After publishing some "circumspect, polite" essays in 2018 wondering whether transwomen were really women, Kathleen Stock was shocked by the response – particularly one from a trans-identified grad student – "I haven’t witnessed it myself, but I am totally sure some trans women have in response to the Stock article talked about how precisely they would like to violently kill and dismember Stock. This is just something that happens in conversations about TERF’s." On expressing her concern, Stock found that many of her her academic colleagues chided her – expressing support, rather, for the poor maligned grad student.
From her X post:
Since then (and faced with many other such crazy-making cases) I have had to come to terms with the fact that there are many, many professional academics who will never back down from their basic quasi-religious belief that me and a few other philosophers must be the bad guys for criticising the presuppositions of transactivism- because they have to hang on to their own self-identification as the good guys, and they need the foil. It is not enough to disagree with us, – that is normal in academia – they have to conjure up poisonous caricatures of who we are.
Only this week a paper was published in a supposedly quality feminist journal (Hypatia) which accused Holly Lawford-Smith's work of propping up Neo-Nazi beliefs. An editor passed that for publication. Referees passed that. There is an astonishing casualness about the way that academics will excuse such inflammatory language, and turn the responsibilty back on the target, with an implied "well, if you didn't say such things…". Of course, they can never really point to what we did actually say, in any depth or with suitable context – for who has the time? They all just rely on the testimony of other earlier caricatures, and so the lie spreads.
When I heard about Charlie Kirk I was in Berlin, at a conference about non-medicalised approaches to gender dysphoria – you know, aimed not at stopping puberty or giving teenagers life-altering hormones, or cutting their body parts off, but trying to give them effective therapy instead – a good aim, right? Or at least a well-intentioned one, even if you disagree with it. Transactivists had vowed to find the conference and disrupt, and had put up a social media account called "know your enemy", and my face was the first on the list. They spent the weekend posting people outside every major hotel to find us. I had a security guard meet me at the airport and take me back there, I barely left the hotel. That is the real consequence of academics' stupid, unthinking, defensive attempts to portray themselves as heroes and make out we are evil villains. And if the story eventually ends with something very bad, god forbid, I know for a fact there will be philosophers who will imply it was deserved, and dig out mangled half-truths or lies to back it up; and there will be hundreds of others who will say nothing in disagreement.
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