" Law professor lives in fear of transgender activists threats" DT headline

[BiologyIsReal]

The Daily Telegraph is now full on GC.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/10/08/revealed-academics-need-panic-alarms-face-death-threats-radical/

Big article by the education editor on the threats to academics, including Prof Rosa Freedman and Prof Kathleen Stock.

Too long to quote but the intro describes Prof Freeman finding a panic alarm in her locker - part of beefed up security on Reading campus where the university is so concerned for her safety they have conducted a full security review, including checking CCTV and installing an entry phone in her office. "There is a sense of dread coming on the campus" she told the DT. "It is quite unsettling to know that even something as basic as picking up my post from my pigeon-hole can leave me feeling on edge." She said that over the past year she had faced death threats, intimidation and harassment. (Some of this has already been the subject of threads on FWR).

Prof Stock spoke about feeling it was necessary to "break cover" and having to put up with no-platforming and online abuse.

"I was immensely frustrated by what I saw was the shameful silence of philosophers. The position that 'you are what you say you are' simply doesn't fit with most of Western philosophy. It was clear that people were frightened to speak out. I thought we needed to break cover and get this conversation going."

Ends with wishy washy quote from Beaumont Society basically blaming the situation on people on both sides feeling their right to exist is threatened and pleading vulnerability on the part of transgender people.

Page 14 of print version.

It's terrifying.

Extremist states silence the 'intelligentsia' first. 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale are more than fiction.

There's a great line in the recent TV adaptation of Chernobyl that says of the academics: 'Sacked for the crime of knowing.'

Isn’t it bonkers? Stating your philosophical position garners death threats

If that doesn’t make DT readers realise what sort of people gender extremists are, nothing will

It's terrifying.

Yes. Very Khmer Rouge.

I'm honestly starting to think part of the problem is that younger people are fortunate enough not to have any personal memory of genocides. While being aware of happenings in Myanmar, or the treatment of Uighar people in China these are not well publicised, headline grabbing events in the way the Rwandan genocide of the 90s was to give but one example.

Obviously genocide isn't something anyone wants to see, but those of us who do have a personal memory of such horrors being beamed into our homes are perhaps more instinctively wary of attempts to curtail speech. Perhaps that cultural knowledge is fading. That bothers me. A lot.

Do men who are GC ever get death threats?

So much admiration for these brave women. The way they are being treated and the complicity of universities in failing to stand up to the bullies is appalling.

pleading vulnerability on the part of transgender people so vulnerable they threaten women and pose with pretty painted weapons on social media (when not nailing dead rats to women refuges, or pissing of peoples office doors).

I'd suggest that the bulk of the bullies and gobshites are nothing of the sort (and can we please cut the 'transgender' - there are transexuals and transvestites). They are over-excitable people with a lack of critical thinking abilities who get off on having a 'hate figure'. They are bullies who would be football hooligans or skin heads in abother era.

I'd suggest the Beaumont society take a look at the POV if you're a woman with a grip on reality in my mentions thing on Twitter. If you're brandishing garottes and baseball bats, no, you're not vulnerable, you're entitled to zero protection and sympathy, you're a thug who society needs protecting from. End of.

The general public are not missing that every mention of TRAs involves violence, aggression, entitlement and batshittery. And the women who are supposedly 'just as bad' are actually just holding meetings saying wtaf is the matter with everyone, there are laws protecting biological women!

I thought this about the change of language this week, Fekko, is there a pinpointed time when it changed? The language does seem so important... "transvestites are women" doesn't sound quite as catchy as TWAW.

I'm not sure.

When I was a teen and went clubbing (we went to gay clubs as these were the best and not full of neddy creeps), you got transvestites (mostly) - always men dressed like Carmen Miranda, who put on a bitchy persona but would be seen at the end of the night propping up the end of the bar, swigging a pint and their wig on wonky. They wouldn't enter the ladies loos, and didn't hit on lesbians.

This whole 'wear an earring and you are a very special transperson' is a load of nonsense. As are the biology deniers.

I blame the internet and social media. And harry potter (magic my arse). Also rainbows and unicorns to some extent.