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The profession can change, the venue can change, but the gender-woo methodology remains the same. Personally attack the person who dares to speak about biological reality, libel and defame their character while poisoning the well as to prevent discussion of an import issue facing women.
The bullshit doesn’t change. It is especially disheartening to see professionals whose business is to be thoughtful and charitable completely abandon those principles in order to defend normative patriarchal values.
“A debate has arisen among philosophers concerning a couple of papers published recently in the prestigious journal Philosophical Studies. The first paper, “Are women adult human females?” by Alex Byrne (January, 2020) attempts to refute what Byrne identifies as “the orthodox view among philosophers,” that “the category woman is a social category, like the categories, wife, firefighter, and shoplifter,” rather than “a biological category, like the categories vertebrate, mammal, or adult human female.” Byrne argues woman is a biological category, that to be a woman is to be an adult adult human female. The second paper, “Escaping the Natural Attitude About Gender,” by Robin Dembroff (forthcoming, but available already online), attempts to discredit Byrne’s argument.
The controversy surrounding the two articles does not concern the arguments themselves but the fact that Dembroff’s article includes an ad hominem against Byrne in which Dembroff effectively accuses Byrne of bigotry against transsexuals despite the fact that there is nothing in Byrne’s paper to support such a charge. The editor of the journal, Stewart Cohen, resigned in protest because he wanted to publish an apology for printing an article that included defamatory rhetoric, rhetoric which should never have made it past the journal’s referees, but the publisher of the journal, Springer, refused to allow him to do that.
Philosophers are not generally known for being warm and fuzzy. But Dembroff’s paper represents a new low in levels of civility. Usually, philosophers aim their barbs at an opponent’s cognitive abilities. Even then they aspire to some subtlety. They’ll intimate that an opponent is feebleminded, but they rarely say so directly. It’s not simply that it’s rude. It’s unprofessional. It’s rare, for the same reason, for a philosopher to directly accuse another of being a “shoddy scholar.” It’s rarer still, again, for the same reason, for a philosopher to accuse another of being immoral. Yet Robin Dembroff has advanced both charges against Byrne.
The debate amongst philosophers surrounding what Byrne has dubbed GenderGate, focuses on a brief passage at the end of Dembroff’s article. The line is:
Byrne’s paper fundamentally is an unscholarly attempt to vindicate a political slogan [“women are adult human females”] that is currently being used to undermine civic rights and respect for trans persons. And it is here that I return to Byrne’s advice to question the motivations behind this debate.”If someone is personally heavily invested in the truth of [some proposition] p,” Byrne writes, “it is prudent to treat [their] claim that p is true with some initial caution.” I agree. So we may ask: What are the motivations of someone who would so confidently insert themself into this high-stakes discourse while so ill-informed?
That is, Dembroff is insinuating here that Byrne has an anti-trans agenda that he is trying to advance in an scholarly paper published in an academic journal even though, again, there is nothing in Byrne’s paper to support such a charge.”
The Gender-woo really needs to stop. :/
Catch the rest of the essay on Counterpunch.
Douglas Murray writing in Unherd describes the penalty and betrayal foisted on J.K. Rowling for having the audacity to speak about verifiable facts.
“This is because on that issue of minimal importance but maximal rage – the Trans debate – Rowling has taken the same view that the majority of the British public holds. Which is that while trans people should be afforded the same rights and dignity as everybody else, they do not have the right to redefine biological reality. Specifically, in the case of Rowling and many others, they do not have the right to redefine what a woman is.
Last week the author took exception to the use of the phrase “people who menstruate” in a news report — the headline writer clearly trying to get around having to use the increasingly triggering word “woman”. As Rowling wittily put it:
This brought the ire of trans Twitter down upon her. That whole army of people who used to be men who tell women to shut up, and the people who think they are helping trans people by pretending that biological sex doesn’t exist and that the clownfish is a suggestive comparison for the biological make-up of human beings.”
The offended feelings crew needs to f*ck off, and the sooner the better.
How not to run an academic institution. My Alma mater is demonstrating some worrisome (read batshit fucking stupid) decisions regarding firing female staff for having the absolute gall of teaching the ‘unorthodox’ view that biological sex is important to women and their struggle against patriarchy.
Her feminist views are apparently causing a small segment of students to feel unsafe and thus because if we are not walking on eggshells around entitled gender deluded males one must be doing the whole academic thing wrong.
“Something very wrong has happened at the University of Alberta. A professor has been fired from part of her academic job for views on sex and gender that break with current orthodoxy.
