Gender Study Ban

[nlaguie]

www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/hungary-bans-gender-studies-universities/

‘First they came for the’ gender theorists doesn’t work because the gender theorists already came for the women’s studies departments and destroyed them.

Genderists are surely those who believe self identified claims to masculinity or femininity are a useful basis for meaningful classification system.

Who exactly are ‘genderists’?

What I mean is people who believe in 'gender identity'.

This is the trouble with the word gender, it means too many different things. Is it a polite euphemism for sex? Is it socially constructed sex roles? Is it an innate and immutable inner identity? Different groups of people use the word to mean very different things and when those meanings get conflated we enter dangerous territory.

Participants in the Mermaids training session were asked to think of their gender identity as an innate 'brain jelly baby' but were then asked to decide where, on a scale of socially constructed sex role stereotypes, their brain jelly baby fitted. This would be laughable if it didn't end up with a load of kids being put on a pathway towards experimental surgery and lifelong medical treatment.

I think the word gender is a lost cause. I think there are now far more people using it to mean an innate identity than there are people using it to mean sex roles. Probably most people just use it when they mean sex.

I get what you're saying about sex roles - that it can sound as if they are innate. I think this is an easier thing to clarify than the gender vs. gender vs. gender distinction which will always have us talking at cross purposes.

Pencils Thank you for the link to the interview. Butler points to the mismatch between her work on gender from 1989 and its interpretation by some people today- her writing has neither legitimised nor brought into reality a lot of the things ‘she’ is being blamed for.

Aside from that, Butler’s academic work is also notoriously hard work to navigate so it isn’t logical to hold her personally responsible if people put 2+2 and get 5 out of it when she meant = 4. And certainly, obviously, getting a 4, or a 5 from an author’s work is not a justification for trying to impose authoritarianism on others’ speech or justification for TRA’s (male) violence.

Katara I use ‘genderism’ sloppily as shorthand only because I can’t think of a better way to describe it- TRAs are the extremist activist end of a (let’s call it) genderist spectrum which has an academic discursive aspect at the opposite (and benign) end.

There is an increasingly authoritarian (over language) and worryingly influential/growing middle ground where certainly some academics are, but I find it worrying because this is where the TRAs are attempting to lead public services -schools, hospitals, charities etc. This includes views that would undermine the reality of biological sex etc etc.

I suppose I would 'Genderist' as a term for the entire quasi-religious edifice. Just as with other religions, there are the hard-core fundamentalists, and there are the more reasonable middle ground. And there are those who study the underlying belief system who may or may not subscribe to the beliefs at all, but can act as influence or critic of the beliefs.

With the topic of Gender Studies, it seems you have people who approach it very analytically, with a deconstructionist eye, and you have people who approach it from the perspective of the true believer.

This particular backlash is due to the enabling behaviour of the true believers, and as many of us have predicted forlornly, the backlash will be quite indiscriminate.

Thank you for the clarifications! I don’t have time to reply properly but wanted to acknowledge. It raises lots of questions for me.

I agree entirely about the Mermaid’s session. Women do not choose the sexist claptrap which is framed as the Barbie end of the spectrum, and the abuse, pay gap, etc which women suffer regardless of how they present.

What is eye-opening for me is who ‘likes’ posts which support this agenda, for example, the long thread ‘explaining’ the Mermaids one, which did not get the criticisms about lack of awareness of structural oppression at all.

I think what sticks in my throat, however, is the support for banning an entire university department because it is gender studies. Gender studies is a rich vein of scholarship and has brought many insights which people use now in every day life.

It does not have to be ‘first they came for the genderists’ - but it is ‘first they came for the scholars’. And those scholars have and do look at women’s position and the way language and discourse shapes women’s experiences institutionally, culturally and economically. As I said above, universities should promote critical thinking, not close it down.

But they didn’t come first for the scholars. Academics were more likely to be members of the Nazi party than ordinary people. Much of the ideology and supporting Facts’ was invented by academics. Academia is part of the state.

Re Judith Butler here is an interview with her. Inasmuch as I can make anything out of her gobbledegook word salad she is very much a genderist.

I loathe her. When I first started posting here several posters were fans of hers for that "perfomativity" crap. I suspect because it academically legitimised sneering at feminine women (mindlessly ) "performing femininity".

