J. K. Rowling #3 JK and the Prisoner of Gender Stereotypes

[Norbs]

The trans debate could cost this Cambridge porter his job

This is a story about a man called Kevin Price, who was until last week a councillor and who is, for now at least, employed as a porter at a Cambridge college. The story illustrates two points. First, political conflict over trans rights and women’s rights is far from over, especially in the...

www.spectator.co.uk

Am unable to copy from the article but its worth a read.
Edit - sorry I didn't realise that had already been posted

I posted the full copy up thread, if there were any particular excerpts you wanted to highlight.

 

[PoleStar]

Having not long left university, on my course there were very little critical thinking going on. In my seminars, the students just all sat there in silence, never did the reading, obviously didn't want to be there. More fool me for thinking going to university would be fun and my seminars would be all engaging debates and discussions for learning. I've no idea what half of them were doing there. By year three, the majority of my classmates still couldn't stand in front of the class to deliver presentations without spending the entire 10 minutes looking at a piece of paper, reading off their phone or speaking loudly enough for people to hear, mumbling away and unprepared. Universities are not preparing young people for the workplace, just taking their £9250 a year. Even my lecturers weren't engaged as they recycled content most lectures - aside from the lecturers who wasted at least 10/20 minutes moaning about their pensions, telling us not to turn up to class to support strike action etc. I was colossally dissapointed by university. And this was a top 15 uni.

The political students were as you'd expect, little hive minds. I went along to both a lib-dem society taster session and the labour society one in freshers and scarpered out of them never wanting to be involved in students politics!! I can totally understand the mindset behind these students taking this action because I've seen it at my university.

Thanks for your post, it's refreshing to hear a younger person telling it how it is! Sadly, I think a university education is no longer the gold standard it once was. Years ago only the brightest and best went to university, whereas now it seems most youngsters end up there via one route or another. I don’t wish to denigrate the effort that a lot of students put into their studies, but throughout my working life I have encountered numerous university educated people who can't even put together business documents using correct spellings or grammar and this makes me wonder what standards the universities are instilling in their students. I wonder if a lot of students spend more time rabble rousing in groups like the Clare College "Union of Clare Students" than they do actually studying! I wonder how many of these students will look back at their actions towards Kevin Price with a sense of shame and embarrassment once they truly grow up?

 

[judgejohndeed]

Oh absolutely, I agree that the lecturers get a raw deal right now and academics are under a lot of pressure. Especially the kind of contracts PHD students etc are on with no guarantees for future work and poor pay. It’s important to protect academia and this government has very little time for it. I just really didn’t appreciate two of my lecturers regularly wasting almost half of my lecture/seminar time talking about their own circumstances, their pensions, their wages, how they weren’t paid to be on strike etc etc. I did support the strikes even though I lost many hours of lecture time because of them but if anything, my sympathies waned a little because of the lecturers using my lecture and seminar time to air their grievances and asking us to petition the university. When you only get 50 minutes of their time, I’d rather we cover the lecture in full and not just 30 because they wanted to use the class as a way to talk about strikes. We had plenty of emails too.

I also think a number of university age students, although adults, often don’t have real world experiences and therefore have a rather set view of the way they look at certain issues. I’m a few years older than the average student so I could see qualities and beliefs in them that I knew I had myself a few years prior. You can be a bit idealistic sometimes when you’re straight out of sixth form and straight to university. You do a lot of growing while at university but it can be a bit of a bubble too. Saying this, I don’t hate students at all. I was just shocked by the immaturity of some of them and found they’d only just grown up by their last year.

Yeah absolutely I agree those lecturers shouldn't be doing that. I think there are some like you said previously who are using the current abysmal state of academia to reuse tired content etc and not put a huge amount of effort in. But then, I feel sympathy for those because the workload will be crazy with the pandemic, I know my old colleagues are really struggling right now.

