Professor Kathleen Stock Forced Out of Sussex University Due to Threats and Bullying by Trans Activists

This is appalling. It’s an attack on free speech and specifically academic freedom by violent student thugs. But unfortunately, it seems to have caused little outrage except from a few individuals on the right because those responsible for the threats are members of a minority, who claimed to be simply defending themselves from persecution.

Before I go on, I wish to make it very plain that I condemn the persecution of anyone for their sexuality or sexual identity. I don’t wish to see trans people denied jobs, ostracised, beaten or worse. I have every sympathy for those struggling with their sexuality or gender. I think it was still within my lifetime that public transvestism was illegal and punishable by a jail sentence. When I was at secondary school in the 1970s-80s we studied ‘relationships’ as part of the Religious Studies course, along with other important issues like television and media bias and influence. One of the piece in the textbook we were using was about a young man, who’d been arrested and jailed for crossdressing. This poor chap wasn’t loud and proud, but tormented by his sexuality. I’ve also got a feeling one of the methods used to treat it was aversion therapy, in which the patient got an electric shock when shown women’s clothes. I think the psychologist Hans Eysenck used this method to treat a transvestite trucker. It’s horrible, and probably explains some of the hysteria amongst trans rights activists when they falsely claim that gender critical feminists somehow want to kill them. I have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that anti-trans rights feminists actually do. But it seems to me that the trans activists are afraid that if they aren’t treated exactly as women, somehow the official persecution that existed forty years ago will somehow return.

But the trans rights activists are still perpetrating violent intolerance of their own, and this needs to be fought like any other kind.

Last week Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor at Sussex University, finally gave up the struggle and announced she was moving on. Stock had been subjected to a campaign of threats and intimidation, including, I believe, smoke bombs, simply because she believes that transwomen aren’t women and that sexual identity is based in biological sex. That’s it. A group of anonymous students issued a series a threats demanding her removal. I think the university initially gave in, but then pivoted and backed her. Unfortunately, her union, the UCU, refused to do so. Despite support from the university, Stock announced she was leaving. The University gave her a very gracious farewell praising her and her work.

The trans activists and certain sections of the gay rights movement were highly delighted. There were gloating comments about her departure by an anonymous individual, Sussex Against TERFS, the Pink Paper and an SNP MP, all of whom saw this as some kind of victory. But while it might be for them, it is an attack on genuine free speech and democracy.

Western democratic society is built on free speech, and much of the west’s intellectual progress has come from the ability to investigate, research, examine and discuss without interference or censorship. These freedoms have been hard won, and as we’re seeing from the Tories’ assault on the right to protest, they are still under threat. Now free speech is not an absolute right. There are laws against certain types of speech, such as incitement to racial hatred the promotion of paedophilia and so on. The argument trotted out by the Trans Rights Activists in their attacks on gender critical feminists and their supporters is that somehow the denial that transwomen are women is an attack on trans people’s very lives. J.K. Rowling has been accused of wanting to kill trans people, simply because she said that transwomen weren’t women. Russell T. Davies, the creator of the Channel 4 gay soap opera, Queer As Folk, who revived Doctor Who nearly a decade and a half ago, gave a bizarre speech last week attack the LGB Alliance. This was set up by gay men and women as an alternative to Stonewall, because they felt that the latter was concentrating on trans rights at the expense of defending ordinary gay people. They have no animus towards trans people. They merely regard trans identity as a separate issue which should have its own organisation. But because of this they were attacked as ‘transphobic’, ‘Nazis’ and Fascists. In his speech, Davies left the endings off various words, and then declared that ‘when you exclude the ‘T’, you kill’.

What? No-one is talking about killing trans people, except the trans activists. It’s a nasty, malign accusation.

But the accusation unfortunately believed by all too many trans people, and is motivating some to acts of violence and death threats, such as those against Prof. Stock. Her departure from Sussex University has been covered by the Lotus Eaters and Alex Belfield, who states that he doesn’t believe that real trans people are behind the threats. He says instead that it’s probably their supporters. One of the Lotus Eaters states that the threat of violence were so serious that when Stock came to talk at his old university, there were bouncers on the door checking peoples’ bags to make sure they weren’t trying to smuggle a bomb into the auditorium.

This is not defending the rights of a minority. This is terrorism and Fascism. Almost literally.

This might sound incredible, considering that trans rights is generally considered to be a left-wing issue, but sections of Italian Fascism would have supported it solely because of the violence of its supporters. The Futurists, a radical avant-garde artistic movement linked to the Fascists, idealised ‘youth, speed and violence’. They praised ‘the slap, the punch, as the decisive argument’. And while they were vehemently hypermasculine and opposed feminism, they were impressed with the Suffragettes because of their dynamism and acts of violence and terror. In the 1940s the movement’s leader, Marinetti, raved about a coming war between lesbians and homosexuals, who would then united against normal men. Well, the violence and terrorist threats issued by militant trans activists aren’t quite like that, but they’re close, especially as Stock is a lesbian.

These Fascistic threats and violence should be stopped immediately. Anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay Kean has said that the students responsible for them should be expelled. I agree. People have every right to protest, but this should not include threats of violence and real bullying.

