Is there a simple explanation for why so many academics have fallen for this?

[resistingreality]

Hi all, this is a bit of a woolly question but I am trying it anyway. I am an academic in the broad area of equality and diversity (not specifically sex-based inequalities). I am aware of many other academics, people far senior to me and much more 'successful,' and who I admire for their work, who are fully behind gender ideology. Some are advocates of queer theory and work in this area, but not all. Most are feminists, and one very prominent example posted on twitter this week saying that anybody who called themselves gender critical was not (a feminist, that is). It sent a shiver down my spine partly because I simply cannot understand this. I can sort of understand how people not immersed in these debates could be swayed by the 'be kind' thing and not see how trans rights and women's rights might clash. But these are intelligent, well-read, people who are supposedly (as academics) led by evidence. I simply can't understand how they can't see the very active harms caused by gender ideology. Or ... perhaps they can, and they don't care? But this requires a shift in my thinking to accept that women (and some men) who profess to stand for other women and have often built a career on this ... simply don't. I'll also admit to not knowing what to do. I want to stand up for my beliefs and I absolutely hate this conspiracy of silence but I am also aware that these more prominent academics could damage my own career and I don't feel brave. Help!

I know my earlier post on this thread probably looks like nonsense to many readers. But actually, though perhaps a little flippant, it does make sense (and is mostly true).

Of course 'transcendental' in 'transcendental signified' means something different from 'transcendental' in 'transcendental number', just as 'imaginary' in 'imaginary friend' means something other than 'imaginary' in 'imaginary number'.

That's as may be. I suppose the takeaway point is that unlike that earlier post of mine, queer theory itself just is nonsense from top to bottom. (I explained briefly in that post why this is so, as well as hinting at the genesis of its grounding error - 'one person's modus ponens ...', etc.)

[By the way (and off topic), I think your mathsisfun stops too soon. Hyperreal numbers and surreal numbers are even more wonderful, even more fun. (Where 'surreal' in 'surreal number' differs ... oh, you know the rest.)]

Very nicely put, Cheese.

What bothers me deeply about this whole movement is that swathes of people seem to believe that transpeople actually change their biological sex.

I wonder about this a lot. I'm sure most people can understand that no one changes sex if they really think about it - in a physical way. If people actually changed sex, like clownfish do, they would be functioning as their new sex (or at least the same proportion of them would as in that sex as a whole). And we know that's never ever happened. It would be major news if it did.

But these "believers" know they have to believe/say that a man actually is, or has become on his say-so, a woman. In every way. They don't really know what that means, but they know they must think it or else be a bigot/fascist/t*rf. Sex - the physical reality of biological sex - is a fly in the ointment, so I think all the specious arguments that there is no such thing as sex or "sex is a spectrum" appeal to these people to help them square the circle. Despite the fact that that makes no sense either and causes more problems. (If sex isn't a thing you can't be trans, and if sex doesn't exist or matter, why would you want sex hormones and sex-imitating surgery? Plus it eliminates both homosexuality and heterosexuality.)

All of this relies on the process of placing moral righteousness above critical thinking. They don't think people change sex - they just know they're not allowed to think otherwise so they exist in a mental limbo of false and circular arguments.

And of course, if sex isn't a thing, you can't change sex. It's entirely circular.

I listened to an interview on the 'some kind of therapist' podcast with a guy who argued that Marxism is a religion. Not 'woke' but Marxism itself. Which I thought was interesting and pertinent to this discussion. He talked about the construction of a 'pseudo reality' (something James Lindsay has talked about as well) and I thought, yes, that's exactly it. Academics (and others) live in a constructed pseudo-reality. Where white people are evil and you can change sex and everything is about power relations and the planet is about to die and racism is everywhere etc etc etc. It's not reality, but it is a simulation supported by much of the media and almost all institutions, especially the universities.

“A university is a community of scholars. It is not a kindergarten; it is not a club; it is not a reform school; it is not a political party; it is not an agency of propaganda. A university is a community of scholars.”
Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899-1977).

Hutchins was appointed President of the University of Chicago at the age of 30. During his sixteen years in the post he was active in developing the institution's strong freedom of expression rules.

Unfortunately, many US universities are increasingly ignoring the principles outlined in that quote and are increasingly activist-minded in their approaches to some issues. For example, the University of California is now requiring academic applicants to submit a "Diversity Statement" on which candidates are judged BEFORE their academic and teaching credentials are even considered. If the Diversity Statement isn't considered good enough the application is binned at that stage.

The Academic Freedom Alliance has opposed this practice, not because it doesn't welcome diversity, but because of the narrow ideological interpretation that will be used to judge these mandatory statements. As Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, said, "The danger that mandatory DEI statements would function as ideological loyalty oaths worried academic freedom advocates and other civil libertarians from the start. Experience, far from diminishing that worry, has heightened it.”

If this kind of ideological selection process is allowed to continue the problems in academia will surely multiply.

As the University of Chicago's 1967 Kalven report stated: "A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.”

What's Marxism got to do with it though?

An old-school Marxist-feminist analysis would recognise that the inequality between men and women rests on the basis of sex.

Whenever someone states 'sex is a spectrum' they think they are telling you how wonderfully complex and enlightened their mind is, but what they are actually telling you is that they think babies are born with predetermined personalities based upon sex. Why else say 'sex is a spectrum' if you don't think that?

TBH apart from 'you can change sex', I can't really disagree with these contentions. (although no, not all white people are evil; but structurally/institutionally you can absolutely make a case for that).
I do agree though with the point that this post and others make, that in academia you can construct and go down a rabbit hole that can seem quite persuasive, even though in the real world it falls down or doesn't or should apply etc.

