To ask what policy your Uni has on women's spaces?

[SerfTerf]

Those of you who have recent work or study experience.

Would you mind listing institution names and their policies?

NC if you need to of course.

It's funny that you cannot recognise the problem with styles and modes of thinking where you can't even win an debate you think is a shoe in. And don't think that means you might need to change tactics.

Do you mean this debate? I'm not trying to win this debate, I don't need to, society has already moved past this thinking. There's only a point to trying to 'win' debates until the thing that is a problem actually changes, like gun control. Or equal marriage. The UK has marriage equality, it doesn't bother me that some people are still mad about it.

Speaking, and the platforming of certain speech, makes people with horrible ideas feel validated and then allows them more space to express those horrible ideas
But without speaking, we have no forum to reject those horrible ideas.

Give a platform to anyone and everyone, especially at an academic institute which should be nurturing critical thinking, free speech and robust debate.

No platforming is just censorship.

maid what do you mean, it included what you could or couldn't do? Or about not judging people because of their appearance?

"Speaking, and the platforming of certain speech, makes people with horrible ideas feel validated and then allows them more space to express those horrible ideas."

No, this is not an inevitability. Consider what happened to the BNP when their platform was increased and they had representatives appearing on BBC Question Time and other discussion shows.

What has happened to our culture that we have become so afraid of free speech, differing viewpoints? It feels dystopian and very wrong.

Loops can you please articulate what you think "being a woman" actually means? You've said that if you had a penis you could still be a woman because you could "identify" as one but what is it you would actually be identifying with? What does it mean to "be a woman" that is distinct from simply having female sex organs?

biology exists, there are biological differences between people with penises and people with vaginas. Anything that requires a physical skill will mean that people who are bigger, stronger, faster etc...have an advantage. That is quite often males
So you agree that males should not be allowed to compete in female sporting categories, given the unfair advantage their biology offers?

Free speech is not freedom from criticism, if I invite you over and you say something horrible and I ask you to leave and don't ask you back, I'm not censoring you...you can go talk wherever else you want. I just don't want you in my house. University is home for students, as well as workplace, they have a right to not invite people over. Speakers can speak off-campus, and students can attend, but if the student body votes to not have someone at their home, that's perfectly reasonable.

Speaking led to the election of Donald Trump and now his policies are actively harming almost everyone who isn't a rich white man.

I don't support Donald Trump at all, but I'd rather live in a world where Donald Trump is elected than one where he was forbidden to speak, along with anyone else whose words might possibly make anyone 'feel unsafe.'

At my university, we actually held a debate on 'no-platforming' during one of the compulsory modules for my degree. It was largely (but not unanimously) agreed that it was far better to let anyone speak, including Trump supporters, MRAs, racists, religious extremists - so that their views could be out in the open and their arguments debated and refuted, instead of banning them from speaking. We agreed that listening to a controversial speaker should never be compulsory for students, but that these people shouldn't be prohibited from sharing their views. Because stopping them from speaking doesn't stop them from thinking the way they do, and if there's no debate, those ideas are never challenged.

maid what do you mean, it included what you could or couldn't do? Or about not judging people because of their appearance?
I meant that the list of characteristics on which discrimination would not be tolerated was comedic.

You're only progressive when you have specific rules about people with ginger hair

I don't think society has "moved past" anything. I think there's a lot of political game playing around the trans agenda, like the recent self-identification proposal, and I think most of society is unaware and disinterested in the topic. I think most people in the UK not involved in trans activism or youth culture, if asked, would be unaware of the requirement to accept that trans women are women/trans men are men. I think you'd get some fairly straightforward responses to that, that you probably would consider horrible and supergross.

To assume that all women have a shared experience just because we have female biology, is essentialism and also not at all intersectional.

You realise that your POV is based in essentialism don't you? Any identity politics that claims that people really are X is essentialist at heart. You're rejecting biological essentialism and replacing it with gender identity essentialism. Just because you also think people can move fluidly between essentialist identity categories does not make the position any less essentialist. It just makes it incoherent.

Similarly, understanding identity as based in sex can be totally intersectional. It's totally possible to be a complete biological essentialist and still claim that someone has an intersectional identity because they biologically have sex, age, biological characteristics associated with race and so on.