The students making them are not defending democracy, but trying to destroy through a determination to stamp out any belief that disagrees with their own. It’s time this was halted.

Real tolerance is not only tolerating views you agree with or find acceptable. It is tolerating those you don’t. And it is time that the students responsible for these threats realised this.

Here are the video from the Lotus Eaters and Alex Belfield commenting on this. Yes, I know they’re terrible right-wingers, but this is such an important issue that I feel they should be heard. And I agree with Belfield when he states that he is horrified more people aren’t condemning Stock’s bullying. Absolutely. I wish more people were doing so too, especially from the left.

Because I don’t believe real threats and violence should be used against anyone in a democratic society, except perhaps real, violent Fascists.

Vox Political: Kipper and Conservative MP Douglas Carswell in Row with Scientists over Tides

This piece by Mike over at Vox Political is a real gem, as it encapsulates the profound anti-intellectualism and sheer bone-headed stupidity of the Tories and the Kippers. Mike has posted up a piece commenting on a report in the Independent that Douglas Carswell, the former Tory and now Kipper MP for Clacton, has got into a row with Britain’s scientists over the origins of tides. Conventional science holds that they’re caused by the Moon. Carswell, however, believes they’re caused by the Sun, and has challenged a top scientist at Sussex University’s Science Policy Research Unit over the issue.

The report also notes that this bizarre claim was made after Michael Gove declared that the British people were tired of experts after he failed to name one economist, who thought that Brexit would be good for Britain.

The title of Mike’s piece just about sums up the astonishment Carswell’s claim must cause in everybody, who has any idea about science: Both Tories and Kippers Have Made Douglas Carswell an MP. Read This and Asky Why?

Both Tories and Kippers have made Douglas Carswell an MP. Read this and ask: Why?

Quite. If you’re wondering whether the Moon does cause tides, Mike over in his piece has a clip of Brian Cox explaining the phenomenon.

I’ve a feeling that as far back as the ancient Greeks, it was known that the Moon caused tides. Certainly the great medieval philosopher and scientist Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln knew about it in the Twelfth century. As he was writing several centuries before Isaac Newton discovered the Law of Gravity, Grosseteste believed that they were caused by the Moon’s magnetism, rather than its gravitational effect on Earth. Still, you can’t expect too much of the people of that period, when science was still very much in its infancy. But it nevertheless shows the astonishing advances the people of the Middle Ages were capable of, simply using the most primitive of equipment, observation, and the power of their minds.

This simple fact, that the Moon causes the Earth’s tides, has been put in thousands of textbooks on astronomy and space for children since at least the beginning of mass education and popular science. Astronomy has been a popular hobby for amateurs since at least beginning of the 20th century, and I’ve no doubt probably as far back as the 19th. Generations of children have had the opportunity to learn that the Moon causes tides, along with other interesting and fascinating facts about space. Carswell, however, is clearly the exception, having rejected all that.

It all brings to my mind the conversation Blackadder has with Tom Baker’s bonkers sea captain, Redbeard Rum, in the epdisode ‘Potato’ from the comedy show’s second series. Trying to impress Good Queen Bess by sailing abroad as explorers, Blackadder, Percy and Baldrick plan to fake their expedition by sailing round and round the Isle of Wight instead until they get dizzy. They get lost instead as Rum believes it is possible to sail a ship without a crew. When they ask him if you really can, Rum replies, ‘Opinion is divided.’
‘So who says you don’t?’
‘Me.’
‘So who says you do?’
‘Everybody else.’
‘Bugger!’

Quite.

This exactly describes Carswell’s attitude to space physics. Everybody else believes the Moon causes the tides, except him. I can see this causing yet another panic amongst scientists and ‘science educators’. Way back around 2009, the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species, various scientists like Richard Dawkins were running around demanding better science education because polls showed a majority of the British public didn’t believe in it. This was partly a response to the growth in Creationism and Intelligent Design, though both of these views of evolution have had a very limited impact over here in Britain. That controversy seems to have quietened down, though the issue of the continuing need for improved science education has carried on with the persistence denial of climate change and anthropogenic global warming by the Right in both America and Britain. One of the sceptics of global warming and climate change over on this side of the Pond is Nigel Lawson. He’s even written a book about it, which I found the other day in another of Cheltenham’s secondhand book shops. Now that Carswell’s made this statement about the tides, which flies in the face of everything scientists have known since blokes like Aristotle, it wouldn’t surprise me if today’s leading science communicators, like Dawkins, Robert Winston, Alice Roberts, Brian Cox and the rest of them started worrying about this issue as well. And I wouldn’t blame them if they did.

As for Gove’s comment that ‘People in Britain are fed up of experts’, this also reminds me another comment by the American comedian, Bill Hicks. ‘Do I detect an air of anti-intellectualism in this country? Seems to have started about 1980 [the year Reagan was elected].’

If you’re worried that the Tories and UKIP don’t understand science, and are going to take us back to the Dark Ages, be afraid: you’re right. And heaven help the rest of us with them in charge.