Anyone up to speed with the Lindsay Shepherd case (the Canadian TA)?

[ConfessionsOfTeenageDramaQueen]

For those who aren't Lindsay is a 20-something TA at a Canadian University. Last November she was teaching a class on pronouns and, during the class, showed a 5 minute clip of a debate (that had been broadcast on Canadian TV) that featured a panel of speakers discussing gender pronouns in the context of trans issues.

The panel consisted of a few people including a trans-man, and Jordan Peterson.

After the class a student mentioned the clip to someone who reported it to the local LGBT group on campus who complained to the faculty who hauled her into a disciplinary meeting, which she had the presence of mind to record.

The meeting is 40 minutes long but I implore you to listen: not only does it give an insight into the Orwellian mindset of these two male professors, but their comments are absolutely dripping with sexism:

I'd be interested to know what others make of this case.

[nauticant]

I have really appreciated your posts on this thread Offred.

One of the most worrying things I see these days is people, on both the left and the right, being corralled into spaces approved for their tribe. This has always happened but now with social media the polarisation is much more risky.

The main tool for enforcing the polarisation is language and social media enables many terms to act as short cuts to bypass thinking and act simply as empty signifiers to signal to fellow tribe members.

[Offred]

Yy nauticant. That’s what joe klein’s short video was about.

I wonder if that’s what is motivating investment in centrism in part (a reaction to polarisation) but actually even that has become about being in a ‘moderate centrist’ tribe... about having that as your identity and your identity being scrutinised by the identity police.

[Offred]

And back to Lindsay... some of her comments on interview about her understanding of JP’s ideas and whether she stands by the comment she made i the recorded disciplinary interview suggest she had recognised JP as a ‘wrongthinker’ because of leftwing culture and she had not really engaged with his ideas prior to this debacle.

She had shown that clip based on the politics of the identities of the participants...

A ‘baddie’ and a ‘goodie’...

So is it unsurprising that due to dehumanising behaviour from her peers and supportive behaviour from JP she is now seemingly shifting her views?

Well no! Not really, her original view was based on immersion in a culture that rewarded her for right think and she got the practice of rightthink wrong once and was made an example of...

[Offred]

It’s the Mitchell and Webb sketch about the skulls; ‘do you think we are the baddies?’

[NotMeOhNo]

Completely agree Offred. And the shrillest and most "offended" voices from a marginalised group will be supported because of tiptoeing around them respectfully. Like how we mustn't critique the hijab even though women in Iran are struggling against it. I was on a thread the other day where someone had heard that the didgeridoo was "sacred" and mustn't be used except by Aboriginal men. She thought I was an awful racist. But actually lots of people play the didge here, it's integrated into lots of musical styles. People go to schools and all the kids are encouraged to have a turn and learn it. It's an idea of this "mystical native" stuff imported from America which I think is essentialising and Orientalist. But none of the intersectional feminists seem to give a fuck about postcolonial theories so there you go...

[BackForaMo]

I have a passing acquaintance with the official life stories of the two. Owen Jones: Mum lecturer, Dad was activist and union official. Jordan Peterson had educated parents (schoolteacher and librarian) but grew up in a small, out of the way place with a cross section of mates. Their backgrounds aren't so madly far apart on a worldwide scale.

They were both able to access higher education. Both had books published but one gets massive media exposure that I for one am very bored with but he has a massive following online so what do I know. The other self publishes appearances on YouYube which I can avoid far more easily.

I don't get the pp's perceived gulf.

[Offred]

Oh yes back but what I am contending is these ‘identities’ are socially constructed modern mythologies.

[Offred]

I went to a fundraising dinner where OJ was the speaker a few years ago. He made his speech re landlords. I had been grumbling about what I felt were failings in his analysis; lack of scrutiny re govt incentives to rely on property ownership rather than social security, the practices of banks and insurance brokers and characterisation of landlords as ‘the baddie’ for a while by that point and a couple of the people I went to the dinner with had been agreeing with me.

At the end of the same speech, we had all heard a million times before, OJ got a standing ovation.

I was the only person (I didn’t see anyone else sitting anyway) who didn’t stand up so I asked the two who I knew agreed re the gaps in his analysis why they stood. They said they felt uncomfortable not standing because everyone else was.

I just went up to OJ afterwards and said that I had been thinking about his analysis and I’d really enjoy a chance to have a discussion with him about it at some point if he had time.

He never did. He spent the rest of the evening surrounded by a group of fawning young girls TBH.