In late March, Kathleen Lowrey, an associate professor at the University of Alberta, was asked to resign from her role as the Department of Anthropology’s associate chair, undergraduate programs, on the basis that one or more students had gone to the University’s Office of Safe Disclosure and Human Rights and the Dean of Students, André Costopolous, to complain about her without filing formal complaints. All Professor Lowrey has been told is that she is somehow making the learning environment “unsafe” for these students because she is a feminist who holds “gender critical” views.
Apparently, Lowrey’s very openness about her views is a problem. Should a course have gender or sex as a central theme, on day 1 she offers a summary of her views along with the declaration that no student need agree with her about any of it, as she did this year with her course “Anthropology of Women.” As she cleaves to a feminism that asserts the continuing importance of biological sex and feminist projects of resisting patriarchal oppression, her views put her out of step with much current thinking about the nature of gender, which from the seminal work of Judith Butler forward takes sex to be a social construct. Lowrey also posts statements related to her views on her office door — something she is entitled to do. She contends that in asking her to resign from her service role the University is endorsing ideological conformity.
Lowrey refused to resign from her service role and insisted that if the University wished to dismiss her from it, it would need to put its reasons for doing so in writing. She subsequently received a letter from the Dean of Arts Lesley Cormack dismissing her from her service role without offering any specifics as to why. The letter simply declares that the Dean believes that “it is not in the best interests of the students or the University” for Lowrey to continue in it.”
This is unbelievable. Exactly what part of a healthy part of academic debate does this help?
“The University of Alberta takes the position that Lowrey had to be dismissed from her service role “for the good of the department” because at least one student claims that for the University to let her continue in the role would be for it to run the risk of the department losing students to another field of study. The argument, in effect, is that Lowrey could not be allowed to let the Department suffer a financial penalty for her views. (In the University of Alberta’s budget model, government funding “follows” students to the departments in which they take their courses.) With its worry that Lowrey’s views will have financial consequences for the Department of Anthropology, the University of Alberta lets an unfortunate development of the academy over the last few decades, in which students have become tuition-paying “customers” upon whom universities rely for more and more of their revenues, come into direct conflict with academic freedom principles. This is a very serious problem. No department at any university in Canada should be taking the position that it has to concern itself with how a professor’s intellectual views may affect a department’s bottom-line.
Finally, the University of Alberta takes the position that it had to dismiss Lowrey from her service role because if it did not do so students would feel that the University “cared more” about “supporting” the professor than it did about them. This is a terrible line of reasoning, which pits students against a professor when what ought to be of paramount concern to all is the commitment to intellectual engagement and critical scrutiny of ideas as fundamental to the University’s flourishing. Quite simply, at a university, unorthodox or controversial views must be actively debated, and never suppressed, if the university is to meet its societal obligations.
The University of Alberta needs to restore Professor Lowrey to her role as associate chair, undergraduate programs, in the Department of Anthropology, and university administrators elsewhere need to make sure that they do not fall into the University of Alberta’s mistake. It is essential that our universities never become homes for orthodoxy of any kind. “Dogma is bad for people,” writes UBC professor emeritus William Bruneau elsewhere on this blog. But for universities dogma is much, much worse. It is anathema to the academic mission.”
Kathleen Lowrey needs to reinstated yesterday. This sort of totalitarian anti-academic thinking has to stop.
Oh and email the Dean about this travesty – artsdean@ualberta.ca
“One woman died and two others were injured in a violent attack at a Toronto massage parlour in February. A 17-year-old male, who is too young to be identified under Canadian law, was charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder.
Police added the terrorism charge on Tuesday, three months after the attack, after finding what they say is evidence that he had ties to the incel or “involuntary celibate” movement, whose members believe women owe men sex and are to blame for male sexual frustration. “
Yep, you read that right. That loser of a dude was under the notion that somehow women (sexy,hot women) owed him sexual pleasure and gratification.
Just how far up one’s ass does one need to be to think that anyone owes you anything in the world? And yet, this incel movement is a real facet of society.
Check this shit out from incel.co a forum for the wankers (hyperlink through donotlink):
“Sex is clearly a vital part of every humans existence, a man doesn’t even “become a man” in a sense within society until he has sex, in essence a lot of men have not undergone their “right of passage” to become part of the “tribe” that is modern human civilization.
This is why all of these mass shootings are taking place, its started to branch off into other things like the “Thot Audit”, more and more things like this are going to keep happening until society finally acknowledges this problem and begins to make changes.
