113 Search Results for: transgender

Dignity—A Review

A review of Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade. Sentinel, 304 pages (June, 2019) Chris Arnade began his career not long after Michael Lewis retired from bond trading to write his 1989 memoir Liar’s Poker. A physics PhD from Johns Hopkins, Arnade was one of the highly educated new breed of traders, and managed to stay two decades instead of two years like Lewis. But he found his way (or was ushered) to the exit a few years after the mortgage-backed securities that Lewis wrote about blew up the financial system. The financial crisis caused Arnade to reevaluate his life and to begin chronicling inequality and poverty in America as a journalist. In parts travelogue, sociological observation, and personal memoir, Arnade presents his work as written articles and pictures, and the end result is reminiscent of Jacob Riis’s nineteenth century classic How the Other Half Lives. Arnade’s new book is called Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America, and, within its pages, Arnade shows the explanatory limitations of the spreadsheets he …

A Canadian Human Rights Spectacle Exposes the Risks of Unfettered Gender Self-ID

Published by Helen Joyce

There’s an important category in logic known as reductio ad absurdum, according to which you contradict an argument by showing that its general application will produce absurd results. It has been in my mind over the past fortnight or so, as I’ve followed a human-rights tribunal in British Columbia, Canada, and watched it deal with complaints made by trans woman Jessica Yaniv (or “Jonathan Yaniv”: The person apparently goes by both names) against three aestheticians. When it comes to the notion that “gender identity”—the self-declared, subjective feeling of being a man or woman—can reasonably be taken to trump biological sex in law and daily life, Yaniv presents us with a reductio ad absurdum on two legs. For those who have not been following the case (which, oddly, has been covered by the international media, but mostly ignored by Canada’s own press), the details will sound unbelievable. Last year, Yaniv used social media to contact 16 female aestheticians in the Vancouver area, most working out of their own homes, who advertized Brazilian waxing—the removal of some …

Stonewall’s LGBT Guidance is Limiting the Free Speech of Gender Critical Academics

Published by Kathleen Stock

In 2015, the main trade union for UK academics, the University and College Union (UCU), objected to the government’s newly announced counter-terrorism strategy—specifically, the part concerned with universities’ legal duty to attempt to prevent student radicalisation. A central aspect of UCU’s highly critical response concerned the use of ill-defined, imprecise words in the strategy. One UCU briefing noted that (my italics): it is important that branches become familiar with how the government defines ‘extremism’.. as follows: ‘Vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.’ Branches should note the somewhat nebulous nature of so described ‘British values’ and the potentially very broad range of individuals and groups who may at some point fall foul of such a negatively constructed definition. In a similar vein, a Professor and a senior lawyer expressed their concern that that the vagueness and lack of definition of terms like “terrorism,” “non-violent extremism,” “radicalisation,” and “fundamental British values” could be understood to mean that…academics and …

The End of an Era—A Feminist Firebrand Looks Back

Published by Phyllis Chesler

After 9/11, I felt as if the Afghanistan I’d fled so long ago had followed me right into the future and into the West. That distant and dangerous country began to dominate American and European headlines. Muslim women started wearing burqas (head, face, and body coverings) and niqabs (face masks) on the streets of New York City, London, and Paris. As global violence against women gained horrendous momentum, many Western feminists became increasingly afraid to criticize that violence lest they be condemned as colonialists and racists. This fear often trumped their concern for women’s human rights globally. This was not the universalist feminism I helped pioneer. We favored multicultural diversity; we were not multicultural relativists. We called out misogyny when we saw it and didn’t exempt a rapist, a wife beater, or a pedophile because he was poor (his victims were also poor) or a man of color (his victims were often also people of color). We had little sympathy for a perpetrator because he had suffered an abused childhood (so had his victims). Fighting for abortion …

How a Feminist Prophet Became an Apostate—An Interview with Dr Phyllis Chesler

Published by Louise Perry

Dr Phyllis Chesler has never been afraid to be unpopular. During 60 years as an academic, feminist campaigner, and psychotherapist, she has frequently courted controversy. Her new memoir, A Politically Incorrect Feminist, details her experiences as a leader of the Second Wave feminist movement in the United States. Readers are introduced to a star cast that includes household names such as Andrea Dworkin and Gloria Steinem, as well as women such as Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Mary Daly, and Shulamith Firestone, women who produced influential work that is now often forgotten, or else misremembered by Third Wave feminists keen to distance themselves from their feminist foremothers. But Chesler refuses to be misremembered. She’s here to give her side of the story, and she doesn’t pull her punches. We spoke over Skype from her home in New York. Chesler in conversation is just the same as Chesler in print: warm and razor-sharp. At the age of 78, she is both a prolific writer and an energetic campaigner. Most of her campaigning interests are concerned …