Turns out those rad female stalwarts like Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond were doing feminism wrong according to Butler.

Verso
www.versobooks.com/blogs/2009-judith-butler-on-gender-and-the-trans-experience-one-should-be-free-to-determine-the-course-of-one-s-gendered-life

Depends where you look. The Khmer Rouge destroyed educated people wherever they found them.

I mean, yes, I can quite clearly see that in a well funded, state backed academia, there is enormous potential for abusive control and for academics to be the puppets in that endeavour.

But equally, upholding liberty and free enquiry in all spheres of life includes, rather obviously, academia.

If you cannot freely investigate the means by which Gendered expectations work, how can you possibly work against the nefarious intent of those who gleefully promote them?

I know it's really unpleasant to deal with opinions that are hugely objectionable, such as those of Genderists who insist that woman = subservient etc. but the only way to defeat ideas is through research and argument. Oppression and suppression are entirely the tools of the fascist.

All very well when you agree that certain views should be suppressed, not so helpful when you find yourself unable to speak out against your oppressor.

Academics were more likely to be members of the Nazi party than ordinary people.

And when Jewish academics were expelled from German universities you would have needed a sensitive microphone indeed to hear the support from those left in post. At least a lot of Soviet scientists saw Lysenko for what he was; “Aryan Physics” involved two Nobel Prize winners.

Thumbs down from me. This is not a solution.

I stand with the bonkers ridiculous mad crazy damaging gender studies crowd on this one.

Not at all Almondcandle. Left-wing, Jewish and Communist scholars were purged or forced into exile pre-1933 (see Richard Evans). Consider Albert Einstein, for example.

So who remained as part of the Nazi party were those who had not been purged - the Nazi party took over universities, not the other way around. Academics remaining were told to follow the party line or go to concentration camps. Of course some were followers of the party, many others simply stayed silent for many of the same reasons people do not speak out about things today (family to feed, fear).

The largest professional representation in the Nazi party were doctors and psychiatrists. This makes sense as eugenics which become racial hygiene and led to the Holocaust was (pseudo-) scientific (see Robert Lifton). The entire racial hygiene project was created by those groups not ‘academics’ who are a broad and diverse group. The doctors and psychiatrists may have been in university clinics, but they were also in state insured medicine, the army medical corps, psychiatric facilities and most importantly, government departments. They were also supported by captains of industry who relied on slave labour of those deemed ‘lesser’. And indeed the military.

So I cannot see any merit in what you are saying that the academy was responsible for fascism. I can see some parallels, but not in closing down the subjects doing the analysis.

I am reflecting a lot on what FloralBunting says about the difference between those doing the analysis and the true believers. True believers in ‘gender’ have always been there - in the late nineteenth century, they simply believed that women should not go out unchaperoned or have the vote or own their own property or get divorced and many other things. And then there are the people who try to explain, criticise, challenge those beliefs who also use the language of gender, without necessarily endorsing the concepts. Is that sort of what you meant?

The people who want to abolish gender studies won’t respect or support women’s studies either. #justsaying. Don’t congratulate this fascist.

‘First they came for the’ gender theorists doesn’t work because the gender theorists already came for the women’s studies departments and destroyed them.

Women’s studies departments are as susceptible to the biases of precarious academic funding structures and academic favour and fashion as other areas of academia. This happens in the sciences and other academic areas too- things come in and out of academic prominence. Not saying it’s a good thing. But not unique to women’s studies and not the same as what is happening now in Hungary. If there were women’s studies departments going they would be similarly targeted.

‘First they came’ is absolutely apt when politicians seek to dictate who can study what. Politicians targeting academia has obvious and very worrying historical precedents.

X post Funky

Yes, KataraJean, very much so. As usual, I see this through the lens of my own religious experience - there are those who study Christianity with a certain amount of objectivity - some of them are believers, certainly, but they employ a credible amount of academic deliberation which means they address the hard questions unflinchingly. The 'Big Bang' theory came from a believing Catholic as I recall.

But you also get a significant amount of pseudo-academia within the Church, where 'true believers' take snippets of things that come from the context of longer academic discourse, often out of context, and you end up with Creationism because the word for 'day' in Hebrew can also mean a longer period of time and so forth.

