Kathleen Stock. Now they are writing academic papers about how terfy she is

[Birdsweepsin]

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09612025.2022.2147915

In this article I write on the feminist rift within University culture and the wider impact it has had in the British media landscape. I will chronicle the case of Kathleen Stock and its reporting in the media principally through a focus on a selection of particularly relevant articles in the UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph as a newspaper closely aligned with gender critical and UK Conservative government thinking.

OK, no worries. So a dispassionate look at both sides, considering media bias goes both ways, hey?

I want to consider Stock as a totemic figure for a trans-hostile media, and discuss the way her case has been used to spread misinformation around universities, and trans people. My focus here is on trans women as those on the receiving end of most gender critical hostility.

Oh. Sigh.

Now that I have gone through it, I repeat my question on just what ‘peer reviewed’ means in this instance? Happy for one of the MN academics to let me know.

Because all I can say is that this article was a hot mess of unsubstantiated claims while making out that they were ‘evidenced’, and quoting absolute misogynists as some kind of moral authorities, and an indulgence in cognitive distortions in place of balanced discussion of views.

I do have to say though that I am not an academic so I don’t know if there is something I am missing. If I turned in a report that was evidenced and argued this way to my manager, I would have had it handed back with a ‘do better’. But maybe that is the difference with working for a multinational corporation and academia? I had thought that it would have been the opposite.

I will happily accept that I am wrong and that I have missed vital things in this because I am not an academic. I look forward to seeing what I missed and other people’s take on the article.

It's not just the trans flag issue but the behaviour on social media. Every time Stock or other feminist academics like Selina Todd were in the news for some no-platforming, cancellation or other attack by students or academics, Phipps and colleagues at Sussex and other universities would do these passive aggressive "My support for trans students today", "She who claims to be cancelled gets platformed in the press" tweets which they'd all share and like, along with various nasty comments.

This was happening at a time when multiple female academics were prevented from doing the core elements of their jobs. Threatened, intimidated, no-platformed, had talks cancelled, assaults happening at talks they'd organise or be involved in, bomb threats, Selina Todd needing body guards, Stock needing security equipment installed, students circulating posters with weapons on them. That @devorah thinks this is some kind of comparable situation to academics saying "women have rights based on our sex and this has implications for law and policy" being upsetting to trans activists is horrendous. The academics mistreating Stock seem like really unpleasant types and it was seeing their bullying behaviour that first led me to find out about GC feminism.

Phipps was also frequently tweeting some racist, classist assertions that GC feminism is for middle class white, women but has never backed that up with any data. She trained as a social scientist, so you'd think she might be able to present some surveys or empirical data for her claims.

If she really believes that women from ethnic minorities in the UK are somehow more okay with being undressed around or being imprisoned with bepenised people, than white women, then she should prove it. If she thinks working class women have some kind of invisible shield that makes us impervious to fear of male sexual violence then she should present the data. Instead she constantly smeared feminists and ignored and elided all the BEM and/or working class women who are involved in GC feminism.

When Kathleen Stock and others like Selina Todd and Julie Bindel offered to sit down and discuss or debate the issues with Phipps, Phipps either ignored them or did the whole "I won't debate trans lives" schtick. She wasn't being asked to "debate trans lives" she was asked to discuss conflicts between sex and gender which she refuses to acknowledge even though there is plenty of legal evidence that those conflicts exist.

@Helleofabore My Dd is getting her BA project peer reviewed to publish in a journal. It first went through some sort of academic moderator who deemed it worthy to be sent to two more professors. The feedback they have given has been incredibly detailed (and sometimes contradictory) but my Dd is delighted they have scrutinised it so thoroughly as it’s her first publication. It’s now been read and praised in three different continents! I am so proud of Dd - she just needs to tweak it to be in the designated journal’s style now.

As Deborah Shaw said, this was an opinion piece but I could not see it passing the moderator and professors my DD’s did if it were due to be published as a research piece. I (only) have an MSc, a science teaching qualification and a bit of a research background but the conclusions were always statistics based. In any discipline you need to justify your opinion with the correct facts though.

