Cambridge University LGBTQI+ students: we are not attempting to silence free speech, we just want to deplatform Helen Joyce

[snurtifier]

Helen Joyce has been invited to talk at Gonville & Caius College next week. This has provoked the usual outbreak of virtue signalling and the following response from "college LGBTQI+ officers". It is pretty much the full bingo card. Warning: contains complex mental gymnastics.

Dear all,
It has come to our attention that Gonville and Caius college, and the Divinity faculty, are hosting a speaker event on the 25th of October platforming Helen Joyce. This event has also been promoted by the Fac Bio to natural sciences, medic and vet med students. The title of the event is ‘Criticising gender-identity ideology: what happens when speech is silenced.’
Helen Joyce is a ‘gender critical’ activist, whose work largely focuses around anti-trans rhetoric and trans-exclusionary radical feminism. “Gender identity ideology” is frequently used as a dog-whistle for transphobic sentiment, cloaked in the language of free speech and scientific inquiry. It goes without saying that this kind of rhetoric is fundamentally against what we as LGBT officers stand for, and we are unanimously disgusted by the platforming of such views by Caius and the promotion of the event by the various faculties. Transgender identities should not be put forward as a subject for debate, and their existence is not an “ideology.”

Colleges, and the wider university, have a duty of care to their students, no matter their gender identity. By inviting speakers with inflammatory and bigoted views to speak, the staff involved are allowing transphobia to proliferate within the university, lending it a level of credibility, and crucially, potentially putting transgender students in harms’ way. Transgender people are an at-risk minority group – according to the Stonewall School Report 2017:
92% of trans young people have thought about taking their own life;
84% of trans young people have self-harmed; and

45% of trans young people have tried to take their own life.

Further to this, just days before the event was announced, the Home Office published the past years’ statistics on hate crimes in the UK, which revealed that transphobic hate crime has increased by 56% from last year, with 4,355 reports being made in England and Wales. In light of these statistics, the platforming of a speaker with these transphobic views takes on a particularly alarming salience.

Freedom of speech, of course, is protected in law; Helen Joyce has the right to speak as she pleases. The core of the issue we take is with the senior staff and fellows who have chosen to platform this speaker, which we consider a violation of their duty of care. To invite a speaker whose publicly expressed views include advocating “reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition” both legitimises active transphobia and also alienates and hurts transgender individuals on a personal and emotional level. Furthermore, the fact that this has been promoted to medical students, who will inevitably treat transgender patients in their future careers, presents a further risk to trans individuals not just in the university, but in the wider community, with the potential for wide-reaching and long-lasting harm.

This is not an attempt to silence free speech, but rather, us exercising our own right to that speech in the face of an event which is, in our view, not only irresponsible but actively harmful and cruel to the transgender students at Cambridge. Trans people deserve a university experience as comfortable, safe, and joyful as everyone else, and the University should take an active role in ensuring that – a role that they have, on this occasion, failed to fulfil. It is for these reasons that we implore Gonville and Caius to reconsider their decision to platform Joyce.
If any individual feels unsafe, upset or troubled by this event, please talk to someone – your college LGBT officer, an SU representative, a college or university counsellor, or a charity helpline. We have attached some resources at the end of this letter.
With love and solidarity,
The college LGBT officers

And I do agree that all topics should be up for debate. And probably all speakers too - I supported Gaddafi being able to speak, and even Nick Griffin back in the day (yes, I am old!). But that doesn’t mean a publicly-funded institution should organise public-facing events on all topics, surely.

you're doing all the soul searching here - you explain where the line should be drawn? (if one should be drawn at all)

choosing to organise an institutional event on a particular issue suggests that the issue is important, prominent, relevant, legitimate and so on,

Are you suggesting that this is not?

No, not at all! I said very clearly I support Helen Joyce and that I’m talking about issues like racial intelligence differences and Holocaust denial

Yes, I guess I am soul searching a bit - just thought it was an interesting question as people I know in real life are much less committed to an extreme position on freedom of speech. I don’t know where the line should be drawn, hence raising the question!

And pondering a bit more- I don’t even think it’s a question of “a line”. I think the line for a publicly funded institution would be completely different compared with, I don’t know, a privately hosted event. For the latter I don’t think I’d want to see any lines drawn at all (I suppose with the exception of actual direct incitement to violence).

Don't you just get sick of cowardly little scroates, sending bitchy secret messeges behind womens backs trying to silence them from talking about their rights and the importance of maintaining safeguarding for women and cnildren. The pompous vainglorious ignorance of them. Proudly insisting on endangering a woman campaigning to protect women and children from harm.

Utter disgraceful ignorant scumbags

If you ban discussions including Holocaust denial then you also ban rebuttal of those denials. If you ban topics from discussion then you get the exact same "Why are they afraid to hear us speak - are they afraid that their attempts at rebuttal won't work, because they have no logic/argument/truth/foundation?" that we point out when trans ideologues refuse to let gender critical topics be discussed.

I agree, on the whole. I don’t want to see any topics “banned”.

