This is worth reading: Carole Hooven, co-director of Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and author of Testosterone: The Story of the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, on why “Academic Freedom is Social Justice”:
While some activists insist that asserting the biological reality of the sex “binary” is entirely wrong-headed and pernicious, the true threat to science, and to human dignity is the idea that in order to support anyone’s rights we must deny or ignore reality.
While some who are fighting for the rights of gender minorities may sincerely believe that subverting science is necessary to protect an oppressed population, department chairs and university presidents are tasked with ensuring that the campus environment is one in which the fundamental ideals of truth-seeking and academic freedom are not only defended, but actively promoted. It should not be too much to ask that they firmly hold the line between ignorance and knowledge, between subjective and objective, between our feelings and the facts.
The trade-off, of course, is that if activists acknowledge reality, they won't get everything they want. Acknowledging sex exists and matters means acknowledging that inner sense of gender shouldn't always (or possibly ever!) overwrite biological sex.
And, indeed, it’s hard to argue that we should treat some men as though they were women if we acknowledge that sex matters in settings like healthcare, public data collection, sports, prisons, refuges, political representation, and so on.
Acknowledging that sex matters raises the tough question that you’re never supposed to ask about activists’ insistence that “trans women are women.” What does it mean to treat a male person as though they were women? In what sense? For what purposes?
In settings where sex matters, treating male people as though they were women undermines the rights of women and girls. In settings where sex doesn't matter, what does it mean to treat anyone 'like a woman'?
The fictions trans activists are trying to force on the rest of us either undermine women's rights (in any setting where sex matters) or needlessly re-'gender' areas of social life where women have fought to just be treated like human beings (in any setting where sex doesn't matter).
On top of all this, any male who identifies as a woman is having an exclusively, inescapably male experience of his idea of being a woman. His experience has nothing whatsoever to do with actually being a woman (being female). So why would we ever treat these two distinct groups as though they were one?
So I get the cancellation campaigns and the insistence on "no debate"—the cause requires it and activists serve a cause, not seek the truth. But academic institutions serve a different purpose -- free and open inquiry—and mustn't bend when activism demands it.
More on these themes in my piece for The Freethinker…
Well, this is good news, isn't it? A prominent academic at Harvard believes in the importance of science! I'll have to send her a grateful note.
However, I'd like to talk about how far Cancel Culture (which seems to have originated with trans people) has reached into our culture. I am a retired male, so you would think that it doesn't affect me, but it does. I am a serious poet. I recently sent some of my poems to the editor of a journal, and she really liked them. In fact, she told me that I should submit my poems to one of the more prominent journals that pays money. The journal this editor represents is very liberal and publishes a lot of poems on social justice, so I told her that I am liberal on most issues, but that I oppose transgender ideology (making it clear that I have no problem with trans people themselves, as long as they are honest about what they are). Well, I haven't heard from the editor since I sent her that note. It has only been a week, but I think there's a chance she may cut me off because of my views.
I had this same experience with another editor at another poetry site. He was going to post a bunch of my poems, but we ended up hating each other after arguing about transgender ideology.
Besides harming children, this Cancel Culture business is really the worst thing that trans activists are doing. They are causing rifts in relationships all over the world. In all my life I have never known of any issue on which one side was trying to silence the other side. They would have us believe that refuting transgender ideology is akin to claiming that black people are inferior because they test more poorly on intelligence tests than whites do, but this is entirely different. The trans activists don't have reality on their side. I will keep speaking out against transgender ideology for this reason alone, if no other -- even if it costs me opportunities to publish my poetry.
(Yes, blacks as a group test more poorly on intelligence tests than whites do, but there are good reasons for that: They are part of an oppressed minority in this country, something which would naturally affect their performance on tests. They are also poorer as a group, have more stress in their lives, and have poorer nutrition.)
This really gets to where I split from transgender rights. The concept of a "gender identity" separate from medical facts about your sex necessarily implies a certain importance of sex/gender that I don't think is good. It is one thing to say that there are identity/personality/experience aspects that are associated with a particular sex/gender, e.g. that women tend to be wordcels rather than shape rotators or whatever. But once you get to the point where you are saying that having those identity/personality/experience aspects actually makes you the opposite sex/gender, you are implying that people of that sex/gender ~ought~ to have those identity/personality/experience aspects.
Personally, I think that William should be able to want a doll and still like playing football.
I guess you can mix and match gender stereotypes if you are nonbinary, but, given that we all mix and match gender stereotypes to a certain extent, what is even the point of that label?