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

as any fule kno

Thanks, liwoxac - I haven't seen Nigel Molesworth quoted in ages. 😀

Oops, I meant to add that your post was very interesting, liwoxac, especially the comparison between the theologians and pew-fillers and their gender ideology counterparts.

And we believe Stonewall?

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 ...?

I don't see this as a religious phenomena. It also happens in terms of philosophy and how it trickles down to the masses, and even science. If you go asking the general population about common scientific frameworks that inform how they see reality, they will often be quite different than what scientists who operate in the relevant area say.

Certainly the popular concept of what science is and how it operates is not particularly in line with what a philosopher of science would say, just look at the "follow the science" rhetoric in the pandemic.

Christianity historically, like a lot of other religions, accepted that this kind of gap was a reality that had to be managed, I am not sure we are better off for assuming we can close that gap even though widespread public education makes it seem possible, at least theoretically. My suspicion is though that very high level abstract thought is not accessible to everyone and maybe no one is able to get to that level in every discipline.

RoseslnTheHospital· 18/10/2022 10:35
I cannot get over how some students believe that some people having a discussion, that no one is forced to attend or participate in could make them feel unsafe or somehow cause them harm. How is our society producing adults with so little resilience and robustness?

The way the words ‘unsafe and harm* are being used here is ridiculous. It is just seems to be a thoughtless repetition of what is bandied about. Can’t students at Cambridge think and write for themselves?

I am not an academic but if anyone used those words so redundantly in an essay I was marking I’d tell them to try to be more exact about what they mean.

Well, to start with, one theorist or strain of thought can perfectly well be informed by a predecessor, without the two being much the same (or indeed much alike at all). One philosopher may take very different things from multiple previous philosophers with whom they simultaneously disagree. That’s very common in the history of philosophy.

Foucault and Derrida are completely different kinds of thought (they disliked each other’s work); and queer theory is not gender identity ideology (indeed, you would find little in common between Sedgwick and Butler, in many ways; and not much obvious correspondence between either and current gender identity ideology — Butler’s early work even runs counter to much of the activists who claim to love her!)

A great deal of the current gender identity ideology is itself a cobbled-together set of lay ideas simplified by being churned around on the internet. It bears as much relationship to genuine academic thought as Liz Truss’s ideas on economics do to Hayek. One might dislike both, but in no way could they be considered the same thing — even if Liz Truss thinks they are.

So: the danger is of conflating several different things, here (and the Stanford EoP is of necessity an outline resource primarily written for analytic philosophers about continental philosophy: it isn’t particularly great on every topic. Indeed, the persistent mischaracterising of Continental philosophy as fraudulent, by Anglophone analytic philosophers trained in a fundamentally different discipline, is at the root of the anti-Derrida movements the OP mentions upthread.)

I do, however, agree with the comparison with a theological split between the ideas of the masses and the debates of the theologians. In this case, though, there are still many within the academy who are not taken in — but also don’t wish to see genuine philosophical and critical thought misrepresented — especially by those who, if they understood it better, might well agree. (Derrida and poststructuralism have been the bugbear for decades now, each time by people who don’t really understand it —so tagging it on to gender ideology is a bit of a tired move, too.)

And students certainly don’t get this stuff from academic discourses or critical theory or anything else. They arrive with it and stubbornly refuse to be challenged on it. It’s been circulating on the internet in places like Tumblr for nearly ten years now; and I can guarantee you that the anime teens on Tumblr are not reading poststructuralism. The source of this is porn and neoliberalism, and not the delving into the minutiae of linguistic structures in Levi-Strauss for the fun 😂

I don’t deny that there are useful idiots in the academy who also perpetrate this stuff. They tend not to be those who have a deep knowledge of Continental philosophy, however 😂 Very much the reverse. (And often, scientists, for some reason, are the most taken in by it all.)

Yes. The allegations made without any evidence, the use of fake stats that have long been disproved … and these are an elite?

On the other side, the college sounds sensible. From the Varsity article: Caius told Varsity: “Gonville & Caius College prides itself on being a welcoming and inclusive community. The event on October 25 is an external event hosted by Professor Arif Ahmed, a Caius Fellow.

“It is not a College event. We support free speech and would encourage those within the College community and wider society to challenge views they find reprehensible through debate and to celebrate our diversity.”

