Academic Freedom, Harassment and GC academics - ask me any questions

[ProfJoPhoenix]

Hi Mumsnetters

Jo Phoenix here - as in the academic cancelled by Essex and harassed by colleagues at the OU. I decided to join mumsnet because I know that several women here are supportive of what it is that we (GC academics) are going through and dealing with. I thought I would start a thread - a sort of ask me any question thread. I'll be making an announcement on twitter (@JoPhoenix1) on Sunday morning that you might find interesting. What's happened to Kathleen Stock has left all of us reeling and I am going to do something that, I hope, will help. Watch this space.

I expect as you are so keen on research into this area @suggestionsplease1 you will be giving all your support to the Gender Critical Academic Network and their research plans?

That's marvelous. Great to have you onboard. There's certainly not enough research to make you happier, I can see you are quite upset about it.

Things will get better. Thanks for the support.

@YetAnotherSpartacus

Why are we allowing this wonderful support thread to be hijacked and diverted?

Quite. Ignore and move on.

There has to be something deeply wrong with a person who is demanding evidence of the harm of transgenderism, from a woman, on their own thread, the entire basis of which is the harm done to them.

I have been publicly vilified by hundreds of my colleagues in a targeted campaign against members of the Gender Critical Research Network; I have been called transphobic; I have twice been compared to a racist by managers; and I have been silenced and shunned within my department.

I have been made to feel like a pariah and have become very ill as a result.

These are just a few examples of what has happened:

A senior manager told me that I was “like the racist uncle at the Christmas dinner table.” When I started to cry, she suggested that if I couldn’t cope with it she could put me in touch with counselling services.
I was instructed not to speak about my research, which includes research on trans rights and the criminal justice system, in departmental meetings.
Over 360 of my colleagues signed a public letter condemning the Gender Critical Research Network and calling for the OU to remove all support and funding from the network, alleging that gender critical feminism is “fundamentally hostile to the rights of trans people”. This letter also made demonstrably false and extremely damaging accusations about what was said in a podcast that I participated in.
Another public statement by my colleagues published on the OU’s website expressed "dismay" at the establishment of the Gender Critical Research network, accusing members of the network of having made transphobic statements and of choosing the label “gender critical” as “a deliberate provocation to trans communities.”
The Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Representative for my Faculty has published numerous derogatory tweets about gender critical belief, including retweeting a tweet showing my name and photo with a reference to a "transphobic/TERF/GC campaign network".
I have been given suspiciously few opportunities at work given my seniority and experience.
The OU has shattered my dreams because it has failed to protect me, despite my repeated pleas for them to remove discriminatory and hate-filled statements that my colleagues have published on the OU’s websites.

I have been diagnosed with acute PTSD because of this treatment and have been too unwell to work for months.

But where it really falls off the cliff of idiocy is the info they demand are actual studies, not personal evidence, from a woman who has just told them

"I was instructed not to speak about my research, which includes research on trans rights and the criminal justice system, in departmental meetings."

I'm not sure what's more ludicrous, the rank stupidity of demanding evidence of harm from someone on a thread asking for support due to the harm actually inflicted on her, or demanding it in a format that she has been prevented from using.

The gaslighting is off the bloody scale.

@Datun
Well said

I'm not sure what's more ludicrous, the rank stupidity of demanding evidence of harm from someone on a thread asking for support due to the harm actually inflicted on her, or demanding it in a format that she has been prevented from using.

The gaslighting is off the bloody scale.

Hear hear!!

(56k carrots and counting!)

Dropping in a Vaclav Havel essay (the signs on the fruit and vegetable stands) that Jo Phoenix mentioned in conversation with Maya Forstater for Sex Matters :

The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace." This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer's superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogan's real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocer's existence. It reflects his vital interests. But what are those vital interests?

Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan "I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient;' he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, "What's wrong with the workers of the world uniting?" Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.

hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23

@EmbarrassingHadrosaurus, great quote.

In fact it gives me the underpinnings of what I want to call myself if I have to call myself anything from now on - a gender dissident, engaging in genderist dissent.

Women as political dissidents.

I like the term gender atheist as it includes the suggestion that gender ideology is a belief system.

Those wanting to answer the questions posed would find everything they need in this article, which to my mind is comprehensive in providing data, solid legal argument and devastating rebuttal of all pro-gender identity arguments.

www.modernlawreview.co.uk/asteriti-bull-sharpe/

@foxgoosefinch

Can you really think of no examples in history where the oppressed have become the oppressors and vice versa?

Except that has no relation to your post, which was a rather bad faith and ill fitting pseudo analogy trying to compare Murray’s Bell Curve with women who are being publicly harassed and threatened for factual statements. You also don’t appear to know as much about Murray’s argument and it’s reception as you ought to, so I fear it’s not me who’s naive.

Keep your focus on the actual argument you yourself are making, and what I said about a false analogy - can you come up with a better one?

I am not sure they need to be completely analogous. Analogies never are, anyway.

The first words in the title of this thread are "academic freedom". Academic freedom doesn't operate on the basis of some kind of oppression hierarchy, whether it's "right" or not.

It's a valid question. Gender ideology is only one area where we are seeing issues with academic freedom. A professor at my university was harassed and faced attempted canceling because he was doing some writing on the history of depictions of other races in theater, including blackface, and he came to the apparently unallowable conclusion that all such depictions are not the same.

