A note before I make my critique. This man, Thomas Willet, a London-based PhD candidate, constantly joins homophobia and transphobia as if they’re similar things. They’re not. Homophobia is fear and loathing of people based on sexual orientation. Transphobia is a propaganda term that, like the construct “Islamophobia,” is used by propagandists to smear people who accept the fact that gender is binary and immutable.
I have corrected Willet on his feed about this but he insists on doing it anyway, which means that he is purposefully muddying the waters. In this case, he joins the fallacious pairing with gender critical views. Gender critical views have no inherent bearing on the question of homosexuality. They concern the claims of trans activists that men can be women and that this delusion or doctrine entitles trans identifying people to trespass upon activities and spaces reserved for women. In reality, trans activism is anti-women’s rights.
What Willet is effectively articulating is a call for organizations and institutions to discipline and punish people who advocate for and defend sex-segregated spaces and the rights of women. If a woman’s place of employment changes its policy to allow men to use the women’s bathroom, and she objects, then she will be the one said to discriminating against trans identifying employees not the company for compelling her and her female coworkers to use the toilet with a man. This is despite the fact that her gender is the protected characteristic. This is (at least it should be) an obviously illiberal point and, if put in practice, the establishment of an authoritarian policy framework.
This is a massive problem with gender ideology that people should have picked up on a long time ago: the cooptation of the rhetoric of discrimination and oppression to discriminate against and oppress women, to deconstruct the regime of sex segregation that not only protects women from intimidation and violence, but makes possible opportunities that they would not otherwise have access to because of the inherent differences between men and women. The grand irony here is that those who go on about equity deny it when and where it actually matters.
Willet’s argument is a variation on the riff about trans genocide and erasing trans people by denying gender ideology. “My identity is not an ideology,” we hear it repeated ad nauseam. But gender identity is the central component of a quasi-religious doctrine. As such, it is an ideology. It’s not like race, where, if I denounce all the alleged features of whiteness (punctuality, rationality, attention to the written word) then I am no longer white. It’s not even like gender, where if I denounce all the things that make me a man (the desire to be a father, to defend my family, to make sure their needs are met), I am no longer one. A person is trans because he says he is and it changes what and who he really is (a man) nary a jot. A free people enjoy religious liberty, which includes any religious-like ideology—really any ideology, as we can’t have the state picking and choosing which deeply held convictions are allowed and disallowed. Naturally, the right includes those who reject other ideologies. Of course it does. I’m not a Muslim and the government should not make me so—not in a free society. Likewise, religious freedom and free speech necessarily include those who do not accept gender ideology and express instead gender critical views. Just as one is free to express his opinions, he is free from having to accept opinions expressed by others.
Note that Willet says that gender critical views invalidate trans people and their rights. I hear this line all the time from trans activists. But whether denying somebody’s beliefs invalidates them as believers is not the problem of the denier. Do Muslims cease to exist because I find the doctrines of Islam invalid? It’s a ridiculous argument, really. Muslims keep on existing whatever I believe about their religion. They don’t like it that I deny the validity of their beliefs, to be sure, and many of them wish the government would punish those who do, and if they get their wish you and I and generations to come will live in a totalitarian society. It is the same with gender ideology. The desire to compel any of us to accept the premise that trans women are women instead of affirm the truth that they are not, and moreover reorganize our society on that basis, signals as clearly as anything could totalitarian desire.
The desire for total control over others is most strongly expressed by those whose faith in their own beliefs is weak, even if that weakness lurks beneath the zealotry. It explains the zealotry. This is what lies behind the demand for “affirmation” (which has taken the place of the worn out “validation”). Suppose the myth of Muhammad receiving sharia from the archangel Gabriel were exploded and the billions of devotees to Islam suddenly came to reject the doctrine based on the myth. There would be no Muslims. Do I wish those billions would come to see the light? Of course. I am a humanist. But the fact that I already see the light doesn’t disappear those who don’t. Obviously. Look at what’s happening to Sweden. Or Minnesota.
It’s not news to me that people don’t believe the same things I do. I may disagree with them (and they may disagree with me). But I don’t labor to drive them from their livelihoods or destroy their reputations. I don’t surround them and intimidate them. The only reason I write about gender ideology and Islam is that these zealots can’t leave the rest of us alone. Rational people who care about freedom and human rights don’t do things that harass people over their beliefs and opinions. Fascism is beneath them. People who care about other humans beings don’t behave like the Stasi and report others to the authorities for the things they say or agree with and their associations.
We are all human beings, and respecting human rights means respecting the freedom to believe what one will—and to not believe what one won’t—and associate with whom they wish to and assemble to express their opinions collectively. When female employees as a university join their voices and raise them to demand spaces safe for women, they aren’t engaged in an act of discrimination against men any more than denying Muslims the hallways where others travel for their daily prayers to Mecca discriminate against the followers of Muhammad—or telling leather freaks they can’t show up for work (or parade around where children are present) in all kinds of leather. If you’re into bondage and humiliation, there are other spaces appropriate to those kinds of expressions. Don’t let my opinion that it’s weird stop you.
