Jesus wept. Is Sederbaum actually a PhD student, or does he just identify as one?
Honestly, repeatedly calling the piece to which they were responding “badly researched” made me embarrassed for them when reading the absolute mess they’d produced. Oh & the repeated “biological essentialism” as an unsubtle lead into AND THE TERFS ARE ALL RACISTS TOO: can one sue for having been injured by cringing so hard at the contents & construction of what purports to be a piece of academic writing you definitely revolved some organs (& then twisted them back again at further cringe)?
Insisting that athletes who it is well-documented are male & have DSDs that only male people can have are “cisgender females” manages to combine truly execrable research AND racism. To say nothing of the casual discounting of the views of [black*] African women on the matter. Treating the women of an entire enormous continent as an amorphous mass who would act as a hive-mind is grim, too - & what of the diaspora? Would the author allow a Kenyan woman living in America to express her views, but not her African-American neighbour? This fiction that all gender-critical people are white is so deeply tiresome - & it’s not the [GC] white women who are failing to listen.
The familiar suicide “stats” were trotted out; it being the “worst year on record” for the murders of trans people was not contextualised which was either just yet more poor writing or it was a deliberate attempt to obfuscate; & in essence it was a lengthy temper tantrum with the usual demand the publication Do Better.
The piece to which he is responding, by contrast, is well-written (in fairness, Kirk is an English Professor) & well-argued. It is personal to her but she manages to keep her tone measured & even throughout. She holds the perfectly standard GC position in that she doesn’t want to exclude trans women from sport; but she wants them to have every opportunity to compete in their sex category.
The editors of “Inside Higher Ed” absolutely have to be Gender Critical - not because they published that first piece, but because they published the second. If one side has clear, well-researched & well-written arguments DESPITE strong personal feelings; & the rebuttal is essentially a screeching mess of slurs, nonsense, racism & a display of the author’s position of privilege… that’s some GLARING sunlight.
- I’m not entirely clear if the author’s ignorance is indeed so vast he is unaware that there are, indeed, white African women.