Academics' letter in Guardian

[Velella]

www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/16/academics-are-being-harassed-over-their-research-into-transgender-issues

Thank you so very much GC. I so appreciate you and everyone else who signed that letter.

Thank you GC and well done. I understand the fear and the relief.

Well done and thank you. Academia needs to fight for the right to think critically.

The point is we are many. There seems to be a cascade effect where one person speaking up encourages five more, and each of these encourages five more. Like some sort of chain letter, giving voice to the silenced. Based on my DC I think you are right about students. Many are mainly worried about loans, debts and uncertain job prospects. They find SU politics irrelevant, and are genuinely unhappy about some aspects of self ID, like the impact on female Muslim students if women’s spaces are not respected, but don’t have the vocabulary nor experience to challenge it. Fantastic that academics are taking a lead.

GCAcademic, is there a way to join this network? I am just about ready to come out at work as gender critical, I think.

Thank you GC.

Many of our universities have close links with trans advocacy organisations who provide “training” of academics and management, and who, it is reasonable to suppose, influence university policy through these links.

This bit. This is what Stonewall is now for. This is its purpose. Nothing to do with representing the vast majority of its constituency. This is the shambles of vast swathes of our third sector. Bullshit jobs. Our third sector has become completely blind to its service users and the demographics it is supposed to represent.

I am really glad to see this letter because I have come to a point at which I despaired of the academy. I hope it's the beginning of a real and sustained fight back.

GC - thank you for signing.

GC well done. I can’t tell you how relieved I am to see that letter. And my favourite tutor is on it, too. That makes me very happy.

Well done GC. Glad to hear you have institutional support. I do think that you are right about most students being able to see through this.

Been picked up by an Indian satirical magazine.

Brilliant!

Well done GC and your wider colleagues.

Amazing work GC

Thank you GC

One of my old lecturers is on that list, I am so bloody proud of her!

I agree, the more people speak out the more others are enabled.

This is really fantastic, feels like the tide is really starting to turn. Thank you to all the academics who put their name to this

Thank you. Every time I hear about women being much braver than me it lifts me to be more courageous!! I have spoken to several people in real life this week, and it is because of reading about women who really are risking so much by speaking out. Thank you.

I should actually be thanking you guys. Because this place has provided a sounding board for my thinking and concerns at a time when my university has failed spectacularly to facilitate discussion, choosing instead to institutionalise transgender ideology. Many of the women on here have a more sophisticated and intellectually rigorous feminist analysis than most academics. So thank to all of you, and also to @JustineMumsnet for allowing the kind of discussion that can't seem to happen on university campuses these days.

I am another one attempting to get started as an Early career researcher. I looked specifically at gender in my PhD, so have been extremely concerned about the way most university departments seem to be going.

It is heartening at both a personal level and at the level of women as a class, to find academics speaking out. @GCAcademic is there a way of getting in touch with this network of gc academics?

Fantastic to see - and in the Guardian! - thank you so much for speaking out, GC, and all your fellow academics.

Just emailed my lecturer to thank her, I hope the universities support their staff.

It troubles me that academics from the natural sciences are poorly represented. Maybe it is time to approach those academics as many such as myself are deeply horrified that our language is being misused for ideological and political purposes. Misuse of language includes words such as:

Cis is a term used in chemistry and is defined scientifically as: denoting or relating to a molecular structure in which two particular atoms or groups lie on the same side of a given plane in the molecule, in particular denoting an isomer in which substituents at opposite ends of a carbon–carbon double bond are on the same side of the bond.

Asexual is biological term use to define: Asexual reproduction only needs one parent, unlike sexual reproduction, which needs two parents. Since there is only one parent, there is no fusion of gametes and no mixing of genetic information. As a result, the offspring are genetically identical to the parent and to each other: in other words, they are clones. Homo sapiens are not asexual as we used sexual reproduction as our means of propagating the species.

As a scientist I find it distinctly disturbing that our language is being misused in this way.

Thank you GC for your courage and integrity.

Thank you so much GC and all the signatories.

Thank you GC. Sometimes I think there's not a lot I can do, so I am planning on sending a note of thanks to the only academic from my uni who has signed, and a letter supporting her/ thanking the uni for supporting her to her faculty. Might be a nice thing for a few of us to do?