Alison Kerr Authored Her Severance
Hoisting Meets Petard
I am not a vindictive person but I must confess this: I so thoroughly enjoyed reading the Times coverage of the failure of St Andrews University to renew Alison Kerr’s contract. Kerr, an American philosopher has been at St Andrews on a temporary contract since 2017. In 2018, she was contracted to build the Institute for Gender Studies and later created a Master’s programme. Few—if any—of over 1,600 sympathisers who have signed an open letter seem to understand how Kerr created her own ousting.
Not only was Kerr the only female professor at St Andrews’ Institute for Gender Studies, but she is one of a growing number of academics who have PhDs in the humanities and mistakenly believe science is a fiction. For those new to the gender theory frontier, Kerr insisted throughout her career and social media posts that sex is a social construction. So is it any wonder when someone has pushed for the dissolution of the scientific definition of sex (male, female) while arguing for the overriding identity politics of “identifying as” a man or a woman, that she should find herself out of a job? Of course, not.
So why should we now be concerned that Kerr was replaced by someone whose very identity she claimed for years matters more than her sex? Not only has Kerr built the foundation for her own removal, she has no counter-argument except to admit that gender theory is what led to this—not St Andrews’ decision not to renew her contract.
One question that immediately popped into my mind while reading through the list of signatories to the open letter in support of Kerr was this: Why are so-called “gender-critical feminists” making sacred cows of women who are the instigators of the very gender ideology that they are fighting? The hypocrisy is neck-deep. And no, “nice feminism” as a form of political upstaging that makes the bizarre claim that Kerr is at all a victim carries no logical weight here. Kerr is in no measure a victim and gender-critical feminists need to take the story of Kerr on the chin and react to the unpinning of language this scholar has cobbled.
Yet, some feminists stood in solidarity with flat-earthery such as Scottish feminist, Claire Heuchan, who writes in the open letter a perfect example of how some feminists are trying to vanish the incoherence of Kerr’s actions:
I stand in full support of Alison Kerr. It is disgraceful that St Andrews would not only dismiss the only female academic teaching their Gender Studies course, but the female academic who put in the immense work of founding it. This incident is entirely in keeping with wider patterns of misogyny in the academy and – ironically – teaches us more about how gender continues to function as a hierarchy than any reading list ever could.
Kerr has indefatigably advocated for an ideology based on gender—not sex. So isn’t it within St Andrews mandate to take her scholarship and put the pedal to the metal as it were? There is zero misogyny at play here and it beggars belief that this is the well-worn excuse for standing with fellow cervix-havers. Quite simply put, Kerr is being hoisted by a petard she not only built throughout her career but through which she made a killing both economically and by reputation in selling the gender snake oil. That Heuchan cannot see that her contract’s end is simply not the product of misogyny but rather a byproduct of gender ideology crafted by Kerr and many other scholars is as risible as the schadenfreude that Kerr has gifted us this week.
If you sign your name to an open letter supporting a woman who has worked tirelessly to erase the meaning of the word “female”, it’s rather senseless to write that this is a “female academic.” Of course, Kerr is not a female academic. By her very academic output, she is no more a woman any more than those replacing her men. So, why are some feminists playing the “solidarity” game when theirs is yet another layer to the identitarian smorgasbord of utter incomprehension? Having a vagina does not erase the damage Kerr has amassed within the field of political debate and coherent scholarship.
There is a moral lesson within this tale which is precisely what the “mean feminists” have been underscoring for years about the need to not remove the language of historical materialism and the specificity of sex. Why try to resuscitate the career of someone who clearly can’t match her politics to her scholarship, nor accept the end result of both? After all, Kerr is one of many in academia who have gleefully taken part in the dismantling of women’s studies, who scoff at the very mention of radical feminist scholars and who have advanced the idea of the female penis.
Certainly, Kerr’s career at St Andrews must be noted within the framework of ethical academic debate: She has taken women into the crosshairs of her homespun gender ideology and showed no respect for basic honesty, much less academic rigour. Kerr was one of many who just last month signed a letter accusing Kathleen Stock of being a bigot because she doesn't believe a man can become a woman. Here I quote Kerr’s participation in a December event entitled “Open Online Workshop: The Implementation Challenge for Conceptual Engineering (ICCE)” and please read this description of her talk, “After ‘Sex’,” carefully:
The received way of differentiating sex and gender is to understand gender as a social construct and sex as a biological property. I aim only to address a tiny but significant slice of this literature—how to define ‘sex’ (and related sex terms like ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘intersex’, and any other sex category terms that might be affected by a definition of ‘sex’). I aim to undermine this picture of one’s sex as an objective biological property of a person. In addition, I argue that the concept of sex is defective. Biologists have long known that there is no single such thing as biological sex. Instead, there is a mishmash of five overlapping criteria for sex, and they often do not agree. Feminist theorists need to recognize this scientific result and then engage in the conceptual engineering conversation about which concept or concepts of sex are the best ones for use, which seems fairly urgent given the political climate. However, any conceptual engineering proposal for ‘sex’ is going to encounter what is known as the implementation challenge: how best to get people to make the recommended change. I argue that an emphasis on deferral to experts, which is familiar from semantic externalism, is a good solution to the implementation challenge for this project. Nonetheless, there are worries about the compatibility of semantic externalism and conceptual engineering, and I offer a reply to these.
What to say to this except mission accomplished, Dr Kerr! Sex has been undermined and those “males” (if you believe in such cis-centric, unenlightened concepts) who replace her merely have to identify as anything on the spectrum Kerr gave us. There is, after all, no single such thing as biological sex.
And it’s certainly not what Jennifer Drew writes in the comments to the open letter: “Now the males in charge have decided to dismiss Dr Kerr and replace her with two non-specialist males whose only aptitude is [the] fact they are men! Yet again men are arrogantly stealing women’s work and claiming it for themselves!” Hasn’t Drew heard of clownfish!? I have. These aren’t males, darn it! That’s transphobic and heterosexist, vanilla ice cream sandwich, upside-down Tuesday rhetoric uttered from the wrong side of history!
I delight that Kerr has seen her words and theory put into action and I hope more women like Kerr follow a similar path to gender enlightenment! Let this be a wakeup call to both the gender affirmative identitarian peddlers and the nice feminists who sign moronic open letters about someone who got exactly what she bargained for!