'These are purely ideological ideas coming from a fringe section of the Far Left"
How The Greivance Studies Hoax revealed corruption at the heart of academia
When you wonder how we arrived at a place where a pregnancy fetishist was able to invade a woman’s group and guilt-trip its credulous members to offer him THE LOAN OF A NEWBORN BABY, you have to take a somewhat winding walk and finally arrive at the exalted halls of academia.
The upcoming medical scandal—the production line of destroyed bodies and minds that organisations like The Good Law Project and Stonewall are desperate to perpetuate— will be the most terrible cost of gender ideology, but when it comes to identifying where the insanity began, you have to look at the the scandal of corruption in American universities as revealed by the so-called Grievance Studies Hoax.
I urge everyone interested in the gender debate to watch this video, dry as it might appear. It seems urgent to me that that we understand exactly how we got here so we never get here again.
This is not just a feature of American universities. I mistakenly started a Gender Studies MA with Birkbeck in 2005, thinking I would be able to study "women's history". But was soon confronted with this ideology; told that gender was a spectrum, etc, and that there was no real difference between men and women, and any differences were a social construct etc etc. When I challenged my lecturer (a renowned, much published feminist!) about the effect hormones had on us etc, she said...and I quote "hormones are a cultural construct."
I remember one delightful lecture, for which a young man was giving a presentation: he put a pair of pink high healed shoes on the table and said that these shoes would make him a woman. He received much adulation.
On another occasion, a young woman who had taken the course because she was working with NGOs in third world countries, said she felt that working as a woman meant she was able to relate very quickly with women from different cultures, sharing interests in jewellery, cooking, etc and much more. She was met with icy silence. I'm pretty sure she was careful from then on to tow the line, since she needed her MA for her work.
When I handed in my rather rebellious essay, I got a very low mark, with the comment that it was, as my tutor expected, "intelligently written" but that I must understand it was "contentious".
When I transferred to History, she commented that she thought it would suit me better to be studying something based on empirical research. (An admission that "gender studies" is not based on fact, if ever I heard one!)
Interestingly, (as a last attempt to rescue my Gender Studies MA, since my transfer meant the loss of a term's work) I asked if my final dissertation might take as its subject: The history of the use of the word "gender". This was point blank refused, and not without some aggression from my tutors. Little did I now how incendiary such a dissertation might be.
The Grievance Studies was one of the most important recent happenings in terms of exposing how extreme and unhealthy ideas had been hidden in plain sight and incubated in Academic.
Some of us are old enought to remember the bewildered debates that happened in the late 1990's and early 2000's between Woman's Studies academics and the newly minted Gender Studies. That proximity to Woman's Studies made it extremely difficult to criticise it openly without being called a mysogonist. I hope we now see those who raised a voice in a new and more generous light.