I have to admit I see your posts on many threads I post on and I had assumed you were older and more mature than the average age of uni student! So I'm not surprised at all that you have a better attitude towards education. I don't think students or the teaching staff themselves are to blame on the whole, to be honest. Students expect an easier time of uni because they're paying a lot, and lecturers have a lot of downward pressure and more ad hoc tasks being lumped into their jobs. There will be the odd particularly lazy student or lecturer but overall I think a lot of this is the higher fees, the higher expectations set for students by paying more, and those standards are being set in universities not by people who are actually carrying out the work. The whole thing is a mess.

 

[2020two]

I agree with this however I'd like to just add a small defence here for lecturers from the inside view - in my opinion, this is not actually their fault. The rising of fees has contributed massively to the consumerism of education and unfortunately students these days (maybe not yourself) are viewing education more as a service and a product they pay for. I was teaching before the 9k fees came in and afterwards, and there is a marked change in how students behave and respond to education. With the higher fees, rightly or wrongly, students feel like for that price they are paying for a degree - not necessarily the quality of their actual education. There are fewer students failing, more grades being overturned, etc. I very much feel that lecturers are facing huge downward pressure from universities themselves and upper management who now face a raft of complaints because of that cost. You get from university what you put in. And unless you're doing a vocational course I would argue it's not actually your lecturers' job to make you workplace ready - if you're studying History for example, you will get some transferable skills from that, sure, but if you don't engage, you don't work on your presentation skills yourself, you deliberately don't take part in formative work to get valuable feedback, I'm not sure it's your teaching staff's responsibility to force you to do that. By university you are an adult, lecturers cannot force you to do anything and neither can they spoonfeed you.

This is not really directed at you because you sound like a student who is engaged and willing to learn - the kind who is a pleasure to teach, by all accounts - but unfortunately in my experience this is increasingly rare these days. And teaching has changed so much that this is one of the reasons I chose to leave academia, ultimately. It is soul destroying trying to teach disengaged students the subject you love and are passionate about because they think they're paying 9k a year to get a piece of paper that says '2.1'

I would love to pick your brain about leaving academia if that's ok sometime? As it's something I'm considering currently. I am stressed worrying about the inevitability of being forced to include trans women in my research/teaching or being forced to out myself as GC. I'm wondering if it's safer to leave than risk my career in the future. I cannot believe I even have to think about this. I have studied and worked hard for years and my job could be on the line for my view that women are women. I know this is just a thread on the internet but I'm overwhelmed with anxiety over my career

 

[Doc]

I’ve found this is schools, a lot of teachers have never been out of the education system since they started primary school themselves. Today’s students are tomorrow’s lecturers and are losing rich input as a result, becoming a hive mind.

Universities haven’t been the same since grants were scrapped. They’re businesses, and ideological training camps. That’s it.

 

[judgejohndeed]

I would love to pick your brain about leaving academia if that's ok sometime? As it's something I'm considering currently. I am stressed worrying about the inevitability of being forced to include trans women in my research/teaching or being forced to out myself as GC. I'm wondering if it's safer to leave than risk my career in the future. I cannot believe I even have to think about this. I have studied and worked hard for years and my job could be on the line for my view that women are women. I know this is just a thread on the internet but I'm overwhelmed with anxiety over my career

Of course! I am very fortunate in that my academic background is legal, so I just had to complete another course to go into practice. It's not perfect, there's a lot of pronoun woo woo and 'modern families' crap in practice too, but ultimately being self-employed it would be much harder for me to lose my job now.
I think it's awful you feel you want to leave because of this, although obviously I totally understand. One of the last straws for me was a push by my uni to stop saying 'he or she' in papers we were writing and to only say 'they.' It's a load of nonsense. You shouldn't have to give up your career for your views, especially when yours are the common sense ones grounded in science. I really feel for you, I can see from academic social media that things are getting worse even in the last few years since I left.

