From: julianlzb87@gmail.com   
      
   This week it became clear that almost none of the adults whose job it is   
   to teach students the truth are much inclined to do it. Even the doziest   
   vice-chancellor must by now have twigged that gender ideology is   
   dangerous bunk and that it lures in the most vulnerable – yet still they   
   can’t bring themselves to speak out. This goes not just for academics,   
   but for politicians in the education business too.   
      
   For anyone minded to understand how poisonous the atmosphere in   
   universities is, the story of poor Professor David Gordon is horribly   
   instructive. His ordeal began more than a year ago when he invited   
   another professor, Alice Sullivan, to give a talk to his students at the   
   University of Bristol. Sullivan is a professor of sociology and a   
   quantitative data scientist at University College London, and the author   
   of an excellent review, commissioned by the last government, into the   
   damage done when official bodies misreport data and conflate gender with   
   biological sex. Sullivan’s just the sort of woman you’d want your daft   
   teens to learn from, to dent their certainties, to make them think.   
      
   This is not how Bristol University’s LGBTQI+ staff network saw it,   
   though. It reacted to the news of Sullivan’s talk in very much the same   
   way Shelley Duvall reacted to the sight of Jack Nicholson with an axe in   
   The Shining. Allowing Sullivan to speak to students about gender would,   
   it said, cause ‘real and enduring harm’.   
      
   Professor Gordon composed a polite reply to the BU LGBTQI+ network   
   explaining why he believed that students would benefit from the talk,   
   but his manager (enter the villain) intervened. ‘Leave further   
   communications on this with me,’ she said. Professor Gordon sent his   
   reply anyway – ‘because academic freedom and freedom of speech are   
   written into the university’s charter, because I’d organised the event   
   and because my LGBTQ+ colleagues expected an answer,’ he told the   
   Telegraph. And this was his apparent crime, for which he’s been   
   suspended since 2024, unable to teach or to talk to students: he   
   disagreed with management.   
      
   If only there was some official body academics could turn to when the   
   brainwashed Stepford students start to circle or when management goes   
   rogue. But hot on the heels of the sorry tale of Professor Gordon came   
   news that the long-promised complaints system for academics anxious   
   about being hounded or cancelled has itself been cancelled – or at least   
   put on hold. The government wants more time to mull over the wisdom of   
   the scheme, it says.   
      
   Some 370 academics have this week written to the Education Secretary   
   Bridget Phillipson explaining how urgently the scheme is needed. For all   
   that people like to think that woke is over, or that the trans madness   
   is dying down in the wake of the Scottish nurse Sandie Peggie’s victory,   
   it’s still the case that a quarter of British academics say they fear   
   they could be physically attacked for addressing subjects such as trans   
   ideology. Research is being skewed, students are being misled, staff are   
   self-censoring and scared.   
      
   And look at Professor Gordon: they’re right to be scared. It’s not like   
   university management has anyone’s back. Quite the opposite. In the   
   countryside where I grew up, gamekeepers would sometimes hang the   
   corpses of foxes and crows along the top of a barbed-wire fence as a   
   warning to other predators: don’t mess with the boss. A ‘game-keeper’s   
   gibbet’, it was called. ‘Management’s gibbet’, we could call the line   
   of   
   academics strung up like Professor Gordon, twisting in the wind. Beware   
   oh students, this is what awaits you in just a short while in the world   
   of work: Karen-like line managers; HR women with that haunted turncoat   
   look. Think: who here is really on your side?   
      
   ‘The complaint system has been kicked into the long grass,’ a source   
   told the Daily Telegraph. Well, it’s getting pretty crowded in   
   Phillipson’s long grass. Also slowly decaying in the weeds is the   
   guidance so many desperate teachers, doctors and academics have been   
   waiting for, which will finally make it clear to businesses and all   
   public bodies that as a result of last year’s excellent Supreme Court   
   ruling, sex under the Equality Act means biological sex. Once the   
   guidance is published, schools, hospitals and universities will be able   
   to go about their normal business teaching pupils actual reality about   
   biological sex and keeping men in dresses from barging into the   
   single-sex places designed to keep women safe. Management will no longer   
   feel free to use such tactics to out their enemies. Once the guidance is   
   published…   
      
   Not at all in the long grass, but on the nicely paved path to quick   
   implementation, is the government’s plan to employ a senior civil   
   servant to ‘lead on trans equality’, with a special remit to look at the   
   implications of the Supreme Court judgment, and to ‘ensure that we are   
   able to take steps to improve outcomes for trans people in the UK’. The   
   job advertisement posted by the Cabinet Office said the successful   
   applicant would earn between £57,204 and £68,558 and lead on some of the   
   government’s ‘top priorities’, which clearly don’t include any return   
   to   
   reality on the subject of sex, or the saving of young minds from gender   
   madness.   
      
   The only glow I can see on the dark horizon is that there are a few   
   excellent students who have managed to see though the ideological fog   
   for themselves. Thea Sewell, a 20-year-old at Christ’s College,   
   Cambridge, was ostracised by her peers just for owning and reading a   
   gender critical book, Helen Joyce’s Trans. She has now set up the   
   Cambridge Women’s Society so that like-minded young women can think and   
   speak freely. My great hope – and it’s a long shot – is that a student   
   or two at Bristol University might see the light too, and set up   
   something similar. Perhaps they could even champion the cause of poor   
   Professor Gordon, who has lost so much trying to help them.   
      
      
   Mary Wakefield   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)