Mick Hartley

Janice Turner on Jo Phoenix, and the wave of recent court cases challenging gender ideology:

Summoned for a “quick chat” by her deputy department head, the criminology professor Jo Phoenix was told that her presence at the Open University (OU) was like a “racist uncle at the Christmas dinner table”. In other words, she was an embarrassment, a bigot whose outdated views her younger more enlightened colleagues tolerated with gritted teeth while they waited for her to retire or, ideally, die.

Professor Phoenix, 59, wept — and who can blame her, since her life’s work is not predicated on some hoary old belief system which the “arc of the moral universe” will shortly leave for dust but on stone-cold fact. Her specialist fields are prisons, prostitution and criminal justice, where data must be disaggregated by sex or it makes no sense. Female and male offenders differ in the crimes they commit, what leads them to offend and how legal systems treat them. Until about five minutes ago, believing that sex is often relevant in public policy wasn’t subscribing to hateful gender critical beliefs, it was (and remains for 99 per cent of us) self-evident truth.

Yet the employment tribunal which this week found the OU guilty of victimisation, harassment and discrimination is an insight into an academic world so addled by postmodern theory and so certain of its moral righteousness that it could bully and ostracise a distinguished lesbian professor until her mental health collapsed and she quit….

Cowardice, malice, revenge — an employment tribunal contains all human life and, regardless of outcome, is a reliably fascinating insight into how organisations are run. Phoenix, just like the philosopher Kathleen Stock, who was hounded out of the University of Sussex, notes that colleagues never challenged her in person — “although I embrace disagreement” — confining their attacks to Google docs or bitchy emails. One senior professor told her that faculty felt about her rather as colleagues of Charles Murray — an American political scientist who believes black people are genetically less intelligent — feel about him. Mean Girls has nothing on liberal academia. Likewise, the [Allison] Bailey tribunal taught us that Stonewall grasses up its adversaries to their employers and that a male colleague with whom you’ve shared an office for years may eavesdrop on private conversations and relay them on your boss. So many silent Stasi.

The most jaw-dropping tribunal yet is current: the case of Roz Adams, a counsellor who claims constructive dismissal by Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC). This puts a spotlight on a service led by trans woman Mridul Wadhwa, who believes that female victims objecting to being counselled by males must “reframe their trauma” and who laments that her clientele are overwhelmingly white women. (Scotland is 96 per cent white.) The tribunal heard that when a 60-year-old rape victim asked if the ERCC was female-only she was told it was trans-inclusive and later received an email saying she was unsuitable to use its services. When another client asked Adams if a person who identifies as non-binary was a woman, she asked permission to reassure her that this person was female at birth. Merely for acknowledging biological sex Adams was disciplined for transphobia….

"Her clientele"? His clientele. Wadhwa is a man: doesn't even have a a Gender Recognition Certificate, but still got the CEO post at ERCC despite it being advertised as a post for a woman.

Phoenix has found safe harbour at the University of Reading, where she was greeted by campus security and given a personal alarm. Here the vice-chancellor manages to balance academic freedom with the right to protest. To Phoenix’s great delight, she was congratulated on her tribunal victory both by academic colleagues and her students, a new generation who, she feels, reject totalitarian thinking. Not an embarrassing uncle after all but a rather cool and courageous aunt.