Fine, fair enough, he doesn’t have to be ‘on’ all the time and he’s allowed to relax but I found the whole thing interesting for many reasons.

[Offred]

Group dynamics mainly...

[BackForaMo]

Sorry I misunderstood due to my skimming!

[FlyTipper]

speakingwoman
he says: "In a University, all perspectives are valid."
he answers:
"That's not necessarily true."
sums it up really. I hope she is ok.

---

Actually, I agree with the lecturer. There are things that are basically no debate: climate change, evolution and the Holocaust being three. You can talk in general terms I suppose about other 'theories' but to present them as serious alternatives on an undergraduate course seems unprofessional to me.

However, to juxtapose these things with the gender debate is where the lecturers appear to have gone off course. The gender debate is not the closed case they insist it is. If it were, they would be in the right to insist her teachings reflected the reality, just like a TA presenting creation theories of evolution in the Biology dept would be taken in hand.


Being someone who takes a disdainful position on J Peterson, I am nonetheless surprised by the degree to which the lecturers despised him. To relegate JP to the level of he alt-right and Hitler is not only unwarranted, it is willful ignorance. JP is just an academic with a youtube presence, a shrink who likes to wave his hands and talk about chimps and lobsters. Overblown, yes. Hitler, no.

[kesstrel]

That sentence: "In a University, all perspectives are valid." struck me as being straight out of the postmodernist playbook, rather than a defense of free speech. And indeed, Shepherd's graduate studies program was in Cultural Analysis & Social Theory, so it seems pretty likely that that's where she go that idea from. When the lecturer (from the same department) said "That's not necessarily true", I doubt he was making a claim for the existence of objective truth; rather, he was up against the innate contradiction of postmodernist ideas: if there is no objective truth, and everyone's truth is valid for them, then you have a problem justifying your opposition to certain ideas. As I understand it, the way this is resolved by postmodernists is to say that the only thing that can be done amidst this absence of objective truth is to challenge those with institutional power, whose version of truth is unfairly influential, and that this must be done by promoting the alternate truths of the less powerful, while condemning the truths of the powerful.

The whole idea is garbled and innately incoherent, in my opinion, which is why it's not surprising that Shepherd's supervisors tripped themselves up in this way. This is the home page of one of them:

www.wlu.ca/academics/faculties/faculty-of-arts/faculty-profiles/nathan-rambukkana/index.html

It's full of postmodernist tropes, and note the phrase at the end: "speaking back to state, corporate and societal power and privilege", which is what postmodernist academics see themselves as being all about, rather than trying to determine objective truths.

[speakingwoman]

"Actually, I agree with the lecturer. There are things that are basically no debate: climate change, evolution and the Holocaust being three. You can talk in general terms I suppose about other 'theories' but to present them as serious alternatives on an undergraduate course seems unprofessional to me."

What does no debate actually mean? I know it can't have a literal meaning because I have campaigned on the streets about climate change and I can assure you that it is hotly debated by debate-minded folk.

As to evolution - my auntie and uncle don't believe in it. Should I refuse to debate? Should I ignore what's going on? How will this "no debate" thing help me? Is it some kind of technical term?

And the Holocaust. Hasn't Poland just moved to deny involvement? How will it help not to debate with the next generation of Poles?

I'm annoyed but I do actually want to know what this "no debate" thing is.

As to all perspectives being valid in a uni - isn't that sort of what I pay my taxes for? I don't know or care about postmodernists but I do know people are supposed to disagree with each other in a University.

[FlyTipper]

"No debate" means that in university departments around the developed world (with the exception, oddly, of the US), you are not going to find anyone in a biology department wasting their time debating man-made climate change or creation-based evolution. You are not going to find historians debating whether the Holocaust happened. You just aren't. These alternatives may be brought up, but never offered without context and peer-reviewed data. But you are completely right: all three are controversial topics in the world at large. They are talking points and things people take positions on. Is that reason for academics to bring them unchallenged into undergraduate courses? In that case, bring flat earth theory into geography and aliens into astronomy. What about a debate about whether gay men should undergo conversion therapy in social sciences? I would be shocked if, for example, people were 'debating' racial IQ differences in genetics - okay, I appreciate these things are in the news, but I wouldn't expect a debate along the lines 'what do you think?' I would expect a scientifically literate breakdown of why we do or do not study this, what are the shortcomings of the data, what the assumptions are, why this topic is controversial, all embedded into a wider perspective of the academic debate and historical significance i.e. CONTEXTUALISED exposition, not a student-led debate.