A Black Eye for the Columbia Journalism Review

Published by Jonathan Kay

Ideological polarization has become a growing problem in many sectors of society. But it is especially corrosive to public discourse when it infects organizations whose traditional role has been to hold everyone else to account for the integrity of their reporting. We need those organizations to act as a sort of referee when journalists of any description—including those at Quillette—fail to exhibit high standards. This becomes impossible when they instead act as combatants in the culture wars. Earlier this month, for example, the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ), which describes itself as “the national voice of Canadian journalists,” “committed to protecting the public’s right to know,” and “dedicated to promoting excellence in journalism,” signed on to the claim that Canada is perpetuating an ongoing “genocide” against Indigenous people, and encouraged journalists to take on an activist role by promoting “decolonizing approaches to their work [and] publications in order to educate all Canadians about Indigenous women, girls & 2SLGBTQQIA people.” It hardly needs pointing out that this sort of explicit activist agenda—however well-intentioned—is completely incompatible with …

It’s Time for Progressives to Protect Women Instead of Pronouns

Published by Julie Bindel

On my way out of Edinburgh University last week, where I’d just delivered a speech on how feminists should resist male violence, I was attacked by a shrieking “transgender person” (to cite the term used in a Scotsman headline). Had it not been for the three burly security guards surrounding me, I would have been punched. I usually use female pronouns to refer to trans women, as a courtesy. But this is a courtesy I won’t extend to someone seeking to hurt me physically. This was a man—specifically, a misogynist who’d become notorious under the (since deleted) Twitter handle TownTattle. He was deeply offended that I’d been allowed to speak. That’s why he wanted to hurt me: for being a woman who opened her mouth. The event at which I’d appeared was called Women’s Sex-Based Rights. It focussed on the threat to women-only spaces and organizations posed by gender activists who seek to erase any legal distinction in regard to the treatment of male- and female-bodied individuals. In the run-up to the event, trans activists …

The Rise of the Illiberal Right

Published by Cathy Young

In recent days, American right-of-center Internet has been consumed by an often acrimonious and sometimes comical public drama: a polemical battle over an essay by author and New York Post oped editor Sohrab Ahmari entitled “Against David French-ism.” The subject of this philippic, published in the religious conservative magazine First Things, is National Review writer David French, who Ahmari considers to be emblematic of a conservatism too weak and effete for the modern-day culture wars. Some of this quarrel is plainly over the simple matter of allegiance to Donald Trump: French is a staunch “Never Trumper,” while Ahmari is a former Never Trumper who, depending on where you stand, either saw the light or surrendered to the dark side. However, it is also a dispute about more fundamental issues related to the future of American conservatism, and the future of liberal democracy. French, like Ahmari, is a Christian who subscribes to traditional sexual morality. But Ahmari’s quarrel with him is twofold. One, “Though culturally conservative, French is a political liberal, which means that individual autonomy …

Watching My Own Excommunication—on a Facebook Video

Published by Sky Gilbert

I was officially excommunicated by the woke left on November 19, 2018. There is a Facebook video of the event, which anyone can watch. The social-justice left often is described as a manifestation of ideological, political or cultural forces. I no longer believe that to be an accurate description. The behavior on display in that video didn’t originate in a place of reason, but rather the realm of spiritual passions. I’ve already related to Quillette readers some parts of my story. In 1979, I founded Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, which for many years was Canada’s preeminent professional gay and lesbian theatrical company. However, the queer Buddies that exists today was truly born in 1985, when my friend Dr. Johnny Golding (a female philosopher and queer activist) became its president. Dr. Golding spearheaded Buddies’ 1994 move to its now permanent home on Alexander Street in Toronto, a 300-seat theatre (with a licensed cabaret) near the city’s large queer village. I resigned from Buddies in 1997 and handed over the creative reins to Sarah Stanley, a …