Trans activism in universities ‘like Stalinist purges’

[IwantToRetire]

Sir Anthony Finkelstein, the head of City St George’s, University of London, claimed that academics were under political pressure to record a person’s gender identity in research, instead of their biological sex.

The vice-chancellor compared the current climate to the Soviet Union, claiming the system “rewards conformity, discourages awkward questions and quietly reshapes categories so that certain answers no longer appear”.

In 1937, a census found the population of the Soviet Union to be 162 million – six million fewer than the figure Stalin himself had announced three years earlier.

Many of the statisticians whose figures showed the damage done by widespread famine and purges by the state were themselves executed and labelled a “serpent’s nest of traitors”.

Warning of the dangers of not recording data factually for fear of repercussions, Sir Anthony said: “There is a long-term danger of governing the degraded data and discovering too late that we are not describing the world we inhabit.

“Society that can’t better count itself will eventually lose itself and its ability to govern itself.”

Article continues at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/02/16/trans-activism-in-universities-like-stalinist-purges/

And at https://archive.is/yrMTj

“Society that can’t better count itself will eventually lose itself and its ability to govern itself.”

Which is what it's all about, post-modernism is about destroying society, so it can be replaced with Utopia. It came from academia, perhaps the Prof/Sir should have paid more attention, the only ones who can stop this in academia are the academic's who know how wrong it is.

That's something else Phillipson's sitting on the law that Labour suspended on day one that was suppose to protect free speech in university's. This undermining of the information that a society needs to function at a high level is not an accident, it's deliberate ploy of an political ideology.

“There is a long-term danger of governing the degraded data and discovering too late that we are not describing the world we inhabit.

He is absolutely right. The point of gathering it is not to give a small special section of the populace nice emotional experiences while filling it in, (while disenfranchising and confusing the living daylights out of many other less special ones), but to create accurate information to inform competent governance. You cannot run a country on fictional data.

But this would involve politicians who were not proud members of cloud cuckoo land.

To the best of my memory after a few years - During Covid I took part in some research done by Oxford University. It was for parents with children, and the focus was on how people in the family were feeling / coping with Covid. It was a fairly considerable time investment and went on for a long time. A long way into the research they asked about the self-identified gender of the family members. I contacted them and pointed out that using gender rather than sex made the research largely useless. I was emailed by one of the team. She told me that they had decided to use gender (not sex) in relation to information about social issues - such as how much childcare people were doing, how they were being treated by those around them, their employers, etc. Because this was affected by gender identity, and not by sex. However, they would take sex into account in respect of physical health. So apparently transwomen are seen as and treated as women by everyone in society.

I took my family out of the research project, obviously, and told them what I thought of them as so-called scientists at Oxford, not able to tell the difference between the sexes and wasting everyone's time.

That Zoe thing started off asking for sex and then changed to gEnDer IdenTiTy.

Despite at the time one of the things they were trying to measure being sex based differences in Covid responses.

I withdrew at that point, because they were clearly idiots not to be trusted with data.

'He said that biological sex was important data to maintain because it “correlates strongly with capital, health, mortality, fertility, violence, incarceration, employment, caring responsibilities”.
“Remove it, blur it or replace it, and whole domains of policy analysis become weaker and less reliable,” he added'

No shit!

On a slightly different angle I can never understand why more people in the UK dont value the information the Census could and should provide. even basics like how many children will be needing school places.

And although in the past previous Governments have introduced trick questions to get information they want to support their existing ideas, they are usually so blatant* they are seen as that.

Sadly I am not sure that many people(*) thought at the time of the last Census just how useless the question on supposedly identifying number of trans people was. Not just useless but dangerous.

(*) Except of course on FWR!

Huge chunks of the populace just had no idea what the question even meant.

Tadpole I did that survey too! Didn’t spot the switch but presumably by then I was just doing repeat questions. Thank you for writing to them, I usually do that so would definitely have joined you had I realised.