Regular readers of Freedom and Reason may recall that there was a recent attempt to have me fired from my position at the university where I have been teaching for nearly a quarter of a century because of views I have expressed here and on social media (see “UW-Green Bay students want professor fired for alleged racism, transphobia”; The Snitchy Dolls Return). In the original news report (which can be found here), my administration told NBC26 reporter Andrew Amouzou, “We are aware of the situation and the students’ concerns. The process by which students report concerns is being followed and will move forward as appropriate.” Perhaps it was a way to get Amouzou off their backs and humor the students, but it’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the First Amendment or the core principle of academic freedom.
Academic freedom is a cornerstone of higher education, embodying the freedom of scholars and students to explore, discover, and discuss ideas without undue interference. It encompasses the right to conduct research without censorship, publish findings without fear of reprisal, and teach with autonomy. This principle also extends to the freedom of expression, allowing members of academic communities to voice their opinions and engage in intellectual discourse without constraint. Ultimately, academic freedom fosters an environment where diverse perspectives can flourish, contributing to the advancement of knowledge and the betterment of society. What the administration should have done was inform NBC26 and its audience that the university stands by its professors and academic freedom and more broadly their rights as human beings to be free from discipline and punishment for exercising their free speech rights.
While the university spokesman (whoever that was) did not say what he should have, my faculty later surprised me with a struggle session during our last meeting of the semester. Had that been an agenda item, I probably would have declined the meeting, or at least reached out to one of the numerous attorneys who reached out to me eager to represent me if the university moved to discipline me for my speech—either facially or via some proxy method (for the record, I am concerned about the weaponization of post-tenure review in my case). However, in the moment, I let those I hired, tenured, and mentored turn on their elder for its immediate sociological value. That is to say, I found the situation interesting and instructive—not to mention amusing. To be sure, as soon as I said that not only would I not apologize for my gender critical views but that I was going to continue to criticize gender ideology, the intervention became rather pointless. It continued nonetheless.
Predictably, the round-robin devolved into emotional appeals mostly centering the feelings of students. But how students feel about my opinions doesn’t count for much in an enterprise that stands on facts and reason and, frankly cold, hard, and often brutal truths. I already had a dean throw at me concern over retention—without even considering how conservative students are avoiding programs and campuses because they find alienating the woke signaling rampant in promotional materials and intolerance among the faculty for opinions that don’t align with progressive ideology (see The State of Cognitive Liberty at Today’s Universities; see also Accountability Culture is Cancel Culture: Double Think and Newspeak in Today’s America).
I may have mentioned this before, but I have had several conservatives come to me (the number has been increasing) and complain about the weight of progressive hegemony on campus (which is ironic given that twenty years ago they, too, tried to cancel me). I never raised their concerns with administrators or faculty because, consistent with principle, I have no desire to constrain the speech of my colleagues by criticizing pedagogy or politics in this way. Instead, after affirming their perception, I tell conservative students to steel themselves against indoctrination and look at it as an opportunity to see upfront and personally the irrationalisms of progressive ideology. I also tell them, if they are so moved, to challenge their professors over the claims they make, always remembering to do so in a respectful and reasoned manner.
If chairs, deans, and provosts are worried about retention, they might focus on making sure administrators, faculty, and staff grasp the important of free speech and academic freedom. To put this another way, and I don’t say this sarcastically, the university should lean into diversity, equity, and inclusion programming centered on viewpoint diversity rather than programming rooted in the identitarian politics that demands the promotion of Islam, reification of race, and dissimulation of gender.
I earned my three university degrees and chose a career in academia because I sought out spaces where ideas can flow freely. I have always embraced the idea of spaces free from restrictions on ideas, and I thought I was joining an enterprise in which others embraced the same. I now know we don’t share the same core of being. Those spaces are becoming increasingly scarce in the era of corporate statism and progressive-captured public institutions. Over the thirty years I have been in higher education, I have seen the project in which I enlisted become a church, the professoriate a clergy, and zealots proliferate among the congregation. Corporate and progressive capture is transforming universities into indoctrination centers that function to prepare students for two tasks: (1) administered lives in corporate bureaucracies; (2) a reactionary army to defend the corporate state from democratic-republican resistance and liberal demands for free thought and conscious.
Thomas Willet is a paradigm of the academic worker who seeks to complete the transformation of the university in the direction I am criticizing. That he is based in the United Kingdom only testifies to the fact that the illiberal threats to freedom and democracy are trans-Atlantic (indeed, they are worldwide). The defenders of speech codes and cancel culture will tell you that views on free speech are changing. The younger generation has a different view. (They say the same thing about the gender.) But the desire to regulate speech according to the ideology of this or that group is not a young idea. It is a very old one. Most human societies have sought to control the minds of their members by punishing those who step out of line with the received wisdom of the thought regime. It hasn’t mattered very much to them that Western civilization advances to the degree that people are permitted to make objectionable utterances. It matters even less to those who seek its termination.
freedom and reason 