I hope her Twitter remarks have sent a few critical-thinkers this way to see why us mums are concerned about this ideology, and it’s impact on informing policies affecting women and children.

Thanks Zanda. I feel more assured that perhaps this is not the acceptable standard these days.

And brilliantly done for your DD!!

Ahh cheers. I am a very proud mama - she just needs to keep going for the final hurdle now!

@GreenUp thanks for putting this so clearly:

She wasn't being asked to "debate trans lives" she was asked to discuss conflicts between sex and gender which she refuses to acknowledge even though there is plenty of legal evidence that those conflicts exist.

I think part of the clash (and the abuse) comes from people like Phipps (and some of my students) not understanding that there’s a difference between discussing the principles and concepts of women’s sex-based rights, and discussing individual transwomen/men.

Absolutely agreed, GreenUp and EasterIsland.

I am the sort of nerdy person who will read something and then go and read the references (partly because I don't always trust peoples' reading comprehension, partly because I want more details). I'm very well up on one particular narrow field, but I read papers about all sorts of things because I am, as I say, a nerd.

And honestly? The quality of academic papers varies hugely. I came across one with an egregious error that the author should not have made and which a competent reviewer should have picked up (all you had to do was Google a name). Because she got things arse-about-face, she used her 'fact' to support her conclusion, when it showed the exact opposite. Yet you get other stuff that is really thorough and even-handed and fair. The problem is that you can't easily tell the BS from the sound information unless you already know something about the topic. The bullshit gets into the zeitgeist or whatever it's called, and becomes The Truth, esp. if it is trendy.

It's not just the social sciences that have problems. If you want to know what a mess the sciences are, try reading 'Science Fictions' by Stuart Ritchie, or familiarise yourself with the Retraction Leaderboard.

I know that I bind on about this repeatedly, but it really is a massive concern. We rely on academia to find out new things about the world we live in. If academics are biased or blinkered or just willing to tell fashionable lies to get ahead, we're screwed, because we don't know what's been properly researched and properly reviewed and what's just a pile of unmitigated bollocks.

We know that some academics are not honest actors. They should be bloody ashamed of themselves.

I think it's quite normative now in certain parts of academia for people to simply quote mine certain authors for things that sound like they support the argument the academic wants to make. It's not that they have read everything this person has said, usually they are not well read at all.

Often their whole university training has been done this way, topical studies that use small parts of texts from many different authors.

It reminds me a lot of what in Christian circles is called "proof-texting." Just pulling out bits of the Bible that seem to support what the preacher wants to say, without regard to the context of the quote.

If this piece was peer-reviewed, and I have my doubts about that - even the WHR's notes say that viewpoints may verge on a polemic, and how do you subject that to academic standards of justification, analytical rigour, balance, measured expression, etc? - the reviewer(s) have done a very poor job.

Hah, she lives rent free in their heads.

Raymond explicitly identifies the practice of transsexuality with rape, unequivocally stating: “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves”; she asserts that the mere presence of male-to-female transsexuals in women’s space “violates women’s sexuality and spirit".

Such a lovely person. I'm 'raping' other women by being more content in my very own skin.

One day we'll look back at this time and shudder at some of the things that were said...and it will be second time that's happened in my lifetime.

Seems strange you are missing the metaphorical device here.

The linguistic device of declaring that something 'is' something when it is not that something at all.

And also strange that you cannot see what Raymond is actually saying. But then I think it is not something that a male would ever understand so maybe that is important to note.

I find it interesting that a woman asserting that she feels violated by a male in her space is met with this statement: 'Such a lovely person'.

A woman stating her boundaries and expressing how she feels has aspersions cast on her character.

We've seen this many times before.

Indeed arabella.

Wims!! Be lovely!! Maybe the males will be kind and stop demanding access to the rights of female people….

I was thinking of how rape victims have their stories torn apart and characters assassinated. 'we believe her', except when she's saying something that's inconvenient to males or denies them their desires, asserts her boundaries or says 'no' to males. Then she must be sneered, jeered, and derided.

Yes that too 😏

Don't be silly Helle when in all of humanity has that ever happened?