not want to see e.g. female muslim students forced to withdraw from their studies (and that is a real risk for some). Very unofficially, from conversations with staff across a number of institutions, quite a few were prepared to make sure that there were real female only flats, even if that wasn’t the official university TWAW position. And if a TW requested female only accommodation, they may have been put in a flat with female students who requested mixed accommodation. NB the vast majority of UK UGs request mixed sex, it is international students, many of whom are PGs, who ask for single sex.

However there is a big problem - accommodation systems take info about the students from the central systems and typically will be given ‘gender’ and will not know if a student is trans. I used to sometimes know because the students themselves told us in the free form notes on their accommodation application - e.g. to explain their need for an ensuite room. And even saw their gender change over time in the systems. Knowing that a student was trans was very locked down, even though we might be given a lot of information re disabilities and even criminal records (this would be limited to a very few staff involved in allocating students).

I would hope that the Supreme Court judgment will help but I presume there will be a fair amount of heel digging in. And the IT systems have to be sorted……

Our uni wears its stonewall/woke/genderwoo credentials as our main marketing tool. More conservative or critical thinking students would be put off by our vague promises to allow our students to "find your you..."

No we've recruited that cohort, any deviance from strict adherence to the laws set out in extreme TRA circles there would be riots. Not only is the customer king, the customer is an brainwashed unthinking mob.... at this point it would Kathleen Stock X100 if anyone stuck their head above the parapet

You are quite the libertarian.

Happy for students and tutors to believe the earth is flat? That certain races are genetically superior to others? That votes in a democracy should be by household with women deferring to husbands? That particular religions are in a secret cabal running the world’s economy and need to be attacked? That some academia ought to be policed? That 2 + 2 = 5? Orwell would be proud.

Hmm, sociologist or gender study faculty?

I’m still proud to work for a university.

However, I’ve said it before, genderism has cleverly and insidiously infiltrated all the progressive institutions (and even countries) by piggybacking the TQ on to the LGB. Even if Genderism currently runs through academia for now, there are still many academics who see their role has supporting the development of analytical and critical thinking. Yes, harder to do but vital work more than ever in our tech saturated, algorithmically driven social media world.

It’s a dual problem. First, customer as king paying tuition on the hand, without it I’d hope we see more of senior management supporting academic freedom of speech. Market forces accounts a great deal for senior leadership being reluctant to contradict the young TRAs who come to uni already having been recruited and converted on Discord and primacy of gender over sex carelessly perpetuated and cemented by teachers in schools. Second, too many #bekind liberals slow to work through or acknowledge the implications and yet quick to accuse colleagues of heresy on the other, who are happy to reinforce the Discord illogic.

It’s a perfect storm of othering that will take many years to correct and with many potential obstacles. A Green led govt would entrench it in law. A Regorm govt would entrench the opposite in law but give rise to even more resistance and activism.

I believe that the only thing that will shift the HE sector will be a high-level, extremely public, lawsuit against a top-ten ranking, Russell Group institution, won with significant damages awarded.

Cannot see this happening but with wider societal pressure and tribunals and lawsuits, the gender woo might gradually diminish. I hope sanity is restored because I’m a big believer in the value of a university education. Further education was decimated under Osbourne and apprenticeships have always been appalling (except for some engineering or accounting type ones) partly because we don’t have the manufacturing industries anymore. Germany was always excellent at their degree apprenticeships but those rested on a strong high quality manufacturing base.

Ideally, we’d have good quality vocational, further and higher education but that all takes money.

Note that the TRA quoted in the BBC article is the same individual responsible for hounding out Ann Henderson. It really is a very small but very vocal minority pushing this agenda

Predictably he is a man who now claims to be a woman.

I suspect Fanshawe will fare better than Henderson because 1) having seen what happened to Henderson he knows what he is stepping into and is probably prepared for pushback; 2) he's a gay rights activist which might make some people pause and realise that trans rights and gay rights are not the same thing; and 3) he's a man

Note that the TRA quoted in the BBC article is the same individual responsible for hounding out Ann Henderson. It really is a very small but very vocal minority pushing this agenda