For once, the words inclusive and diversity being used correctly, instead of meaning “grovelling to the gender police”!

Are academics starting to regain some backbone?

And this is the same students union who did their best to get a college porter Kevin Price sacked because, as a city councillor, he refused to recite the new articles of faith: “Transwomen are women, transmen are men, non-binary individuals are non-binary”.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8883575/Cambridge-students-demand-transphobic-Labour-politician-loses-college-porter-job.html

The Daily Mail said this was about trans rights, whereas Kevin Price (he resigned from the council over this issue) was clear that the council’s policy was a threat to women.

Maybe if they didn't always use 50,000 words, when 20 would do, these ideas would be less likely to misinterpreted.

No doubt the full nuanced magnificence of Derrida is misunderstood by the peasants, however as a peasant I think that philosophers who dick around with concepts questioning objective truth (which then become mainstream), can reasonably be accused of inspiring the current harmful denial of objective truth by social justice activists.

Ideas as viruses. This is where it led. He might not have anticipated it or wanted it but he is in part to blame.

He did also wang on far too much about violent hierachies and binaries of oppression which seem frighteningly familiar.

Maybe if they didn't always use 50,000 words, when 20 would do, these ideas would be less likely to misinterpreted.
**
No doubt the full nuanced magnificence of Derrida is misunderstood by the peasants, however as a peasant I think that philosophers who dick around with concepts questioning objective truth (which then become mainstream), can reasonably be accused of inspiring the current harmful denial of objective truth by social justice activists.
**
Ideas as viruses. This is where it led. He might not have anticipated it or wanted it but he is in part to blame.
**
He did also wang on far too much about violent hierachies and binaries of oppression which seem frighteningly familiar.

A key point here might be that he doesn’t in fact “deny objective truth”. And “Violent hierarchies” — isn’t the entire point of gender critical feminist thought that the hierarchy between men and women is both a “binary of oppression” and essentially* *a violent one? One of the essential core aspects of Derrida’s thought is that binary oppressions are not just symmetrical intellectual games, but asymmetric relationships of real oppression, involving violence, political, social and economic control - eg of men over women. The very point that gender critical women make against transactivists who pretend that oppression is not real and the binary opposition of sex doesn’t exist.

Ditto the binary sex/gender, which gender ideology tries to pretend is interchangeable and meaningless — deconstruction, in contrast, argues the complete reverse. It’s not “postmodern”. The feminists who were most influenced by Derrida were eg. Cixous, Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, who are also regarded with horror by gender ideologists, for the crime of suggesting that men aren’t women and vice versa (all three now also derided as proponents of the dreaded “essentialism”; and for the crimes of “erasing queer and trans folx” by holding to the notions that women exist, bodies exist and we are also uniquely oppressed by men on that basis).

One of the reasons Derrida’s thought isn’t expressible in twenty words is that it isn’t remotely reducible to some pop-culture caricature of “well he said there’s no objective truth!” Misrepresenting, getting wrong, or repeating misleading caricatures of ideas (especially without reading and understanding them), is one of the aspects of gender identity ideology that we rightly excoriate. We shouldn’t be doing this either. It makes no sense to complain about gender ideologists simply repeating inaccurate caricatures just because they fits in with their biases, if feminist women who should know better do the same.

So weird to see a hate campaign attacking the career of a lovely woman of great integrity, signed off “with love” 🙄

How deluded are these echo chambers.

Oh ffs. They are at Cambridge. They might even learn something.

Yes, indeed, philosophers take different things from their predecessors and contemporaries.

However, Judith Butler does herself claim (in one of her prefaces to Gender Trouble) she took her clue on how to read the performativity of gender from Jacques Derrida's reading of Kafka's "Before the Law". Is that enough to make the point?

Of course Butler may well have misread Derrida. But she does follow much of Derrida's schtick, here and elsewhere. So I assert. You may disagree. I don't think I'm terribly out of line with this reading, though. Here we might just agree to differ.

(We might differ also on Butler's reading of J L Austin, which I think an egregious misconstrual. I don't think she mentions Austin by name in Gender Trouble, however. We probably also differ in our thoughts about where Derrida and Butler - and poststructuralism in general - go so badly wrong. This isn't a good place to argue any of that.)

