These days it’s hard for the social justice warrior crowd to truly shock us with their septic approach to intellectual rigor. But sometimes they still succeed.
As was recently the case at my brother’s alma mater, Durham University. As reported by the Daily Mail last Friday, postgraduate philosophy student, Angelos Sofocleous, was fired last month from his role as an assistant editor at the university’s philosophy magazine, Critique, and removed as editor of magazine, The Bubble. Oh, and Sofocleous was also forced to resign as president of the university’s Humanist society. His offense?
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To state a fact.
I’m not joking. Because Sofocleous’ grave offense was to retweet someone who had retweeted a Spectator article titled, “Is it a crime to say women don’t have penises?” Specifically, the student retweeted another Twitter user who had linked to the article with the lead, “[retweet] if women don’t have penises.”
This, said the head of Durham University’s philosophy society, was grounds for dismissal in that Sofocleous’ words “belittled trans experiences.” I don’t really know what to say here.
Except to say that if you have a penis, you are a man. If you have a vagina, you are a woman. These two distinct sexes are a fact not just of human identity, but of human existence. After all, without the mutually exclusive nature of sexes, humans would die out.
Now I’m not a fanatic here. Although I would have concerns about their mental health, and they wouldn’t have ovaries or testes, if someone completes a full gender reassignment surgery I would be happy to identify them on the basis of their post-operative sex organ. But the simple fact is that a penis is a male identifier, and women are not born with them. With rare exceptions, the vast majority of humans are born unambiguously male or female, a biological fact that our species’ survival depends on. These things should be said freely because they are true.
Regardless, the central issue here isn’t ultimately whether what Sofocleous said was right, but whether or not he had the right to say it. And I would suggest that Sofocleous comments are totally justifiable, especially in the context of philosophy. Unfortunately, that contention is an outlier at Durham. As the Daily Mail notes, the “new editor-in-chief of Critique, Sebastián Sánchez-Schilling, tweeted saying he was ‘happy to announce’ the publication would not be ‘tolerating trans-exclusionary radical feminists or bowing to their pressure.'”
Mr. Sanchez-Schilling evidently has not read enough ancient Greek philosophy. Had he read Plato and Aristotle, he would have learned that the best way to expand ones knowledge is to facilitate free discourse that fosters reconciled truths and constant, introspective debate.
Instead, Sanchez-Schilling and all those who supported the purging of Sofocleous have chosen a different path: the vacuous mysticism of social justice warrior populism.