No topics should be off limits in and of themselves. Time constraints may mean not all avenues are explored (molecular drive or Lamarkism in evolution lectures). But care must be introduced with certain topics that come with cultural baggage. And some things are really just not debatable. I want to make clear however that I think 'gender' is not in the category of a spherical world or Darwinian evolution. It most certainly is up for debate (however, is a grammer lesson an appropriate place for this to occur?)

[speakingwoman]

Thank you for replying. To my mind, That’s not a definition of “no debate”. You are describing a result, not the practice itself.

Appreciate you have other things to do but would love it if someone could help me understand what this “ no debate” practice is.

[FireFartingDuck]

I think we contextualise everything we discuss, tbh, so I'm not remotely concerned about people openly debating any ideas whatsoever. In fact, in the context of our current society, full of suspicion and mistrust, I think it's more important than ever to let everyone have their say openly and dissect the logical fallacies and mistruths in their thinking.
If an ideology goes 'underground', it gains a power that it just won't have if it is exposed to the light and rational people show it for what it is.

[speakingwoman]

I think I agree with FireFarting Duck.

[Dragoncake]

Did Shepherd mean that in a university the presentation of all perspectives for discussion is valid? Rather than that they all have equal value?

Flytipper a grammar lesson is one of the few times that gender is relevant!

[speakingwoman]

Dragoncake, - yes I think that's what Shepherd meant.

[speakingwoman]

I'm listening to the recording again.

Interrogator 2 attempts to compare Shepherd's teaching to a meteorology lecturer presenting climate change to undergraduates as a debate.

He gets very very muddled between:

1. A meteorology lecturer telling undergrads that there are two sides to the scientific debate about climate change.
   
2. A lecturer teaching students about the nature of the (rather important!) debate about climate change.
   

Then he mentions trans people having high suicide rates and stops without giving her a right to reply.
But not before he gives some ahistorical crap about the Nazis.

[FlyTipper]

FireFart If an ideology goes 'underground', it gains a power that it just won't have if it is exposed to the light and rational people show it for what it is.
I think this is the nub of the issue and one with which on balance I disagree. One of the things I hear 'needs discussion' is the Holocaust. Just bringing up the topic seems to get people grabbing out for minimisation - all for what goal? what is the goal? - I think the goal is often to try and absolve our collective guilt (fellow humans couldn't have been that bad), but, sometimes the goal is to feed something worse (the Nazis weren't that bad, the Jews are exaggerating). That is why, sometimes, other points of view are not always equally valid or should be given equal weighting.

I also have a problem with the logic that says when a topic is suppressed (for the record, I'm not saying any viewpoints should be suppressed) it gains power. David Irving's recent rise in popularity has come off the back of the internet which has acted as a very effective vehicle for disseminating his ideas to the world.

[speakingwoman]

"I also have a problem with the logic that says when a topic is suppressed (for the record, I'm not saying any viewpoints should be suppressed) it gains power. "

I guess it depends on the suppression.

Banging the gavel on climate change and announcing the debate was over and anyone who hadn't understood yet was a "denier" was a catastrophic decision that our children and grandchildren will suffer for.

Whereas closing off debate on a husband's right to rape his wife seems to have worked rather well for some women at least.

It's a complicated world.

[FireFartingDuck]

Flytipper, the existence of the internet is making it very easy to disseminate all kind of ridiculous ideas, without a doubt.
But for me, that's exactly the reason why people need to be trained to think, reason and debate. If you never come across these views in an arena where you are taught how to deal with stats, misrepresentation and all kinds of logical fallacies, you are very much at the mercy of a clever and charismatic internet personality. Holocaust denial exists, yes, and the internet is a powerful vehicle for promoting it. One does not have to give it credence, but unless you examine the tropes and lies it is based on, so that you can clearly show the errors, there will be people taken in by it.

My daughters like to tease me because they watch YouTube conspiracy videos, where all manner of David Ickeisms are presented as fact, and they know I waffle on about critical thinking. But plenty of their friends see this stuff and gobble it down whole. People need the tools to fight this, and the trend of waving a hand in dismissal rather than dealing with error head on is leaving a generation unprepared to fight against ideological tyranny.

[TransExclusionaryMRA]

It’s worth pointing out there is a problem with reason and critical thinking, in that you can use it to validate almost every position. It all depends on what kind of premise you are starting with and what you think maybe axiomatic or not.

If it was just as simple as applying logic and reason we wouldn’t have a problem. Logic, reason and critical thinking can’t really prove truth in and of themselves, but they are invaluable tools in understanding everything with greater depth and accuracy.

[speakingwoman]

Agree with both posts above