“...the most prestigious debating society in the world.” - Oxford Union To Set Up "Welfare Spaces" For Students To Cope With Gender Debate

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

The Oxford Union bills itself as “the most prestigious debating society in the world” based on the values of free speech.

It is a well-earned reputation for one of the world’s oldest forums for debating the great issues of the day. However, Oxford students are outraged that the Union will allow a debate over transgender ideology.

In response, as reported by the The Times UK, the Union has promised to provide a “non-student support team that will remain in a separate welfare space to offer counseling and advice.”

This is to deal with the trauma of free speech in simply allowing Dr. Kathleen Stock to speak about her views that biological sex is real and “gender identity” should not alter certain biological truths.

Stock is a feminist who has joined those (like the author J.K. Rowling) in raising concerns over transgender ideology. Her book, “Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism,” explores the subject and calls for a reaffirming of fixed biological realities.

At the same time, Stock has stressed her support for trans rights generally, writing that trans people “deserve to be safe, to be visible throughout society without shame or stigma, and to have exactly the same life opportunities as non-trans people do.”

Nevertheless, Oxford’s LGBTQ+ society called for censorship of the debate society and objected to her being allowed to be heard on campus as a “transphobic and trans-exclusionary speaker.” They alleged that the union was ignoring the welfare of the society’s members under the guise of free speech.

[zerohedge.com]

Roger Scruton made a key observation, which is that feminist understood, they cannot win in direct competition with men, so in a sneaky way they saw opportunity in hijacking the language of the society and turning it into a political weapon.

"As far back as 1949 the seminal feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir made this programmatic recommendation: “Language is inherited from a masculine society and contains many male prejudices . . . Women simply have to steal the instrument; they don’t have to break it or try a priori to make it something totally different. Steal it and use it for their own good” (1972, p. 123)."

And indeed they tried to do this with sex and gender. "During the 1970s American feminists seized on the idea of gender as a social construct, and used it to hide the truth about sex as a biological destiny. By replacing the word “sex” with the word “gender” they imagined that they could achieve at a stroke what their ideology required of them – to rescue sex from biology and to recast it as a complex social choice." (December 2002/January 2003, p. 1)

This led to the creation of a monster. Trans movement which now is the enemy of the very same feminists that created it. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the danger of letting politically ambitious people play with language. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?