The Aunt Lydias of academia

Anyone who gets embroiled in squabbles with trans activists will be familiar with certain canards that crop up time and again. Like a set of plastic skittles, it doesn’t take much to topple them but, wearisomely, there is always someone willing to put them back up to be knocked down yet again.

In a recent article on the BuzzFeed News site, LGBT Editor Patrick Strudwick could have scoured trans Twitter and come up with the exact same input from common or garden Twitter numbskulls as that provided by the five sociologists he calls – and this is the only touch of humour in the article – “leading feminist thinkers”: Akwugo Emejulu, Sally Hines, Tracey Jensen, Alison Phipps and Vanita Sundaram. If you’ve only been a feminist for a few decades, you’ll be forgiven for never having heard of them.

I suspect that no academic worthy of the name would bother responding to the article. Why would they when the Professors’ “arguments” – for want of a better word – could be refuted by a teenager without a single GCSE? On the other hand, the article is a good example of the sheer dishonesty as well as the cultish thinking of the trans activists. As such, I think it’s worth including in that very tiny and select group of articles that I refer to on this site because they are so unbelievably bad.

I came across the article because I’d started writing a different blog, for which I needed to check whether I was up-to-date on the definition of a certain word as it is used by anyone who promotes transgender ideology. It was a search I’d done many times before and had always come up short. This time was no different. It is a word for which the trans lobby have no robust and useful definition. The word is ‘woman’. Continue reading →