This is kind of what we mean by critical thinking. You appear to have memorised some terms to be applied as dismissals and insults, but haven't really interrogated what they actually mean.

Loops I'm positive that all uni's are trans inclusive because that's a protected characteristic and by law they have to be and should be. I'm also positive that gender identity will be looked at far more critically in more academic/scientific establishments and I'm also positive that the best and the brightest will fight back against the accepted ideology of their time and challenge it (because this is what has happened since the dawn of time) rather than accepting it 'emperors new clothes' style. The sad thing is that will then make things much worse for genuine trans people who were never pushing this in the first place.

I've lurked on many of these threads now and the best quote of read is 'be careful not to be so open minded that your brains fall out'

dont not really? My personal experience is not universal, that again would be essentialist, not all women are the same. Women's experiences are all valid and all come under being a woman, like I have previously stated I believe in a biological cause for gender-identity. So, if your ID is woman, then your experience is the experience of being a woman.

Free speech is not freedom from criticism
Oh, I couldn't agree more.

if the student body votes to not have someone at their home, that's perfectly reasonable
I don't recall their being a vote amongst the student body here when Julie Bindel was no platformed.

And I think we have to be clear about the separation between university and student union. A university is a centre of academic learning, of debate, of interpretation, of free speech and not freedom from criticism.

A student union is a member's club that can do what they want. Even if it isn't put out to vote by the student body....

So if all experience is unique to an individual -whether they are biologically male or female - why the need to identify as anything?

You appear to have memorised some terms to be applied as dismissals and insults, but haven't really interrogated what they actually mean.

This.

I would be a woman even if I didn't have a uterus, I would be a woman even if I had a penis, because my gender identity is woman.

This statement requires an (implicit) essence of woman as gender identity, by the way.

So, if your ID is woman, then your experience is the experience of being a woman
But is it necessarily the experience of being a female?

So, if your ID is woman, then your experience is the experience of being a woman.

Guess your critical thinking studies didn't cover circular reasoning and other common logical errors- oh.

So, if your ID is woman, then your experience is the experience of being a woman.

This, on the other hand, is not essentialist but it's a tautology and has reduced the term 'woman' to a house of mirrors.

That's what I mean by the position being incoherent. People have an essential gender identity but that gender identity has no basis in anything other than their feeling like they have it. So it is at once essentialised (you are a tomato, in your essential being) and completely meaningless (because all experiences of being essentially tomato are individual).

what because anyone who disagrees with your particular view is less intelligent, because intelligent people would automatically agree with you? That is incredibly arrogant.

Perhaps the reason we all get on so well at uni is because none of us think that we are right and everyone else is wrong.

milady essentialism, as I understand it, is the idea that identity (woman) is due to some universal qualities that every woman possesses (being nurturing, having a vagina etc...). This is rubbish, not every woman will have the same experience of being a woman, there is no universal 'shared experience' of being a woman.

Of course, I do still think there's a gender identity, and then within that identity your experience is your own. But again, if you don't believe in innate gender, then you won't agree with me lol

I wouldn't expect everyone to agree with me, but there are ways of disagreeing that don't actually invalidate people that do believe that and for whom it forms an integral part of their sense of self. That is the policy we have at uni.

I think the scariest thing, Loops , is that you genuinely seem to believe that you and your classmates have arrived at agreement miraculously and without any sort of coercion. That you haven't been forced to do so. I think, as a teacher and as someone who was a student, that it is incredibly, vanishingly unlikely that this would happen. As you say, we're all individuals. It is especially unlikely given the rules you have said you operate under which quite clearly tell you what you should think about this, which insist on a particular view of trans issues and of feminism which you would be censured for questioning.

That's universalism.

Essentialism is the idea that at core there is something essential and innate to an individual that makes them X.

I wouldn't expect everyone to agree with me, but there are ways of disagreeing that don't actually invalidate people that do believe that and for whom it forms an integral part of their sense of self. That is the policy we have at uni.

You do realise that you've reduced everything to beliefs and, at the same time, insisted that beliefs are somehow inherent (they're at the essence of your being) and therefore unchallengeable.

So what you're actually saying loops is that the identification is with an individual identity that is unique and yet at the same time a "woman's"

Or what Milady said much more eloquently!