Trans/gender activists/ideologists/believers complain of being cancelled.

[ArabellaScott]

And censorship.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/anti-trans-views-academia-kathleen-stock-sussex-university/

Can they give examples of TRA academics being sacked for their perspectives, running the gauntlet of student protests and having journals retract previously published pieces due to protests that they may hurt people? You know, verifiable events?

Maybe Lavery feels there should be an affirmation-only peer review process for transactivist work?

These people have been told the world must see them as they believe they are not as they objectively are.
I can see how that would lead to really unhealthy thought patterns and belief systems which come crashing down when no, the outside world doesn't always agree with them.

It's like a collective madness.

But this is it, isn't it? Mentioning anything that jars the preferred reality is intolerable. Which makes it clear really that it's a mistake to enable from the start, because eventually you have to reach the boundary of 'yes but other people have rights too, and cannot revolve entirely around you'.

I have to admit none of that made any sense. And I read it thrice.
The words are put together in such a jumbled, incoherent way.

Does Lavery mean that no-one is a woman then? If Lavery can’t be one, then no-one else gets to be one either. Is that the gist here?

god I'd LOVE it if these poeple would talk about what they actually believe, and explain why they think it's right

I just don't want them to randomly libel and insult others. it's not much to ask is it?

Does Lavery know what motility means?

What does a gamete’s ability to move independently have to do with anything Lavery is talking about?

I mean, it matters if you’re undergoing fertility treatment. But… it’s got nothing to do with whether you think you’re a woman.

Penis obsessed male, (TW) Lavery is a toxic prick. Even as a male masquerading as other they manage to create an unusual power dynamic with their female (TM) partner. Unsettling.

I mean, this sort of thing is indicative of the kind of issues that would definitely get picked up in peer review.

No matter how supportive the reviewer or editor is… incoherent gibberish that uses words the author doesn’t seem to understand is always going to be a problem.

Hahahaha pull the other one, Sasha, it's got bollocks on it.

Being told by your university to stop defaming a now pretty well known figure who recognises defamation when she sees it is not being cancelled. It's your university not wanting to be on the wrong end of a lawsuit.

I did like the "fuck off you complete and utter dickhead" tweet from Kathleen Stock, as well as the follow up comment, which basically translates as, "Who? I don't remember this person. They clearly are a dickhead though."

It might make something resembling sense if the word morphology was used.

But sticking motility in there instead is pretty good evidence that the intent is to produce impenetrable word salad.

Wow. The dishonesty here is just breathtaking.

Amusingly Sally Hines threw Grace & Alison under the bus on Twitter by insisting the very opposite - that GCs have no toehold in academia.

Exactly. It's people avoiding you because you're a bigot or at least supporting a bigoted cause. It's in no way comparable with what has happened to JKR or Kathlwwn Stock and you look really daft when you try and compare it.

I expect that's a lie tbh. I bet it was not being told not to speak put in support of trans people, but rather to stop the women hating misogynistic assaults on others.

Perhaps a few people have been warned to stop breaching their universities' social media policies? A gentle reminder, given recent court cases and guidelines? In some people's worlds that might equate to the old #LiteralViolets, especially when coupled with some rigorous peer review.

Oh dear.

It's the Schroedingers difficult women again, isn't it? Simultaneously only six socks with no power, but also with unlimited power.

'Our sanctioned victim status shields privileged white women from accountability in interpersonal interactions and in the political sphere.'

Alison Phipps

edited to add reference: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1367549420985852

"Using #MeToo as a starting point, this paper argues that the cultural power of mainstream white feminism partly derives from the cultural power of white tears". Well 'the paper' (aka the author - I can see why she wants to distance herself from it) tries to make that argument. Spectacular failure to do so in any convincing way. It's a bad paper IMHO. As far as I can make out the argument seems to be that white women have a special victim status in society and therefore we should let men into women's spaces. It's a nonsense because even if the first statement were true, that does not make the second one true. It does not mean that white women are not actually at risk when men are in their spaces, it does not make an argument for allowing some, but not all, men into women's spaces and it fails to acknowledge that some of the leaders in the anti-obliteration of women's rights movement are black women. It's an embarrassing pile of rot at best.

So ms Phipps writes this:

»Colonialism also created a circuit between bourgeois white women’s tears and white men’s rage, often activated by allegations of rape, which operated in the service of economic extraction and exploitation. This circuit endures, abetting the criminal punishment system and the weaponisation of ‘women’s safety’ by the various border regimes of the right. It has especially been utilised by reactionary forms of feminism, which set themselves against sex workers and trans people. Such feminisms exemplify what I call ‘political whiteness’, which centres assertions of victimhood: through these, womanhood (and personhood) is claimed to the exclusion of the enemy. Through legitimating criminal punishment and border policing and dehumanising marginalised Others, claims to victimhood in mainstream feminism often end up strengthening the intersecting violence of racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy.»

where she talks about weaponising ‘women’s safety’ and political whiteness - and something about border policing (which most states do, regardless of the colour of the majority of inhabitants) and this strengthens something something heteropatriarchy.

I am not wiser for having read that. None whatsoever.

Oh dear.

What a pity.

“They have almost a monopoly within academic philosophy'

Oh well. How interesting! So apart from Ivy/McKinnon (no longer lecturing), Lavery, Phipps and a hand full of vocal others, there seems to be no convincing philosophers that just saying a male is a female makes it real. Despite postmodernism.

Interesting indeed.

An interesting article, thanks for sharing. None of this is new, though, it seems like an attempt by some academic personalities to get attention in a fringe publication.

Peterson’s tweets were obsessively concerned with Stock (I remember seeing them at the time), and what is her philosophical specialism anyway? Her ‘research’ into the GC movement is at best sociology.

Lavery has been trying to turn the Tobin incident into a mini-scandal for a while, I think first in a series of tweets and then a blog post. https://www.gracelavery.org/prof-stock-please-sue-me/

Phipps was named recently as a senior academic involved in the events that culminated in Laura Favaro leaving her job at City University: https://thecritic.co.uk/cancel-culture-in-academia/

Favaro has now sued City; in this article Phipps comes across as a bit of a bully. If this is a mischaracterisation, then I hope she points out any inaccuracies.

Could this just be a group of people who struggle to come to terms with some new realities?

I haven’t read the whole thing as I find Lavery unbearable, but pretending that being told to stop making defamatory statements about someone is the same as being cancelled or oppressed is laughable.

They are identifying as being cancelled. Trans-cancelled. Trancelled?