Universities will be the last bastion of gender ideology and the denial of women's rights

[BridgetPhillipsonIsACowardlyJobsworth]

With thanks to @IcakethereforeIam A new/spinoff thread to discuss/commiserate about the steadfast refusal of universities to acknowledge that women have rights in law.An article from The Critic, and what I posted on the House of Communion/EDM thread (love the typo, BTW!)

https://archive.ph/L8E0b

https://thecritic.co.uk/how-the-war-wasnt-won

It is depressing, and I think she has put into words how I have been feeling lately about the whole thing. I worked in HE many years ago (not as an academic) and it seems clear to me now that, as universities always do, they will continue to move and change at a glacial pace, if at all.

Universities exist, and have for a very long time existed, in order to exist. They generate income in order to generate income. They hoard their resources in order to buy up land and build their estates, in order to generate more wealth by taking on more and more international, high-fee-paying students, whose families then do their publicity for them. Which, in turn, generates more wealth. So they can exist. In order to exist.

I believe that the only thing that will shift the HE sector will be a high-level, extremely public, lawsuit against a top-ten ranking, Russell Group institution, won with significant damages awarded. So, not one academic suing for constructive dismissal, but a suit by a high-profile, wealthy individual or foundation taken against UCL, Imperial College, or LSE, with the outcome and damages awarded not being hidden behind an NDA.

Or a major foreign donor withdrawing support for the institution.
This could take another generation. I have a feeling that universities will be the last bastion of gender ideology, where the law-deniers teach the next generation of law-deniers.

I'm very glad that I no longer work for a university.

Any thoughts? We know that many universities have withdrawn from Stonewall, but there's a lot more to do. Please cheer us all up if you have any progress in HE that you have noticed. I think we could all use a good news story right now, after the EDM and Hampstead Heath Ponds announcement.

@oxfordfeminist a big part of the problem you are dismissing is the willingness to debate or allow other people to express their reasonably and legally (and logically) held views - eg Michael Foran. Why do you think this is desirable in a university setting - surely exactly the place where ideas should be rigorously tested?

Thankyou for this, I’ll pass it on for when dc is making their choice. Disappointing.

ETA feel free to do me contact details for someone in admissions - they should know that this approach will affect applications

It's a depressing thought that the very institutions that are supposed to nurture freedom of thought are the very ones most likely to continue pushing an insane and irrational belief long after everyone else has seen sense.

Is it true, though? I sometimes think universities are particularly captured, and then I look at the NHS, the police force, the publishing industry, the charity sector, the judiciary*, and I really wonder. All those sectors appear to be ideologically captured to an insane degree.

*Feel free to add any I've forgotten.

I hope there are a lot more of you!

I think this theory hits the nail in the head.

J.K. Rowling has said that people who work in the Arts have a horror of appearing unsophisticated - I think this is also the root of HE pushing gender ideology

I work in a very captured University (professional services). It has been a tough decade.

However, more university staff and students than you might think are gender critical. Edinburgh University currently has a gender critical Rector - and this is significant because the Rector is voted for by staff and students and is supposed to represent their views:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-68272222

Thanks for that bit of good news!

It’s not all bad news:

https://x.com/jophoenix1/status/1933458079661867275?s=61&t=Og74NL350OdVbEJ3Se9_Iw

There was also a protest a few years ago about a gender critical speaker, after which it was made clear that freedom of speech will be upheld. I seem to remember the phrase “No one has the right not to be offended” was used.

I think Ireland will be the last holdout. We have utterly commited with self ID so we wouldn’t want to be seen as rolling back, a little bit like having a teeny bit of nuance on what is happening in the Middle East.

I have a feeling that just like with abortion, 40 years down the line we will start to see the error of our ways and the harm of gender ideology and try to pretend that yet another example of an extremely harmful ideology that damages women and children could be tolerated and hidden in our society,

Parsimonious means as simple as possible not simple. As we know more about <thing>, it would be extraordinary if we didn't discover some nuances along the way. Life isn't simple or we wouldn't need so many lawyers...

And as Grok, like every current AI tool, cannot do more than give us fancy predictive text, you (and we) would be far better using your own intellect to summarise. This is after all the same programme that proclaimed itself the reincarnated leader of the third Reich, and its owner more moral than Jesus, a better author than Shakespeare, and still contains a CSAM on demand tool.

