WITCH TRIALS WITHIN THE ACADEMY
October 13, 2021
Joseph (excuse me, Grace) McCarthy (excuse me, Lavery) is going after academics who have the temerity to stand up for women and girls, specifically, University of Sussex philosophy professor Kathleen Stock. It’s like the McCarthy era all over again, except this time it’s coming from within the academy.
Stock is well known in the U.K. and among American radical feminists for taking a stand on the importance of acknowledging the material reality of biological sex. For that, she has been vilified and threatened. Stock is, for now, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex. Last week, the campus was littered with fliers and notices condemning her and calling for her firing.
In response, the University appeared to be standing up for Professor Stock’s academic freedom. Later, the union that is supposed to represent her interests, put out a statement condemning the University for supporting her. The union has a stated policy of “enabling members to self-identify, whether that is being black, disabled, LGBT+ or women.” According to that article, a Scottish college professor and commentator evidently thinks that it is inappropriate for college administrators to conduct work capability assessments with employees who present with disabilities before immediately granting that the employee is, in fact, disabled. Police officers advised her to hire private security. American feminists are watching all of this in horror, as institutions that ought to be taking a firm stand in favor of academic freedom are crumbling at the altar of “gender identity” and attacking women.
Enter Grace Lavery, an associate professor of English at the University of California Berkeley, and a U.K. native. Lavery joined the Berkeley faculty in 2013 as Joseph Lavery and announced in 2018 that he is a woman named Grace. Lavery appears to think that being a woman is fundamentally about eyeliner and lip stain, and also that it is possible to actually change biological sex. He thinks that tilting one’s head is a medical condition that is “empowering the trans world” and has a book forthcoming in 2022 called “Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis.” The adage that men really like to talk about their penises has never seemed more true.
But what does any of this have to do with Kathleen Stock? Stock does not think that it is possible for a person to change his or her biological sex, which is a perfectly sensible thing to think. In other words, she thinks that sex is immutable. Berkeley has a study abroad exchange program with the University of Sussex. Because Lavery objects to Stock’s belief in the immutability of sex, he has called on Berkeley administrators to cancel its affiliation with Sussex.
The Sharon referred to here is Sharon Inkelas, a professor of linguistics at Berkeley and also the Special Faculty Advisor to the Chancellor on Sexual Violence/Sexual Harassment ("SVSH Advisor") (she has she/her in her bio, please make a note of it). The baseless claims that Lavery makes in this letter should be astonishing, except that feminists have become accustomed to receiving these types of accusations. For example, he refers to Stock, without evidence, as a “reactionary bigot.” He says that she is a member of “leadership of hate groups,” without stating which supposed “hate groups” Stock allegedly leads. I am certainly not aware of any. He states that Stock’s presence on campus makes “LGBT students” not safe, without pointing to a single reason to think that this might be true – Stock is, herself, a lesbian after all. He concludes by encouraging Inkelas to terminate Berkeley’s relationship with Sussex.
Attacking academics for their views is not new, but in the past, professors and university administrators have typically come to the defense of academics who state controversial opinions. Lavery, while not calling for Stock’s firing, is calling on his own academic administrators to terminate a program that provides Berkeley students with an opportunity to study abroad in the U.K., simply because a professor (a lesbian) at the university there states openly that women are female and that sex cannot be changed.
Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on academics have been well-documented. David Gardner, who was, perhaps ironically, born in Berkeley, served as the President of the University of California between 1983 and 1992. He once referred to the late 1940s and early 1950s (“the McCarthy era”) as “the nadir in the history of American academic freedom.” Although rabid anti-communist sentiment didn’t fully take hold in the U.S. until after the end of the Second World War, it had already started gaining steam decades earlier and was temporarily contained by the U.S. and other western powers’ war-time alliance with the Soviet Union.
When the war ended in 1945 and the Cold War began, it was fully unleashed and academics were some of its primary targets (though not the only ones of course). Professors were terminated from universities all over the country, from Harvard to the University of Washington, for the alleged offense of harboring views that were sympathetic to Communism. The strategy worked. Adherence to communist views quickly became extremely unpopular and after a few years, very few academics were openly espousing it.
Yeshiva University history professor emerita Ellen Schrecker detailed all of this in a fascinating speech that she gave at the University of California in 1999 called “Political Tests for Professors: Academic Freedom during the McCarthy Years.”
Back then, the primary offense that got professors fired was actual (current or previous) membership in the Communist party. Today things look different. Stock is not being vilified because of her membership in any particular political party. Instead, she is being vilified for being, allegedly, a TERF (if that’s right, it would put her in the company of author J.K. Rowling and comedian Dave Chappelle, among others). Numerous professors have faced similar treatment all over the world (though few of these campaigns are as vicious as the one against Stock). Donna Hughes at the University of Rhode Island, Holly Lawford-Smith at the University of Melbourne, and Callie Burt at Georgia State University, have all received similar treatment. This phenomenon is nearly, though not exclusively, limited to female academics. One example of a man being vilified for insisting that sex is immutable is that of Nicholas Meriwether, who was disciplined by his public university employer for refusing to use wrong-sex pronouns and titles in the classroom and eventually vindicated in U.S. federal court.
Where will this end? Will today’s witch-hunters succeed in silencing female academics in the same way that yesterday’s communist-hunters succeeded in silencing support for Communism? Will women simply be ousted from the Academy entirely? Feminists all over the world often disagree on many things, from appropriate language to effective strategy. But we all agree, at a minimum, that women need to be able to advance the movement to liberate women and girls from male oppression. All feminists know that “gender identity” ideology is regressive, misogynistic, and homophobic.
Will we reach a time when women are ousted from the entire academy for holding and expressing that view? Will women and girls be permitted to teach at all? Will women and girls be permitted to learn? Just how far back in time is this movement going to be permitted to take our society?