{"id":9066,"date":"2023-09-22T18:25:56","date_gmt":"2023-09-22T16:25:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gender-theory.org\/2023\/09\/22\/agtrt-bdf6-a-scientist-putting-a-political-spin-on-gender-theory-is-that-right-or-wrong\/"},"modified":"2024-05-05T22:47:04","modified_gmt":"2024-05-05T20:47:04","slug":"agtrt-bdf6-a-scientist-putting-a-political-spin-on-gender-theory-is-that-right-or-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gender-theory.org\/en\/2023\/09\/22\/agtrt-bdf6-a-scientist-putting-a-political-spin-on-gender-theory-is-that-right-or-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"[AGTRT-BF6] A scientist putting a political spin on gender theory, is that right or wrong?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jan Bergstra and Laurens BuijsAmsterdam Gender Theory Research Team<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

In NRC in March this year<\/a>, UvA professor Jan Willem Duyvendak criticized Laurens Buijs, one of the authors of this blog. According to Duyvendak, Buijs would have been guided by political motives in his criticism of non-binarity. The intended implication, we suspect, is that such a political justification would be scientifically less pure coffee than mere empirical support. <\/p>\n\n

This reproach is diametrically opposed to the view on the role of politics in gender theory of a colleague of Duyvendak’s, UvA professor Sarah Bracke. She wrote in 2014<\/a> that she believes, on the contrary, that the field of gender studies<\/em> has so little political focus that one can speak of gender light<\/em>. We believe that we are working seriously on gender theory, which Buijs did in early 2023, and that we are also accounting for the political dimension. Thus, the qualification “gender light” is not an issue for our work.<\/p>\n\n

The political dimension of gender soon enters the picture, as a variety of current developments show. This spring, for example, the Scottish government entered into a legal battle<\/a> with the central government of the United Kingdom, seeking to have a new transgender law that was blocked by London enacted. In Germany, the government recently approved a new bill on transgender people<\/a>, the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz<\/em>; that bill now goes to the Bundestag. In our country, a similar bill<\/a> has temporarily fallen between two stools due to our government crisis.<\/p>\n\n

All of these transgender laws center on the same idea: there should be more room for “self-identification. The underlying philosophy is that the gender with which the person self-identifies should be leading in determining what gender a person actually is. In other words, if someone feels<\/em> like a woman, then that person is<\/em> a woman. <\/p>\n\n

Read Buijs’ rejoinder to Duyvendak:<\/em>Science still struggles with gender, self-identification is not everything<\/a><\/p>\n\n

We have also called this thinking in AGTRT-M1<\/a> counter-essentialism<\/em>, in short co-essentialism<\/em>. Where there used to be the idea that being male and female were fixed in nature (essentialism), the pendulum has now swung to the other side: the idea behind the laws is that people decide for themselves whether they are male or female (co-essentialism).<\/p>\n\n

In the United Kingdom in recent months, both Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer have rejected co-essentialism in very clear terms. They go beyond the rejection of co-essentialism and almost exclusively accept transgendering in its most classical form (with surgery, hormonal therapy, and medical requirements for the condition achieved; we call this form bio-transgendering). <\/p>\n\n

Gender is thus particularly topical in politics. Not only in our part of Western Europe, but also in some states of the US and in parts of Africa. The ROC (Russian Orthodox Church) claims to base its support for the war against Ukraine on the derailment of gender theory in “the West,” and by that it means, among other things, that it finds the acceptance of transgender status highly undesirable. Thus, the idea that one could work on the controversial aspects of gender theory without being politically charged is illusory.<\/p>\n\n

Read more about the problems with wokeness and radical transgender ideology:<\/em>Denying the biological reality of male and female only encourages transphobia<\/a><\/p>\n\n

The mayor of Amsterdam recently stated at the opening of<\/a> UvA’ s academic year<\/a> that researchers should get more involved in the political debate. Even the Corona pandemic was cited as an example, and Buijs certainly did that “blending,” alongside, for example, UvA colleagues Ewald Engelen and Annette Freijberg who did the same.<\/p>\n\n

With his opinion piece in Folia<\/a> this January, Buijs interfered in the public debate on gender. Immediately it became apparent that the students wanted (and were able) to take him to task for threatening their right to safe space<\/em>. According to Halsema, the right to a “safe space”<\/a> would too often<\/a> be claimed in the academic debate, but she immediately added that one must respect the identity of students and staff. We suspect she is alluding to the fact that this would have been inadequately done by Buijs. We believe Buijs did show the required respect, but more on that later.<\/p>\n\n

Buijs’ work on gender has, as far as we can see, primarily a content side. There is no party or movement that this work joins or even tries to join. We cannot see Duyvendak’s observation that Buijs is politically framing his remarks on gender as anything other than in line with Bracke’s desiderata on gender theory, and Mayor Halsema’s call for participation in public discourse.<\/p>\n\n

So we take that as a compliment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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