What strikes me is that back when I was a student (UG and PG) the whole poststructuralist thing was all about a move away from identity (as something inherent) towards discussing subjectivity and the social processes through which people’s subjectivity emerges. Somehow we seem to have retained the stuff about things being fluid and multiple but returned to ideas of identity as inherent and the main characteristic of the self.

What we have is a return to reified identity categories - just with a proliferation of variants and subcategories in which to place human selves. The categories have become more real than the self people are attempting to articulate through them. And certainly more real than the material or biological world.

It’s weird. And feels like a perverse use of, for example, deleuze and guattari. 🤷🏻‍♀️ I mean the last bit isn’t important - who cares what people do to a thousand plateaus? But it’s still odd.

I think that even structurally the ‘white people are evil’ is a problematic and oversimplified position that might serve some kind of self flagellation needs but doesn’t help to actually understand the issues. Never mind address them.

I don't disagree, and I should have said I also think it's oversimplified and problematic. I stand by my general point though.

Listen to the interview. It was very interesting.

It's racist bullshit, is what it is.

Superb quote from Thomas Sowell! Thanks @teawamutu.

Yes, you're right. I agree it all seems very strange.

What we have is two ideological modes operating under the same brand.

One - the academic, queer theory mode - denies sense to talk of identity, stresses fluidity with something like Derrida's endless deferral of sense and tries to link this to Butler's egregious misreading of Austin's notion of the performative.

The other - out in the wild, so to speak, in schools, council meetings, political parties and so on - reifies gender identity in a wholly dualist manner, opposing it to bodily sex and taking a quasi religious stance to its mysteries.

Even if either of these modes could be made coherent in itself (I see no way of doing this), it's plain as a pikestaff they can't be joined in any coherent whole. But, well, there they are.

It would help a little if those in the academy on mode1 could offer the obvious critique of mode2 from their own standpoint. (Gender identity true believers cannot be expected to criticise Judith Butler etc., so the reverse cannot happen.) But those who started the whole thing (who they? - not allowed to say on MN) have too tight a grip.

Really, it does look as if the academy has been baldly pusillanimous on this. Easy for me to say, I know, now my employment does not depend on toeing the party line. But, really, you all need to stand up and be counted. I'm sure it will come; some people I know are already girding their loins. Go for it.

All of this is painfully true.

The other - out in the wild, so to speak, in schools, council meetings, political parties and so on - reifies gender identity in a wholly dualist manner, opposing it to bodily sex and taking a quasi religious stance to its mysteries.

Yes and this is so important. A "lay" interpretation of the whole bollox tends to not understand the intricacies and how it all arose, and how it's not facts but a load of highly debatable sophistical wibble. And it's not surprising because that wibble is designed to be obfuscatory and clever-clever, it's not about clarity.

So out in council meetings and schools and NHS and prison boards etc, it often boils down to an understanding that you can literally be born in the wrong body - that a "woman" (whatever that means, when separated from a female body) is stuck inside a male body or vice versa and it's terribly sad. And we have to be super-nice to all these people because they're suffering so much from this already without the terrible prejudice they also encounter from nasty transphobes. This is taken as read and of course the only way you can know it's happening is if the person tells you, so you always must believe them.

A classic example of academic nuance and/or sophistry turning into essentially unrelated "facts" of "common knowledge".

Which is fair enough, but it's only worth looking at concepts differently when you've already looked at them conventionally to start with.

Thats what I tend to think about teaching very young children about gender identity.

If they don’t know, because nobody tells them, that boys have penises and girls have vulvas, and then someone comes along to tell them that boy and girl are categories based on your mind, your behaviour and your preferences… how can these children make any sense of that information?

I once had the misfortune to sit through a Judith butler talk at a conference. The hall was literally packed with what I can only describe as adoring fans.

Butler stood up and waffles her way through half a talk. Literally half a talk. She got to the halfway point (having said literally nothing) and just stopped. Said she’s run out of time so she’d just stop there. It was like stopping mid sentence and leaving everyone wondering what the actual sentence was going to be about. Or stopping a (really bad and pretentious!) film
halfway through and expecting everyone to just know about the big plot twist at the end.

It was objectively crap. Absolutely dire. Yet, everyone around me raved about how wonderful it was. How wonderful she was. If literally anyone else had given that badly organised, poorly timed talk and just stopped, they’d have been tearing them to shreds. But it was Judith butler and somehow she was beyond criticism. It made no sense at all. None.

I sat looking at people I had previously thought were sensible people, wondering about cults and brainwashing. It really is everyone raving about the emperor’s new clothes.

Oh… and she was just reading it. It was something she’d written and she just just reading an excerpt for her adoring audience. Like a reading at a literary festival. But at an academic conference.

But no one wanted to say: Oi Judith. That was shite!

A classic example of academic nuance and/or sophistry turning into essentially unrelated "facts" of "common knowledge".

YY.

Kathleen Stock wrote an interesting essay recently about the change in philosophy departments to being more friendly to women.

kathleenstock.substack.com/p/cocooning-philosophy

Yes, unless replacing sweeping statement such as "All White People Are X" with "All Black People Are Y" isn't racist. But, of course, it is.

In my department there's an obsession with bringing in "famous" people whenever we organize a research lecture of some relevance. This can either be academic stars or people from industry.
Most of the times these people arrive, give a talk or workshop that they've delivered thousands of times (sometimes as far as 5 years ago, which of course is not ideal in research), are generally polite but very disengaged. I have repeatedly said that we'd get more value for money with someone who is more up and coming, has something new to say and would put in some effort to offer something more tailored - to no avail. I thought academics would be the first to know that just becaue someone wrote an influential book 30 years ago or is on TV a lot doesn't mean they should be revered, but there you go.