I hope he's having a better time of it than Ann Henderson elected Rector of University of Edinburgh 2018-2021 (see her chapter in The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht) Accused of anti-semitism and transphobia by Edinburgh Labour Students, formally complained about, investigated and cleared by the University and refused support by UCU.

If anyone ever remembers the academic Matt Lodder on Twitter, and probably lots of other academics - he would write literal gibberish to explain why men can be women. Everyone could see he wasn't interested in the truth - his entire modus operandi was to try and look clever by posting arguments that made no sense in the hope that everyone else would say 'oh this is too confusing, I better leave it to you because you're extremely clever'.

It then turned out he'd written an essay or a book in which he overtly subscribed to that approach - nonsensical arguments that would include made up words that cannot be defined, simply to exclude people from understanding whatever point he was trying to make, so that they could therefore be excluded from the debate.

That is basically humanities academia in the UK this century. It's been a total failure.

"There are ideas so absurd that only an academic would believe them" (attributed to George Orwell)

The universities have no interest in dropping gender ideology. It sets them apart as the sort of clever people who get it, while the rest of us mere mortals think it's about toilets.

I suspect Fanshawe will fare better than Henderson because 1) having seen what happened to Henderson he knows what he is stepping into and is probably prepared for pushback; 2) he's a gay rights activist which might make some people pause and realise that trans rights and gay rights are not the same thing; and 3) he's a man

Note that the TRA quoted in the BBC article is the same individual responsible for hounding out Ann Henderson. It really is a very small but very vocal minority pushing this agenda

Note that the TRA quoted in the BBC article is the same individual responsible for hounding out Ann Henderson. It really is a very small but very vocal minority pushing this agenda

Predictably he is a man who now claims to be a woman.

I’m still proud to work for a university.

However, I’ve said it before, genderism has cleverly and insidiously infiltrated all the progressive institutions (and even countries) by piggybacking the TQ on to the LGB. Even if Genderism currently runs through academia for now, there are still many academics who see their role has supporting the development of analytical and critical thinking. Yes, harder to do but vital work more than ever in our tech saturated, algorithmically driven social media world.

It’s a dual problem. First, customer as king paying tuition on the hand, without it I’d hope we see more of senior management supporting academic freedom of speech. Market forces accounts a great deal for senior leadership being reluctant to contradict the young TRAs who come to uni already having been recruited and converted on Discord and primacy of gender over sex carelessly perpetuated and cemented by teachers in schools. Second, too many #bekind liberals slow to work through or acknowledge the implications and yet quick to accuse colleagues of heresy on the other, who are happy to reinforce the Discord illogic.

It’s a perfect storm of othering that will take many years to correct and with many potential obstacles. A Green led govt would entrench it in law. A Regorm govt would entrench the opposite in law but give rise to even more resistance and activism.

I believe that the only thing that will shift the HE sector will be a high-level, extremely public, lawsuit against a top-ten ranking, Russell Group institution, won with significant damages awarded.

Cannot see this happening but with wider societal pressure and tribunals and lawsuits, the gender woo might gradually diminish. I hope sanity is restored because I’m a big believer in the value of a university education. Further education was decimated under Osbourne and apprenticeships have always been appalling (except for some engineering or accounting type ones) partly because we don’t have the manufacturing industries anymore. Germany was always excellent at their degree apprenticeships but those rested on a strong high quality manufacturing base.

Ideally, we’d have good quality vocational, further and higher education but that all takes money.

You are quite the libertarian.

Happy for students and tutors to believe the earth is flat? That certain races are genetically superior to others? That votes in a democracy should be by household with women deferring to husbands? That particular religions are in a secret cabal running the world’s economy and need to be attacked? That some academia ought to be policed? That 2 + 2 = 5? Orwell would be proud.

Hmm, sociologist or gender study faculty?

It’s a dual problem. First, customer as king paying tuition on the hand, without it I’d hope we see more of senior management supporting academic freedom of speech. Market forces accounts a great deal for senior leadership being reluctant to contradict the young TRAs who come to uni already having been recruited and converted on Discord and primacy of gender over sex carelessly perpetuated and cemented by teachers in schools.

We're having an interesting parallel discussion over on the other university thread as well!

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5539518-michael-foran-has-had-to-cancel-the-remaining-lectures-on-sex-gi-and-the-law?page=5&reply=152800035

Re the high-level an extremely public lawsuit, I agree that I can't see it happening anytime soon, so it's more like a Christmas wish than an event that I'm expecting to witness!

