The Lady Regresses
Kerr & Supporters Threaten to Take Us Back to the Middle Ages or Worse, the 1970s
It’s been a difficult week. First, my building’s custodian assumed my gender when he shouted “Miss Plumber, help!” as the ladder he stood on to scrape bird droppings off my seventh-story window gave way and he plunged to his near death. He’s in a full-body cast, but he’ll be okay. I’m not so sure about me, though. The very next day I was lying in bed swiping along on my iPhone 12 when I happened across the news that the career of Alison Kerr, the Director of the Institute for Gender Studies at St Andrews University, was poised to take its own kind of dive. The university isn’t renewing her contract and taking her place are two of those—oh, what to call them—you know, those warm-blooded, breathing entities who tend to get paunchy and bald in their middle years?
It has been an angry few days since the news broke. So far, an open letter in protest has headed north of 2,000 signatures, the hashtag #StAndwithAlison is reproducing its way across Twitter like a virtual bunny in the spring, and the New York Times has covered the kerfuffle.
I’m upset too, but not because the 10 students who currently make up the cohort of Prof. Kerr’s MLitt program will have to push ahead without her. No, that’s not what rankles this non-binary amputee-identifying ball of singular complexity. In the last few days, I’ve experienced more triggering than a Texas gun range because of the retrograde gendering the pro-Kerr camp has resurrected to save her job.
Let’s start with the website that’s been hastily put up. Click on over to the “Diversity and Philosophy” page and what do you see? Women. Women. Women. Over and over again, this outmoded, bigoted word hit my non-binary eyes like a little cis sledgehammer. Women! Women! Women! By Butler, make it stop! You’d think this was some sort of hysterical TERF campaign. A couple of examples will suffice:
“As of February 2021, there are 35 members of Academic and Research staff in the Philosophy Department. Out of those 35 people, 12 are women.
“The Philosophy Department has 19 members of staff in full-time permanent positions. Only 4 of those are held by women.”
I know, it’s appalling. The flagrant use of the word women as if that category exists!What is this the 12th century or the 1970s when TERFs thought they could tell us who we were? Did the writers of this misguided little list not attend Prof. Kerr’s talk “After Sex,” where she makes it plain that “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.” So, what’s with this “women” business? Why all the handwringing about how many wo …. wo—I have difficulty getting the word out—hold positions as opposed to those bipedal creatures with the frankfurter between their legs? Haven’t Gender Studies professors like Kerr taught us that we’re all just humans, just individuals chiseling out our unique identities from this hunk of unsexed flesh and bone we’re born into?
Has Kerr forgotten that the brave stance she once took against that bigoted Kathleen Stock when she signed on to the letter condemning her transphobia and refusal to recognise the importance of “self-identification to establish gender identity?” It seems no one has even bothered to ask how those “men” who work alongside Kerr in the Philosophy department identify. Blithely they go, these former unmaskers of the falsehood that is sex, throwing around the anachronisms “men” and “women” as if they themselves hadn’t shown us how meaningless these categories are.
And it doesn’t end there.
On the open letter, one TERF commented, “This decision is very harmful to the shy attempts to reduce the scandalous under-representation of women in Philosophy (which is worse than in STEM fields) and to foster the study of concepts and frameworks to understand such discriminatory situations. St Andrew’s will diminish its reputation if it doesn’t succeed in maintaining a first rate study of gender and its effects run by specialised faculty in a professionally secure and standard way.”
Now, I’d be all for this sentiment if they had correctly identified Kerr by her precise ratio of sex criteria as compared to the sexual mosaic of her colleagues, but “female academic?” Like, seriously, break out your bell-bottoms and fondue pot.
Yet another one tweeted: “This is what the erasure of women actually looks like in HE. Universities build institutes, courses, reputations, and win awards on the back of insecure, fixed-term labour - disproportionately undertaken by women and migrants.”
But how do you erase that which does not exist?
My greatest fear is that this is the beginning of a regressive trend that threatens to undo the sex-obliterating progress that Kerr and others have made. As we slowly find our way in this post-sex world we may see more disgruntled cervix havers try to claw us back to a time when cars were gas guzzlers, fashion was tacky, and no one thought to ask about pronouns. I wish these so-called “female professors” wouldn’t worry so much about their jobs. If they lose them, there’s always sex work, which I’m told can be liberating for the people formerly known as “women.”
Ha!