It's a wider problem than gender ideology and if people are really going to make the claim that this is a violation against academic freedom they should really be putting their money where their mouths are and also be standing up for it when they don't like the viewpoints being expressed.

Academic freedom doesn't operate on the basis of some kind of oppression hierarchy, whether it's "right" or not.

I beg your pardon, have you actually just arrived here on page 10 of this thread to explain that to the women here as if it wasn’t understood throughout the past 10 pages of discussion?

Or are you the same unwarrantedly self-satisfied arse as the previous one and this is a NC fail? If you’ve been on this thread all along, that only makes the unutterable gall of your arsesplaining even more astonishing.

You’re making a total tit of yourself. Please stop.

On further reading I don’t think you are that person, you’re just responding to comments that were made to them, so I probably should have been slightly less annoyed at the splaining. 😬 For the record, it is quite possible to both support academic freedom in general, and object to the comparison being made. But the context that made your post obnoxious wasn’t supplied by you.

Yeah, whatever.

It's related to the question I asked way back at the beginning of the thread on page two or three, when questions seemed to be part of the discussion, with regard to how this particular issue about gender ideology is related to a more widespread problem in academia. Within the context of academia I'd argue it's the more important problem, but in any case no one really said much one way or the other, right up until the question of academic freedom was brought up again with the reply that race isn't the same.

I don't give a shit if suggestions-or-whateverthename is is in good faith or really interested in a gotcha about race for a screenshot or what. Because even if that's the goal it suggests an entirely distorted understanding of academic freedom as something we only allow for certain ideas, and that needs to be pushed back against and getting into arguments about who is really oppressed is the opposite of pushing back.

[quote Notinmynamebuddy]Those wanting to answer the questions posed would find everything they need in this article, which to my mind is comprehensive in providing data, solid legal argument and devastating rebuttal of all pro-gender identity arguments.

www.modernlawreview.co.uk/asteriti-bull-sharpe/[/quote]
Does anyone know about the one author -Asteriti of that article? I remember she was on Twitter but I don't see her anymore. I remember that publishing that article led to protests at the university where she was working in Germany.

I don't give a shit if suggestions-or-whateverthename is is in good faith or really interested in a gotcha about race for a screenshot or what.

Well, I do. “Screenshots” in this case are more targeted than the usual Twitter bullshit. People will be poring over this thread looking for ammunition they can use against Professor Phoenix specifically, and they’ll twist anything that is said entirely out of context if necessary.

Well one of the reasons I objected to the comparison was that manifestly Charles Murray didn’t get cancelled. Quite a lot of other men stood up for his academic freedom, took the book seriously (and it’s more complex than suggestions allows, though it has its own bad faith reasoning); many serious senior male academics wrote reviews, critiques and rebuttals of it. He faced some controversy and a few protests, but was manifestly not treated remotely like Kathleen Stock or other gender critical feminists. The academic phrase of the time was “teach the controversy”! Whatever the conclusions about Murray’s work, it was certainly not denied a platform.

So not only does suggestions’s analogy not work on the basis of race, it doesn’t even work on the basis of what actually happened. Murray wasn’t censored or silenced - his book was widely debated. The protests suggestions mentioned were actually in 2017 and quite nasty - the university concerned too disciplinary action against the protestors. But 2017 is firmly in our current age, very different from 1994 when the book was published. The culture has changed radically since then.

I myself am perfectly happy to accept that academic freedom involves sometimes defending the freedom for others to hold and debate ideas I dislike or find abhorrent - as many of us argued on the thread about pro-life groups and free speech recently. As long as something does not cross the line into harassment, threats or incitement, then the bar for banning it has got to remain a high one - a democratic society must be able to have academic freedom and free speech, or totalitarianism beckons.

I also fail to see why on Earth these protestors are singling out academic monographs in the first place, given all the harms, false information and frankly dangerous idiocy freely available on the internet. But of course it is much more fun to bully lesbian women academics than It is to, for example, lobby for Pornhub to be shut down, or anti-vaxxers on Tiktok to be suppressed. In terms of great harm done to trans people, logically the “trans” porn categories on “big porn” sites cause trans people more measurable social and psychological misery and harm. But to acknowledge this would be to acknowledge that “swerf and terf” feminists might actually have a point about something.

Was there, watching Prof Jo being fabulous because people started donating on the dot of 9am the moment the crowdjustice site opened, and the donations started flooding in.

.
The stuff OU have put her through is fucking unbelievable

She was actually quite emotional, btw! Really very overcome at the response

#Orderofthephoenix
#phoenixrising
#teamjo

“Screenshots” in this case are more targeted than the usual Twitter bullshit. People will be poring over this thread looking for ammunition they can use against Professor Phoenix specifically, and they’ll twist anything that is said entirely out of context if necessary

Bunbury would agree with you.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3438714-Bunbury-s-Public-Service-Announcement-2

www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-web-violence/201806/what-is-dehumanization-anyway

'Dehumanization involves redefining the targets of prejudice and violence by making them seem less human (that is, less civilized or less sentient) than other people. The classic strategy for this is to use terms like “animals” and “vermin.” '

Step over and onwards.