Our uni wears its stonewall/woke/genderwoo credentials as our main marketing tool. More conservative or critical thinking students would be put off by our vague promises to allow our students to "find your you..."

No we've recruited that cohort, any deviance from strict adherence to the laws set out in extreme TRA circles there would be riots. Not only is the customer king, the customer is an brainwashed unthinking mob.... at this point it would Kathleen Stock X100 if anyone stuck their head above the parapet

My specialist subject…….. (not really but I have worked in the sector).

Accommodation staff generally want students happy in their flats - because we genuinely want the best for them (and it makes our lives easier as well). They are very aware that female only accommodation is an absolute for some students, and that means no TW. We do not want to see e.g. female muslim students forced to withdraw from their studies (and that is a real risk for some). Very unofficially, from conversations with staff across a number of institutions, quite a few were prepared to make sure that there were real female only flats, even if that wasn’t the official university TWAW position. And if a TW requested female only accommodation, they may have been put in a flat with female students who requested mixed accommodation. NB the vast majority of UK UGs request mixed sex, it is international students, many of whom are PGs, who ask for single sex.

However there is a big problem - accommodation systems take info about the students from the central systems and typically will be given ‘gender’ and will not know if a student is trans. I used to sometimes know because the students themselves told us in the free form notes on their accommodation application - e.g. to explain their need for an ensuite room. And even saw their gender change over time in the systems. Knowing that a student was trans was very locked down, even though we might be given a lot of information re disabilities and even criminal records (this would be limited to a very few staff involved in allocating students).

I would hope that the Supreme Court judgment will help but I presume there will be a fair amount of heel digging in. And the IT systems have to be sorted……

This post reveals something and why I don't think it will be as long as some fear before the bubble bursts.

Some recent incidents in my dept have shaken even the most staunch trans allies.

And there it is.

At what point do we start to recognise transactivist violence and terrorism?

It WILL happen at some point.

There has been a number of incidents which have raised these concerns but nothing which reaches a level where it effectively becomes the smoking gun evidence that can no longer be ignored. But the spiral to that seems inevitable because these people are egging each other on further and further to out do each other and prove their belief to the cause.

In terms of the last bastion, the really sad post on the 1st page about the girl whose friends have all moved on, reminds us of who really will be the last man standing in support of this nonsense - parents. Some because they are desperate that it should have been worth it and some because they helped instigate it in the first place. They can't admit their own failings because of the harm done to their own children.

the really sad post on the 1st page about the girl whose friends have all moved on,

I felt when I read that, that it really should have been the OP for a new thread (not necessarily about universities) but about the consequences for those who take what for some is just juvenile fad, fake agreement with, as being the next real life direction they will take.

I wonder if any of the "friends" worry about her, and how her life is going.

I feel that universities have fucked themselves so badly in many ways they may not survive as any kind of center of intellectual life.

The problems with research. The watering down of courses and programs to suit unremarkable thinkers. Especially the loss of protection for controversial discussions. The flat political profile. Too much expensive infrastructure. Dependence on foreign students paying fees. Development of marketable and lucrative stupid masters programs with little worth. And more.

Tbh, although I was once someone who thought the intellectual life of universities was a kind of punicak of achievement, I don't know now if I am sorry if they fail. I think they are making society worse.

I worked in a large Uni in Australia a few years ago, and a dept of Health after that, in IT. In both public settings, money was found to update the systems to allow gender identity and preferred name to be added so as not to "dead name", or "misgender" the sensitive folks. These projects are complex because all the downstream systems must also be updated so that data flows correctly through them. It takes money and resources away from critical service delivery but no-one dared question the priority, it was just "the right thing to do". Part of my job was to review projects, and when I asked, in both cases, how it was determined these projects were needed, the answer was "we've recieved complaints". When I asked how many complaints had been recieved, in both cases it was 2, and they were anecdotal, nothing in writing. Complete fuckery.

@DrBlackbirdI love your 'Regorm' typo. I wholeheartedly agree with you about the value of Third Level and there are those of us about who are trying to hold the line against this madness.

I'm still drumming my fingers waiting for policies to be updated post EHRC guidance. And we don't collect sex data on our employees, only gender. It's a sex pay gap not a gender pay gap as was confirmed the other day.