UK universities struggle to deal with ‘toxic’ trans rights row

UK universities struggle to deal with ‘toxic’ trans rights row

"An angry student shouted at Prof Rosa Freedman outside the students’ union at Reading University. She was a “transphobic Nazi who should get raped”... She felt shaken and, “for the first time on campus, afraid of physical violence”...

Freedman and 53 other academics wrote a letter to the Guardian questioning the proposed introduction of self-identification for gender reassignment. They said that critical academic analysis of transgenderism is being suppressed...

She disagreed with other feminists in a Facebook group called the Women in Academia Support Network. “I was watching them attacking another woman academic for voicing some difficult questions,” she says. “They were saying, let’s get her fired. When I tried to defend her I was told I was committing structural violence against the group and I was transphobic and I wasn’t welcome.”...

As well as many abusive comments on Twitter, she has been shown a written request from an academic at another university asking for her to be blacklisted from giving any papers or attending events in their law school. Colleagues have also told her that Reading University has received written and verbal complaints about her views from its staff and students, and from people outside the university...

Freedman gave a talk on the United Nations Human Rights Council at Essex University. Prior to it, students there called for her to be barred from campus and her talk cancelled...

“It is a failure of our education system that it produces young people who think superficially about these issues; who think it is all about emotion, and who can’t tolerate different points of view from theirs.”

Despite calls from students and trans rights activists for her to be fired from Sussex, Stock feels confident she will keep her job... Sussex’s vice-chancellor, Adam Tickell, issued a public statement about her case saying: “I hold a deep-rooted concern about the future of our democratic society if we silence the views of people we don’t agree with.”

But Stock says she knows academics at other universities who are “terrified of being fired” for their views on this subject...

“I can deal with strangers behind pseudonyms saying horrible things on Twitter, and, up to a point, with young, inexperienced students condemning me. But what I can’t understand is academics going out of their way to shame me.”

Debbie Epstein, professor of cultural studies in education at Roehampton University, says many feminists are afraid to voice any view about the gender recognition proposals. “I grew up in South Africa under apartheid and was involved in politics from my teens, and not since I left there in the 1960s have I been as scared of speaking out as I am on this issue now. I have seen the toxicity of this debate and how other academics have been treated and that is frightening.”...

"When they attack you they generally don’t respond to your arguments or address them, they simply say that it is dog-whistling that is indicative of an underlying bigotry."

Selina Todd, professor of modern history at Oxford University, agrees. Recently one delegate cancelled their place at a humanities conference she was due to speak at when they saw her name on the agenda. “It was because the person was concerned that ‘transphobic’ views would be expressed. I assume that this referred to my gender-critical stance.” The conference had nothing on the agenda that was connected to the subject."


Apparently you feel "safe" by making other people feel in danger

If you take verbal and physical violence to be the same, physical violence is a legitimate response to verbal "violence"