The same happens when Stonewall and Mermaids have to give evidence in court.

All bigots struggle when they have to justify their ideology.

Functionally you are absolutely saying people should be banned from speaking.

If there is an interest in a topic like race and IQ, if there are scholars looking at this kind of question, who think it is important, by definition it's not marginal. That is how the university works, and the public discourse more generally. If people are talking about it, it is in some sense important.

In your system, who would be the people who get to decide what is too niche, too silly? What would be the process to determine that? Who would decide where the lines are, or whether drawing those lines might have unexpected consequences in other areas?

The only workable option, the only transparent option, is through open public discourse. Otherwise you are talking about some kind of closed group who are making these kinds of decisions about what is important and what people can legitimately talk about. By what processes? Who knows. On what authority? Their own. With what special knowledge?

There is no system that guarantees that all people will only believe the right things. Which may seem like an excuse to limit what others can see right up until you realize there is no guarantee you will only believe the right things.

Why should certain topics be off limits? Surely it's only through presentation of evidence and subsequent discussion that we can come to have a better understanding of the world we live in? And what if the available evidence shows there are difference (on average) between groups? Why is that necessarily a bad thing?

The most memorable lecture I ever attended at uni was a psychology Professor's talk on sex differences in performance on various cognitive tasks. In a number of the presented studies, the average for males' performance was better than the average performance for females.

As a woman, I didn't come away from the lecture feeling oppressed, unsafe or maligned by the university, instead I found the studies very interesting. The lecture raised all kinds of questions about who decides what IQ consists of? Why are certain tasks (that males perform well in) privileged over tasks that females perform well in? Who demarcates what "cognitive skills" encompass? What can we infer from performance on IQ tests in relation to life outcomes etc. It was also the only lecture I ever attended that got a standing ovation for the lecturer.

I don't understand why students today are so close minded and illiberal. They have far more access to information through the internet then people my age who had to consult a limited number of paper journals in brick libraries. With all the information at their fingertips why aren't they more open to learning as much as they can about the world around them? It seems to me that universities nowadays are more like religious seminaries preaching to devout students who won't entertain anything that challenges their life outlook.

I really don’t think I am saying that. In particular I would never want to see individuals banned - but I’m also not interested in “banning” topics either.

I think this clause in your PP If there is an interest in a topic like race and IQ, if there are scholars looking at this kind of question, who think it is important is doing a lot of heavy lifting - I’m saying we shouldn’t host/sponsor events on topics like race science where there is no serious academic interest (as far as I’m aware!) and the topic is being raised only by fringe/extremist groups. Let me stress again here that I don’t see Helen Joyce’s work like that at all.

It’s a bit like public funding of research, I guess: I would never want to see any topics “banned” but of course RCUK has to make decisions about which topics are worthy of million-pound grants and which topics are not. The ones that are fringe and pseudo-scientific or based on racist assumptions don’t tend to get the funding, and rightly not.

And no, there’s not a “closed group” making decisions; but I’m a HoD and of course together with my seminars and events colleagues we will decide which speakers to invite and which events to host each term.

The Master and Senior Tutor have capitulated to the students

twitter.com/camradfems/status/1582760543496343553

very disappointing

But the debate is still going ahead? Or no?

Yes, it’s still going ahead thankfully.

Disappointed at the weaselly capitulation by Caius. Ridiculous!

As an aside, though, @snurtifier, Derrida has absolutely nothing to do with gender ideology. He isn’t even a postmodernist, if you dislike postmodernism. He’s effectively writing in a Hegelian Marxist tradition, and would have been deeply sceptical of gender identity ideology, which can’t really exist at all under deconstruction. If you know Derrida well, you’d be unable to believe in any gender identity ideology.

Doesn’t help to aim at not just the wrong target, but also at a form of thought that would be explicitly against gender ideology and in fact undoes all the genderists’ claims.

Best that I could find: Stats from Amsterdam Cohort of Gender Dysphoria study (1972–2017):

The prevalence of suicidality in trans people in suicidal ideation, suicidal attempts, and suicide death rates is studied in varying degrees and shows high variability in findings. [...] Since structured prevalence studies on suicide deaths are lacking in the transgender literature, an estimation comes from a limited number of studies reporting on suicide death rates in small study samples. Derived from a systematic review on suicidality in trans people by Marshall et al., suicide death rates varied from 0% to 4.2% in a sample of 24 post‐treatment trans people from Sweden (15). Six of these studies only included postsurgical people whereas two studies also included trans people who were only using hormones without surgery. However, studies differentiating the treatment stage during which death by suicide occurred are lacking. In addition, studies differentiating between suicide in trans women and trans men are scarce. While some studies found that trans men have a higher risk of suicide attempts than trans women other studies reported no differences in suicide attempts between trans women and trans men. Only one cohort distinguished suicide death risk in trans women and trans men and found that trans women had an increased risk of suicide death compared with trans men.

