UCU being taken to tribunal over discrimination for 'gc' views

[ArabellaScott]

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/gender-critical-documentary-makers-take-ucu-tribunal

The filmmakers of 'Adult Human Female' are taking UCU to tribunal.

I'll try to find an archive copy.

Has someone made a list of things that are transphobic dogwhistles? eg sex, biology, reality itself. Perhaps easier to list the things that aren't dogwhistles.

What like this sort of lovely sing-song stuff?
seems friendly enough to me?

Ha this is a funny thread started by Jo Phoenix. Tribunal bingo!
twitter.com/JoPhoenix1/status/1907792792069226735?s=19

I didn't know what a dogwhistle was until someone explained it upthread (thx!). I thought it meant a rabble-rousing cliche that turns people into attack dogs, but then I learned it's a seemingly harmless statement that only people with certain views respond to.

And now I think it's a "dogwhistle" if we don't have a logical factual answer to it. We can't argue against what you said so we decide you really meant something else, and what you really meant is a secret except to other Bad People like you. But somehow we know what you meant because we're sensitive that way. It's your dogwhistle not a projection of our own prejudices about you and your beliefs!

In fact AHF is a very good title. In three words it captures the main disagreement between gender critical women and gender ideologists. Gender critical women think "woman" means exactly "adult human female", gender ideologists disagree. It's bad luck for the gender ideologists that most of humanity agrees with gender critical women. Plus, the title nicely centres the women who are adult human females instead of the "women" who are not.

"Small group of protesters physically stopped ppl and we weren't part of that."

The question was not whether he was involved, but whether the behaviour was threatening.

How did they physically prevent people from attending the screening if they weren't threatening?

From what I could tell, this afternoon's witness objected to the two questions on the publicity for the AHF screening:

Is it really harmful when men self-identify as women?
Is it progressive for doctors to change young people's bodies in order to affirm their 'gender identity'?

(I'm paraphrasing here because I didn't get the full questions, but that's what they seem to be.)

The screening was due to be in December 2022. That's when the GRR Bill was on its way through the Scottish Parliament, and its two main proposals were getting rid of the need for a medical opinion for a GRC (i.e. self-ID), and lowering the age for a GRC (making it more likely that younger people would so identify). So the two questions, assuming I'm in the right ball park, are exactly the two questions I'd expect to see framing a responsible discussion of sex and gender in that context.

Much as trans rights activists may think otherwise, they cannot expect to have their quasi religious belief system adhered to as a fiat by people who do not share it.

But since they've held sway for so long, and found that they were able to exercise highly potent power as a result of people knowing that they shouldn't resist, then they're going to attempt to bulldozer on. There's too much power for them to lose.

You only have to look at today's witnesses. They claim that they will tolerate people holding the wrong views only if they never voice them (and I don't even believe that their tolerance actually extends that far), and expect to have control of the language that everyone speaks.

This is another indication that it's going to be a long fight yet.

Bahahaha 😂😂😂😂

Seriously tho…..thanks all for the sterling reporting. I wasn’t able to observe for this one and my flabber has, as so often, been ghasted roughly every 10 seconds. Incredible stuff. How, just how, do such people actually exist in this world??

So this (amongst other things!) is puzzling me. The primary purpose of the UCU is to support its members - academics and other university staff in the UK. But they are busy campaigning on things outside the UK and outside academia, like Palestine, while refusing to support some of their actual UK members, and even participating in the ostracism of those members, simply because those people hold certain perfectly legal beliefs.

Incidentally, I was in the UCU aeons ago, when it was the AUT. I was even a union rep. Seems like a lifetime ago - we discussed salaries, short-term contracts, redundancies and strikes. GI hadn't even been born.

Idid think that, when this mornings witness said she doesn’t get paid if she misses work, that perhaps she should be campaigning for better terms and conditions.

That’s the precarity (precariousness) of entry-level academic work. If I remember correctly, Oxford or Cambridge supervisors have taken industrial action relatively recently over this.
(Supervisors/Tutors teach usually one-two, whereas she’s teaching whole group, I think, but the principle applies)

I think this is such a brilliant idea.

Dear Mr Buttars
I'm a gender critical woman and feel under attack. Everyday at work I have to pretend to a transwoman sex offender that I think they are just as much a woman as I am and not an utter pervert.

So now you can't say women haven't told you.

PS You should also know that there's a real world out there where no-one cares about your research.

That's interesting, because I left UCU ages ago and have refused to rejoin because I feel they don't give a shit about non-academic staff, especially those of us who are fairly senior, research-involved PS staff

Where I am, it's definitely the academic staff who are leading the GI charge (apart from the librarians, who seems to have a lot of NBs and spicy straights in their ranks)

The only NB person I know more than slightly is a librarian. Hmm 🤔

Our library used to be awash with rainbow lanyards but it seems to have died a death.

Ah the librarians! Yes, I've noticed this too. Is it perhaps what Julien Benda called La Trahison des Clercs? Or is it because their jobs are otherwise pretty boring?

With apologies but could anyone link me to the TT from this morning? My X is playing up and their sub stack hasn't updated yet...

thank you if at all possible!

Tribunal Tweets:
"NC: Nobody should be allowed to say TW are not W?
GB: Not in the workplace no. Can hold but not say at work, bcs against the D&R policy."

So according to GB, although there are many work place situations where a TW is treated as a man, even if they hold a GRC and sometimes for their own safety, this can't be expressed in words.

Regardless of the outcome of this case, is it possible to sue a union for misrepresenting its competence?

There is nothing intrinsic to being a librarian that would imply succumbing to gender nonsense or supporting "no debate". I used to be an academic librarian and when I was training, back in the eighties, we were taught that a good librarian has "no politics, no morals and no religion" (i.e. it is unprofessional to bring your ideological biases into the workplace). Wannabe book censors were to be resisted, not pandered to. I had left academia before this ethos changed (at any rate in the institution I worked for), so I wonder when the rot set in and where it came from.

Talking of the Peggie case. It turns out Mr Buttars boss is a one Jeremy Upton.

And Jeremy Upton is the Director of Libraries at Edinburgh Uni

He's not having a good year is he?

Well now, there’s an opportunity that he could grasp! If he wants to prove how open minded he is, he could arrange for this to happen. I wonder how many students he could persuade to watch on those grounds!

It’s only a short while ago that transactivists were carefully warning others not to even listen to or read women’s rights protester’s material, lest they accidentally became indoctrinated.

You really have to be pretty unsure of your own convictions to be so terrified that a brief exposure to women's rights risks losing your congregation.