Is sanity finally being restored at UK universities?

[LadyBracknellsHandbagg]

https://thecritic.co.uk/gone-in-90-seconds/

This is excellent from Helen Joyce, the bit about the Irish young woman is hilarious whilst also being Orwellian, how must her parents feel?!

DH's Cambridge update from today - woman in a seminar misunderstood his point and was horrified he might think she was a Terf. She then gave a 5 minute explanation of her impeccable intersectional feminist backgrounds.

DH thought it was funny but assumed it was because she was American and had to believe it or get sacked from a US Humanities Department.

I remember when they made the toilets 'gender neutral' in Kings - IIRC they were relabelled as 'urinals' and 'other'. I went to use them and found a big group of very confused female tourists stood outside them. They were relieved to see me because I was not only clearly female but, as if to confirm it, heavily pregnant and so they could be pretty confident that they could follow me into what had been the week before the women's loos.

That’s just it though, isn’t it, they come out of a world of “safe spaces”/people using your preferred pronouns and into a workplace where no one gives a toss about your pronouns/need for a blanket and snacks because you’re upset. They’re going to hear opinions they don’t like from people who are senior to them whom they can’t challenge if they don’t want the entire office eye rolling about them.

It’s a failing if they’ve been given a false impression of the real world.

@SidewaysOtter not the one. Plus appears to be a womanly woman.

I also don't think abuse on social media just for being trans on a quiz show is not acceptable.

It's doing the camp performance of feminity that sets my teeth on edge.

FFS why do I always see mistakes when it's too late to edit? Do think abuse not acceptable obvs.

It’s alright, I had my post removed as it was the wrong link. And now I can’t find the one I saw originally. Grrr!

We badly need an eye roll emoji on MN.

I found one! 🙄🙄🙄

What an insufferable bunch of wankers. No idea how they get into Oxbridge with inability to think critically. Flowery-pants-gay-man-Irish-woman character needs to get a job on a factory production line or do voluntary work digging wells in a very poor country to realise that nobody gives a stuff about her precious identity.

Edited to include quote

Women want women only safe spaces and women only sports and prisons

Indeed most of us know what biology is. Unfortunately we’re also dealing with a lot of other crap as well that the NHS throws at us so forgive us if we’re not obviously out there. However a lot of my younger colleagues have stopped using pronouns in their emails and being more open to proper discussions about safeguarding women due to having me asking lots of innocent questions

A lot of these people actually seem to think the reason places like the UK are majority white is because they are racists. It's very weird.

👆Agree that it’s really weird. I once had a discussion with someone who’d relocated from a very gentrified part of east London to my parents’ very quiet leafy village near the coast in the south west. She was thrilled with the tiny primary school, access to beautiful beaches, their lovely huge home, but then said “ oh but it’s such a SHAME that it’s not very ethnically diverse” and stared at me as if to gauge my reaction. I replied in a matter of fact way about “ethnically diverse” communities being more likely in large cities because of historical job opportunities but I clearly didn’t say THE RIGHT THING because she gave me a disappointed look and walked away.

I was obviously racist for not agreeing what a “shame” it was that her new community didn’t 100% meet her “I’m so liberal” view of herself 🤦‍♀️

Nuts. Enraging.

I’m embarrassed reading those quotes.

Cambridge makes me so sad now, I loved growing up here but its gotten so unwelcoming, I've stopped going to specific places now as everything is being catered towards the blue hair brigade, trying new shops and things like the Lucy and Yak one and having to be around men doing some very strange look at me I'm such a girl acts is really making me feel at odds with the city 😂

All of that worrying. Dressing as butch lesbians from the 30s? I'm imagining Radclyffe Hall style... ?

That's fine ofc, but pronouns are worrying...

This is the problem generally with the omnicause: not only does it make selective subscription to agendas impossible, but it relativizes them in a way that the constituents of the various causes ought to find offensive.

The trans debate in particular exposes this flaw. (gay rights didn't because gay rights activists were, by and large, willing to accept that gay rights was not the most important cause in the world)

Trans rights should be the starting point where we disaggregate the omnicause. Trans individuals are driven by an extreme desire to 'transition', often exchanging healthy intact bodies for ones that have undergone unneeded, brutal surgical procedures and chronic, transition induced problems, sometimes to the point of disability, for the sole purposing of presenting as the opposite sex; even knowing that they are not in a literal sense even changing sex. For that person, transition is the most important thing in the world and they will sacrifice practically everything else to do it.

But that is not rational thinking. By objective measures it fits a definition of mental illness. Whether we allow such individuals to access medical treatment to try and change their bodies to alleviate that mental distress is one question - we've decided as a society the answer is: yes. And I'm sympathetic to that decision - to the point of being conflicted; but obviously we shouldn't be treating trans perception of the harms of not being able to transition as an objective reality. It is not genocide to not have access to 'affirmative' care. It is not eliminationist to not allow male sexed individuals into female spaces. To think it is is the product of dis-regulated emotional response and distorted, intrusive thoughts. That isn't hate speech, it is an objective assessment. We should be insisting as a society that we use clear language on this so that we don't put the trans question on the same plane as the Palestinian problem or climate-change mitigation. It's short-circuiting our ability to democratically arrive at public policy.

Anecdotally now teens call them “the they/thems” and they are eye rolled about but treated kindly.

It is a certain type of teen that is attracted to this group - clue it’s never the cheerful well balanced neuro typical teens with hobbies and interests.

Is sanity finally being restored at UK universities?

No, definitely not.

I watched a short video about masking today. A cheerful bouncy young woman with Audhd, coloured hair, loud clashing clothes is schooled in ‘masking’.
Drop the vibrant colours, wear blue jeans, stop fidgeting, stop grinning, smile politely.
She was ‘smoothed out’ into a restrained ‘tasteful’ version of herself.

Trans reminds me of that. Self conscious youngsters feeling they need to tone down to fit in. Change their entire identity because who they are naturally is ‘too much’ or ‘not right’.

I’ve always found fits the bill.
sometimes combined with

Whether we allow such individuals to access medical treatment to try and change their bodies to alleviate that mental distress is one question - we've decided as a society the answer is: yes. And I'm sympathetic to that decision - to the point of being conflicted; but obviously we shouldn't be treating trans perception of the harms of not being able to transition as an objective reality. It is not genocide to not have access to 'affirmative' care.

The difficulty is, we are allowing these brutal procedures to take place on a self diagnosis basis by vulnerable people with mental health issues and no evidence that it works in the long term for all.

If there was a proper diagnostic test that was extremely reliable (no misdiagnoses) and concrete evidence that it drastically improved quality of life overall then it might be ok but we have none of that.

One of the most heinous parts of this medical aspect of the ideology is that detransitioners are so badly treated. In any normal scenario, people who have suffered serious medical harm would be listened to and their experiences learned from to prevent harm to others (as well as compensation).

I wonder how many girls have been permanently damaged by going to university and being indoctrinated? I remember that article from detransitioner (Charlie?) who went to her university GP because was feeling down and was directly encouraged that transition was the answer. How many other girls has that one university doctor harmed?