Conclusions
We observed no increase in suicide death risk over time and even a decrease in suicide death risk in trans women. However, the suicide risk in transgender people is higher than in the general population and seems to occur during every stage of transitioning.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7317390/

So it seems that the evidence base consists of "a limited number of studies reporting on suicide death rates in small study samples", that higher male rates of suicide persist in transwomen, and that the elevated risk persists in all stages of transitioning including postsurgically.

Access to drugs and surgery certainly doesn't seem to be a cure-all. Maybe more investment in mental health services is the way to go. ¡Que sorpresa!

But as you say, this already happens.

There are all kinds of polemical speakers who don't get invited to talk at universities because everyone knows they are intellectually lightweight.

But if professors, or students, are interested in hearing a talk, there is something that has caught their interest, even if it is more to do with it being culturally relevant at a particular moment.

This doesn't square at all with your argument that no one should invite speakers who might talk about something like Holocaust denial - or at least what some people define as Holocaust denial. Why not, if they are presenting some kind of serious or culturally important argument that academics or students are interested in?

I think you're wrong about Derrida and gender ideology, albeit in an interesting way.

Here's something from Stanford (probably the best online Philosophy Encyclopedia, for those interested; see Stanford trans philosophy):
" Queer Theory roughly applies to theoretical work, typically informed by Foucault and Derrida, that aims to study and “deconstruct” heteronormative ideology. It emerged in the 1990s through thinkers such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick."

Judith Butler, as any fule kno, is in many ways the Mother of trans ideology ... and, yes, she follows Derrida in being, as you say, "deeply sceptical of gender identity ideology" How can this be?

What is going on? As follows (roughly). Actually, currently there isn't a single unified 'gender ideology' at all. There are two modes, operating under a single brand. What's more, these two modes are mutually incompatible ...

The academic, Butlerian mode of gender ideology follows Derridean post-structuralism in having no truck with notions of identity - of necessity, given its roots, we could say. But what we might call the popular mode of gender ideology bases itself thoroughly on this very notion of (gender) identity. (I imagine old Jacques smiling at this conjuctive disjunction. Scoundrel that he was.)

Can these two modes be reconciled? I suspect that not. (Although each of them is nonsensical, albeit in different ways, and we might link them by an ex falso quodlibet.) But it is one of the many trahisons des clercs committed by queer theorists that they do not apply their theory, at least in public, to the popular - and societally influential - mode of gender (-identity) ideology. (Shame on them.)

I sometimes think of this state of affairs as akin to what often happens in (other?) religious ideologies: the simple faith of the masses based on notions excoriated (but not publicly) by the clever theologians. Certainly that was the case in the Roman Catholicism of my long-ago youth. Plus ça change ...?

Academic freedom is the freedom for scholars to pursue truth and understanding according to established scholarly conventions, without interference. This includes through teaching, research, publishing and public engagement. Universities have a legal obligation to uphold it. The academic who organised this talk - Arif Ahmed - is exercising his legal right to academic freedom (which is different from Helen Joyce's right to freedom of expression). He's organised a public talk which is something academics do all the time in their pursuit of truth and understanding.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm interested in how that email from the master and senior tutor squares with Caius College's legal obligation to ensure that Ahmed is enabled to pursue truth and understanding without interference. They seem to be encouraging the attempted interference, and failing to maintain organisational neutrality - using their first names doesn't make them less responsible for a circular email they send round.

The whole lunatic idea of cancelling someone because they have a different opinion which is quite peaceable is crazy. If people might be upset by hearing Helen Joyce then for goodness sake don’t go and hear the lecture. If somebody might be driven to suicide by somebody saying that a woman is a woman then it may be that that person is in need of therapy not a course at university.

Reminds me of that Clash lyric:

"You have the right to free speech
As long as
You're not dumb enough
To actually try it..."

I am really, deeply shocked and disturbed by this.

according to the Stonewall School Report 2017:

92% of trans young people have thought about taking their own life;

84% of trans young people have self-harmed; and

45% of trans young people have tried to take their own life.

Has anyone got the real facts around regarding this moral blackmail?

What a shame that these students at Cambridge University believe cancelling the speakers is the answer rather than proving the speakers wrong.

This Swedish Study is a follow up study and the mortality rate of trans gender people following transition shows it is not the panacea it is made out to be.
Results

Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden | PLOS ONE

journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885

Excerpt:
The overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up (aHR 2.8; 95% CI 1.8–4.3) than for controls of the same birth sex, particularly death from suicide (aHR 19.1; 95% CI 5.8–62.9). Sex-reassigned persons also had an increased risk for suicide attempts (aHR 4.9; 95% CI 2.9–8.5) and psychiatric inpatient care (aHR 2.8; 95% CI 2.0–3.9). Comparisons with controls matched on reassigned sex yielded similar results. Female-to-males, but not male-to-females, had a higher risk for criminal convictions than their respective birth sex controls.

Conclusions

Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group.

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.

His influence can be seen in the University of Chicago's 1967 Kalven report, which 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.”

(Apologies for the duplication, as I posted the same quotes on another thread about the capture of academics.)