[The National Union of Students LGBT conference] also condemned the Royal College of Psychiatrists “for having Bindle [sic] talk at the annual meeting on the subject of ‘There is no such a thing as a real woman’”. Yes, so toxic are Bindel’s views – gender is “harmful and a total social construct that serves to reinforce patriarchy” rather than an innate quality, she has argued – that the faint hearts at the Royal College of Psychiatrists need to be told off by students for listening to them.
Julie Bindel believes that "sex change surgery is unnecessary mutilation" and has a history of saying things like "I don't have a problem with men disposing of their genitals, but it does not make them women". It's neither surprising or wrong that an LGBT organization would criticize the Royal College of Psychiatrists for hosting her, any more than it'd be wrong to criticize the AMA for giving a platform to anti-vaccine cranks.
The irony here is that, for a long time, I struggled to find out what Bindel’s views on gender were.
Really? I had no trouble at all. I choose to believe that Wikipedia didn't have an article on her at the time.
A peculiar internet activist culture has sprung up that treats any form of intellectual curiosity as suspect. The good activist simply takes it on trust that some people are bad. You must not talk to the bad people, or they might infect you with their badness. Simply saying, “Sorry, could you outline the argument that you disagree with?” inflicts a kind of psychic violence. This symbolic violence is then conflated with fears of actual violence.
This writer seems to believe that activists are idiots who don't actually understand (and/or don't want to understand) their opponents' arguments. If anything, the 'internet activist culture' declines to interact with their opponents because of sea lioning and being really fucking tired of having to justify their basic positions over and over and over again. And this isn't special pleading - try being a feminist on a MRA site, or a MRA on a feminist site, and you'll get essentially the same reaction, because neither side wants to argue from first principles for the umpteen millionth time.
Seriously. We know what the 'bad people' have to say. If the 'bad people' bothered to spend two minutes on Google, they'd know exactly how we'd respond to whatever arguments they want to post, because after however many years of vicious Internet warfare, there really aren't any new arguments left - and it's unfair, I know, but activist groups get really tired of explaining basic principles to clueless newbies who can't be bothered to spend two minutes on Google before posting things like 'doesn't calling it 'feminism' instead of 'humanism' mean it's inherently biased against men?'.
Were the two journalists involved “silenced”? Not really, given that they have other outlets. But was it fair to deny those students who wanted to hear them the opportunity to do so? No.
... wait, so the journalists can still talk - and the students can still, therefore, hear them - so what are the students being denied here?
And others have the right to protest – although disrupting a lecture until it has to be stopped, or idly threatening a protest in the knowledge that the cost of security will be more than the organisers can afford, implies that you believe that anyone who doesn’t share your values might as well not exist.
This is ridiculous hyperbole.
More importantly, that ethos of needing protection from life’s unpleasant side cannot be allowed to leak into the classroom. A teacher friend tells me that her students were reluctant to read the section of her European history module on the Holocaust on the grounds that it was “upsetting”.
I agree completely with this paragraph. It's necessary for students - for everyone - to understand the depths of man's inhumanity to man. But is there any evidence that barring obnoxious and hostile activists from the use of college resources leads along a slippery slope to banning discussion of historical events in the classroom? Is any college actually refusing to teach the Holocaust on the grounds that it offends people? Hell, there are probably more 'colleges' refusing to teach evolution on those grounds, and yet 'silencing' is supposedly a tactic of the 'SJW' left...
