There is no transgender row: women can have a penis
This week we learned that you can be booted out of a job for saying: “Women don’t have penises.” Angelos Sofocleous, a postgraduate philosophy and psychology student student at Durham University, retweeted those words and found himself sacked as editor of the university’s online magazine, Bubble, and his assistant editor role at its philosophy journal – called with no little irony Critique – in what the Times called a “transphobia row”. But there was no row because for that you need two sides to argue with passion. Any heated debate happened only in the media after Sofocleous was banned. This was a retweet, an article he wrote called Keingenderism, Truth, and Where the Transgender Movement Gets it Wrong and a command to get thee hence.
His retweet of a Spectator column headlined “Is it a crime to say women don’t have penises?” was to “belittle trans experiences” and leaving “no room for, or to promote, any fair discussions”.
Good to know philosophy leaves no room for discussion.
And before we go on: anyone can call themselves what they like. But others should also have the right to say ‘No, you’re not.’ That goes for women who think womenhood comes after the experiences of being a girl in society. “Is it because I is black?’ asked Ali G, who walked the walk and talked the talk but lacked the actual skin tones, biology, genes and depth to be black. How we laughed.
But on the upside, Sofocleous did get a job: he was hired to write a story for The Spectator. He writes:
On campus, the subject of gender is now off limits for those who fail to fall into line with the new orthodoxy: that being a man or a woman is fluid. Anyone who says otherwise is liable to find themselves hounded into silence…
Or pushed towards a magazine with a larger readership with the misnomered Critique and correctly named Bubble, or Echo as might be a more fitting title. He continues:
It won’t come as much of a surprise that the National Union of Students is leading the charge on this front. Today, the NUS announced its response to the government’s consultation on changes to the Gender Recognition Act. Among the NUS’s more barmy proposals was calling for an end to ‘coercively assigning gender at birth’. Is it a boy? Is it a girl? In future, it seems we might have to wait to ask the child itself when it grows up.
In the meanwhile, if you see a woman with a penis in the women-only changing rooms, at the rape-crisis centres, at the refuge centre for abused mothers, in a women-only train carriage, in a women’s prison, in the women’s football team or running the Women’s Institute don’t point and say, ‘You sure you’re in the right room?” because to do so is be bigoted and very possibly misogynist.
Posted: 23rd, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