With Genderism it's the same. Gender Studies has useful things to say, but is being roundly co-opted to serve the cause of people who already have invested their worlds into a belief that men and women are defined by gender roles. It becomes part of a strange new establishment faith, much more conservative than much we have seen in the West for many a year.

I think what sticks in my throat, however, is the support for banning an entire university department because it is gender studies. Gender studies is a rich vein of scholarship and has brought many insights which people use now in every day life

Many of the scholars at the CEU are of old-fashioned women's studies ilk. They are doing interesting work on women and labour, women refugees and women's history.

With Genderism it's the same. Gender Studies has useful things to say, but is being roundly co-opted to serve the cause of people who already have invested their worlds into a belief that men and women are defined by gender roles. It becomes part of a strange new establishment faith, much more conservative than much we have seen in the West for many a year

Genderism and gender studies are not the same thing. I dislike the term gender studies and prefer women's studies for a whole range of reasons, but there are no articles of faith in gender studies and the tern really describes an ecclectic group of scholars all studying different aspects of sex and gender, sexuality or women's studies from quite different perspectives.

Orban, including his ban on gender studies, is what a right wing backlash looks like.

Genderists should take note. Because right wing backlashes are not pleasant.

YetAnotherSpartacus, yes that's fair, I was being imprecise. I was comparing gender studies broadly to something like biblical scholarship, which is a fairly wide field, by no means exclusively the domain of people who believe traditional Christian things. And yet biblical scholarship is still used by fundamentalism when it serves a purpose. Gender studies function the same way for the true believers of Genderism, which is why you get the long, tedious discussions on here peppered with links to pomo academic tripe redefining what a lesbian is and so forth.

I have issue with actual, rigourous academic study of Gender, I have no issue with women's studies, I think they are necessary and worthwhile - as I think pretty much all free robust academic enquiry is.

As I've said repeatedly on this thread, I think banning gender studies is a bad thing. But it was always coming because in the totalitarian lunatic form it's being presented as by so many of it's advocates, it's just the other side of the coin to the right wing totalitarianism it professes to despise. The backlash is entirely predictable. It's really scary stuff.

Oops, there's a 'no' missing from the first line of my second paragraph there.

I am not referring to academia post Nazi purges. I am referring to academics being more likely to support the Nazi party before it came to power, and that academia was already persecuting Jews and enforcing German traditionalism before the Nazis came to power.

Of course the Nazis attempted to control academia once in power, just as they attempted to control the army and the police.

And the notion of Aryan culture, still believed in by the right now, is almost entirely an invention of the humanities and social sciences.

That is interesting almond please can you provide me some references?

The idea of the Aryan race in supremacist terms came from Gobineau, if I am correct, who was a member of the French arostocracy. It was taken up by physicians, and people who did anthropometry and the like, as well as statisticians (Francis Galton although I am not sure he was a supremacist) developed into now discredited ‘race science’. If you are talking about it prior to Gobinaeu, used by linguists, it was used to mean a tribe of people, which is no more racist than talking about Picts or Celts, at least at that time.

I do not dispute that many universities had race science or eugenics departments (UCL had a Galton Laboratory of Eugenics until 1996), but I am very surprised at the idea that racial hygiene which led to the Holocaust came out of the Humanities. The Social Sciences maybe if you mean anthropology, but you need to consider statistics, eugenics and medicine more, I think.

Of course lots of scholars used the language of race if they believed in eugenics - feminists did to argue for birth control. But I always understood it to be a ‘science’ and people used it to give their ideas scientific credibility.

But I am open to debate obviously, I guess I would just like some references so I can understand what exactly you mean.

aristocracy, that should say

I do not dispute that many universities had race science or eugenics departments

But eugenics was, if not respectable, certainly a topic for debate on the pre-war liberal left: like temperance, the idea of protecting the working classes from their baser instincts, or perhaps more generously from what were seen as causes of poverty, was considered legitimate. Marie Stopes was a savage eugenicist (she cut her son off for the "crime" of marrying a woman with "defective" genes - she may have worn glasses, but if you want good intellectual lineage, being Barnes Wallis' daughter is a reasonable heritage) and amongst others George Bernard Shaw advocated such policies. It wasn't just the idee fixee of cranks, nutters and racists, although they look like that from a post-Holocaust perspective.