Jan Bergstra & Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team
Jo Phoenix was professor of criminology at the Open University (OU) in the United Kingdom until she got into trouble for her gender-critical views.
For example, she was gender critical by making a clear distinction between biological sex and gender identity. She also raised what she saw as the overly central role of gender identity in gender transition in a 2018 open letter.
Meanwhile, Jo Phoenix won the lawsuit against the OU in the second instance. The OU should have protected her from the criticism of students and colleagues and fell short in doing so, the judge said. One is now allowed to take a gender-critical position in principle at a university in the United Kingdom. This is gain, even if it is incomprehensible that it took such litigation to do so.
Read more about the importance of gender critical positions:
Netherlands needs a gender-critical movement
In the Netherlands, the situation is not that much better. The fact that gender can be a topic of debate and discussion is also frowned upon at best in universities in the Netherlands. In practice, all sorts of extreme criticism is levied against persons with gender critical positions. For example, gender criticism is mentioned in the same breath as fascism and genocide (see AGTRT-BF10). Gender-critical scientists are also dismissed as transphobic for no apparent reason, which is what happened to Jo Phoenix.
By the way, the British press explicitly mentions the name of a colleague of Jo Phoenix’s who spoke extremely unsympathetically about her at the time (see the link in the first paragraph of this blog). The names of those who shoot sharply at others who do not support their own views on gender theory are usually swept under the rug. As if it were a merit to so pertinently disregard the tenets of academic freedom.
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