I think you're a bit harsh on Stanford EoP; certainly not "primarily written for analytic philosophers about continental philosophy" as you said. You would likely qualify that on reflection, I guess - most of it is concerned neither with 'analytic' nor 'continental' philosophy, and, while of course the quality of the articles varies, most of it - a large majority - is pretty authoritative, with articles written by genuine experts. (I include articles on post-Kantian non-anglophone themes in that characterisation.) Of course it is written by philosophers, mostly mother-tongue English, rather than, say francophones or lit critters. It's a very good resource for students and the intellectually curious, to say no more.

I don't enjoy the continental vs analytic game. Nor is this a useful place to play it. We do agree on the large difference between Butler-style non-identity-based gender ideology and the more popular - you blame Tumblr - identity-based gender ideology of the blue-haired young. OK. Good enough.

I think it behoves academics - even Butlerians - to point out where they think identity-based ideology goes wrong, rather than, as is happening, encouraging it for their own nefarious reasons. (Butler herself strikes me as particularly intellectually dishonest, in this and other ways.)

My own scientist (and mathematical) friends and colleagues, by the way, contrary to your experience, mostly tend not to be taken in, either by gendered souls or the eternal deferment and differential nature of meaning always already inherent in the absence of any transcendental signified. Maybe I'm lucky. But I see it going on elsewhere, and worry about it.

Indeed. But still, worth getting back to. Does anyone agree, for instance, that the essential decentring of logos inherent in phallogocentric critiques is thoroughly Molesworthian, at least in intent?

“Actively harmful and cruel.”

wow, some of those students have led cloistered lives havent they. I bet at least a couple of them didn’t get the lead in the school play so know all about how actively cruel life can be.

A great response from Helen Joyce: www.thehelenjoyce.com/an-open-letter/

Pippa and Andrew should be hanging their heads in shame, but they won’t be will they? As Helen Joyce so rightly points out from the P and A perspective a wiser strategy when dealing with woke shriekers is to point an accusatory finger at someone else rather than apply reason, speak up and risk having the fingers pointed at you.

I would like to but can't find out how to buy a ticket, or if you can just front up at the college and buy one there.

Yes, I'd like to know about ticket arrangements, too. (Although it looks like I'm keeping an eye on my 91-year-old dad that evening, so unlikely to make it there anyway...)

I recall Arif Ahmed’s name as the Cambridge/Caius Philosophy Don fronting an objection to wording in the Athena Swan scheme (which seems to be Stonewall Champions for universities) which he considered ran counter to open debate on GI matters. This recent letter from Caius’ Master must be making his life very difficult in college. An article he wrote on this subject earlier this year is here, for those interested www.spiked-online.com/2022/05/23/universities-are-sleepwalking-into-censorship/amp/

Is it sleepwalking.

Because to me, it honestly seems like they are very deliberately embracing it.

Interesting - not least because the top news story on the university's Faculty of Philosophy website is about their recent Athena SWAN award: "Faculty of Philosophy has been awarded an Athena SWAN Bronze award from 4th October 2022 for five years" archive.ph/2r69o

I Understand the points raised, but then does it also follow that the university is not offering a full educational service to other students and not filling their educational mandate by then no platforming speakers ?

Hawkins001 · Today 02:28

^snurtifier · 18/10/2022 10:49
I learned about this event from an internal departmental e-mail list. The initial announcement has been followed by at least half a dozen replies copied to the entire list, all deploring the platforming of Helen Joyce and patting themselves on the back for "standing against transphobia". These are mostly coming from PhD students, many of whom have a science background.^

^The irony of opposing "bigoted anti-intellectualism" by attempting to deplatform someone whose works they haven't read seems to be lost on them... I can imagine that anyone within the department who doesn't agree is also going to feel very reluctant to voice their opinions for fear of being completely ostracised.
Show quote history^

I Understand the points raised, but then does it also follow that the university is not offering a full educational service to other students and not filling their educational mandate by then no platforming speakers?

IN my opinion, the full educational service ought to include teaching abstract principles of how to engage thoughtfully with ideas.

So, even if these scientists are teaching their students all there is to know about their various separate fields of science, but at the same time are saying Helen Joyce is transphobic without explaining exactly why through an argued debate with her, I would say that they not filling their educational mandate at all.

Did anyone attend last night? How was it?

The Telegraph have a piece here (archived version): archive.ph/hbaoS