So as it stands we now have a significant and growing pool of sexually starved men, who due to this are angry, violent, irritable and suicidal, seriously how does society expect this to play out, the most dangerous animal is the one backed into a corner with nothing to lose, when someone doesn’t care if they die, worse yet they want to die just so their sad existence can end, there is no reasoning with that person, they are on a “war path”, you either kill them, give that person what they want, or you get out of their way as they proceed to claim what they want.
Society expects us not to burn the village down when it won’t initiate us into the tribe, that’s whats truly outrageous, not the violence of disenfranchised men, but the fact that society actually expects us to just remain docile and accept this reality that has been forced upon us.”
Yeah. Witness the real creme of human civilization…
To Solidarity and Liberation!
Please go and support feminist organizations that are carrying on the struggle for female rights and safety.
Also, why women are joining the Canadian Women for Sex Based Rights group:
Females need spaces away from men. Especially men who believe that woman is feeling inside their heads. Access to safe washroom spaces is a key part of women’s rights. So the ‘gender neutral’ (read male) toilet movement has to stop.
“Access to sanitation services has been recognized as a human right by the UN since 2015:
sanitary facilities are essential for men’s and women’s health alike. But despite a direct link between women’s rights and dependable access to toilets, the issue remains less visible than it should be. Even when sanitation infrastructure exists, it’s often ill-adapted to the needs of girls and women.
sanitary facilities are essential for men’s and women’s health alike. But despite a direct link between women’s rights and dependable access to toilets, the issue remains less visible than it should be. Even when sanitation infrastructure exists, it’s often ill-adapted to the needs of girls and women. Even when sanitation infrastructure exists, it’s often ill-adapted to the needs of girls and women. In 2018, 60% of the total number of people who had to resort to open-air defecation were women, and in sub-Saharan Africa one girl in ten missed school during her period. Though women are at higher risk of lacking access to dependable sanitary facilities, and such access is key to empowering them, data on this basic right are limited.
No toilets: putting girls’ and women’s health and security at risk According to the most recent available data, from 2017, over 500 million women lacked access to sanitation facilities. That means that 13% of the world’s female population was unable to use a toilet to go to the bathroom or manage menstrual hygiene. For these women, the risk of sexual assault is 40% higher than for women with access to sanitation facilities, according to a 2018 study conducted in the shanty towns of Kenya’s Mathare Valley. In India, this risk is as high as 50%. Titre Tribune Also read Toilets for more gender equality around the world Health Gender Water & Sanitation Read What’s more, a lack of access to toilets poses higher health risks for women than for men. In addition to health risks shared by both sexes—including diarrhea, dehydration, dysentery, typhoid fever, hepatitis A and even polio—problems like toxic shock syndrome, vaginal or urinary infections, and pregnancy complications affect women alone.
Illnesses due to a lack of personal and menstrual hygiene compound problems arising from contact with fecal matter, which tend to receive more attention. Hygiene, health and security: when girls and women have to choose As a 2016 study observes, attending to menstrual and personal hygiene while avoiding many of these illnesses necessitates four elements: privacy, water, soap and a trash disposal system. Unfortunately, even when sanitation infrastructure exists, it’s often ill-adapted to the needs of girls and women, according to the NGO WaterAid.
In Kenya, the sanitation facilities installed in the Mathare region are mixed-gender, few in number (with 1 toilet for every 70 to 100 people), fee-based, and often lack a door. Together with paid access, the lack of cleanliness, privacy and security drives many women to avoid using these toilets : “A third of women use a bucket or plastic bags or defecate outdoors at least once per day, and two-thirds of them do the same at night,” says researcher Samantha Winter. When toilets contribute to female empowerment In addition to being essential to girls’ health and security, access to dependable, well-designed sanitation facilities exerts a direct influence on girls’ education rates. In 2019 a third of the world’s schools lacked toilets, according to the UN. The direct result has been an increase in girls’ drop out and school absence rates when they reach puberty, owing to the lack of a place where they can change when they have their period.
According to UNESCO, in sub-Saharan Africa one girl in ten misses 20% of the school year for the same reason. For all these reasons, UNICEF is leading a program in Jharkhand, India to train women as masons. Girls who have dropped out of school because of the lack of facilities for dealing with their periods are becoming rani mistri, toilet-builders, in their communities. For its part, WaterAid has drawn up a best-practices guide in partnership with UNICEF and Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP), designed for all actors involved in providing sanitation access. These initiatives have the same goal: promoting the inclusion of women in the planning and governance of sanitation infrastructure to ensure that their needs are taken into account.”
The Intransigent One
Mystro
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