 

[Scotch Mist]

I would love to pick your brain about leaving academia if that's ok sometime? As it's something I'm considering currently. I am stressed worrying about the inevitability of being forced to include trans women in my research/teaching or being forced to out myself as GC. I'm wondering if it's safer to leave than risk my career in the future. I cannot believe I even have to think about this. I have studied and worked hard for years and my job could be on the line for my view that women are women. I know this is just a thread on the internet but I'm overwhelmed with anxiety over my career

I'm really sorry to hear that you feel like that and hope that you are not put in an awful position.

So many people appear to be completely unaware of what is happening. I was trying to explain to my husband today as he was under the impression that it was just 'a few extremists in the internet that nobody would take seriously'. He was shocked to learn about the Porter who could lose his job.

My husband also went on to say that the majority of men who parrot the line 'trans women are women' are just virtue signallers and that most of them secretly wouldn't entertain the idea of having a relationship with a trans woman despite saying this in public.

 

[judgejohndeed]

I'm really sorry to hear that you feel like that and hope that you are not put in an awful position.

So many people appear to be completely unaware of what is happening. I was trying to explain to my husband today as he was under the impression that it was just 'a few extremists in the internet that nobody would take seriously'. He was shocked to learn about the Porter who could lose his job.

My husband also went on to say that the majority of men who parrot the line 'trans women are women' are just virtue signallers and that most of them secretly wouldn't entertain the idea of having a relationship with a trans woman despite saying this in public.

I think a shocking number of people don't understand what self ID is or what 'trans' is meant to mean anymore. I've had so many convos with male friends who have said things like 'well if theyve had their surgery what's the big deal.' Then when I tell them what's actually going on, they're horrified.

 

[HockyRorror]

I think a shocking number of people don't understand what self ID is or what 'trans' is meant to mean anymore. I've had so many convos with male friends who have said things like 'well if theyve had their surgery what's the big deal.' Then when I tell them what's actually going on, they're horrified.

You should also tell them that assuming trans people have to/have had surgery is considered transphobic nowadays and their job could be at risk if they voiced that out loud or online.

 

[CheshireLove]

In today’s news, Harry Potter pyjamas are “putting trans lives at risk.”

 

[HoGi]

In today’s news, Harry Potter pyjamas are “putting trans lives at risk.”

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I love the last reply about getting knickers in a twist

 

[Doc]

Even breathing endangers transssssss peeeeople these days. What the hell is folx anyway?

 

[Pixie06]

I hope these idiots are silenced soon by some means. Fxck Xff.

 

[Doc]

Seriously. All the injustices, brutality and oppression in the world and these crusaders go off about people living pretty much how they want to, unimpeded. Folx off indeed.

 

[CheshireLove]

Even breathing endangers transssssss peeeeople these days. What the hell is folx anyway?

I can’t quite work it out but I think it’s similar to the way they wrote womxn? Ridiculous nonsense.

 

[SqualorVictoria]

Yeah it's to denote non binary people too. Utter narcissistic nonsense

 

[emmer_moans]

Seriously. All the injustices, brutality and oppression in the world and these crusaders go off about people living pretty much how they want to, unimpeded. Folx off indeed.

Exactly, at a time where earthquakes are happening during a pandemic, yes absolutely go off shunning teenagers who will want to buy Hogwarts PJs for Christmas. It’s getting scary now. I’m glad MeUndies stated that a lot of work went into the designs rather than cower

Edit again: a lot of the comments were saying along the lines of “ thanks for letting me know this brand exists, I’m now going to buy all my nieces and nephews some lovely HP PJs”

 

[SqualorVictoria]

I've decided I'm not going to give an inch anymore. I will no longer be using the word trans woman, trans identified is what I'll be using. They are trying to take language from us (woman, mother) so I will no longer be playing ball.

 

[judgejohndeed]

So, the 'right side of history' apparently now includes...yelling at people buying pyjamas...aaaaaaaalrighty then

 

[2020two]

You're telling me I can work from home in a ravenclaw dressing gown?! Shut up and take my money too far if I buy one and teach zoom lectures wearing it like a Hogwarts professor?