Cambridge University is blind to reality in the gender debate | The Spectator - 0 views
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At Cambridge, professors and students alike are afraid to speak critically, or at all, on the subject of gender.
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Believing that biological sex is binary and unchangeable – and that gender is culturally constructed – may not seem controversial. Yet gender-critical feminists who hold such mainstream views are often slapped with a derogatory label: Terf, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist.
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heir beliefs, let’s remember, are far from radical: they think that conflating gender with sex leads to violations of the rights of women, children and gay and lesbian people.
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Cambridge Students’ Union recently published a guide titled ‘How to spot Terf ideology’. It suggests that sex is neither natural nor binary, but rather a social construct and a ‘colonial fiction created to oppress trans people’
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The guide goes on to claim, falsely, that ‘Terfs spend a lot of time working with the far-right.’ The Union’s Women’s Officer proudly announces in her manifesto that ‘Terfs aren’t welcome here’.
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It is not uncommon for students to comb through a classmate’s social media and bully them in private messages. This can progress to more threatening behaviour.
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A gender-critical student at Cambridge was traumatised after her peers discovered an online article in which she expressed her views on sex. It cited her sexual assault as a reason for her reservations about allowing males into women’s spaces. For holding these views, she was publicly shamed and harassed. In the first year of what should have been a rewarding university experience, she became a pariah within her college
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Helen Joyce, author of the best-selling book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, was recently invited to speak at Gonville and Caius College by Professor Arif Ahmed. This event sparked a furore. In an email to Caius students, the college’s Master and another academic described Joyce’s views as ‘hateful’ and wrote that: ‘Individuals should be able to speak freely within the law…However, on some issues which affect our community we cannot stay neutral’. Ahmed was blocked from using the college’s intranet to publicise the event.
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Hundreds of students vehemently protested Joyce’s speech. Yet, in their report of the event, the student newspaper, Varsity muddled up what Joyce actually stood for. The paper suggested Joyce believes that ‘gender is not a social construct and is immutably linked to sex’, the very opposite of her thesis.
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At one of this country’s most prestigious universities, women who hold perfectly reasonable views are terrorised into silence. Gender-critical students and academics are ostracised. A university that prides itself on academic rigour is letting down its students.