We few, we happy few, we band of terfers

                I’ve posted before about the long denouement to my 2020 dismissal from an academic service position at the University of Alberta following student complaints about my gender critical / sex realist views.  Sadly, the last chapter of this long story is in and I’ve lost: finally, totally, and irrevocably.  My faculty union filed an application to appeal the May 2024 ruling by a labour arbitrator that my academic freedom was NOT violated by dismissal because I was not dismissed for my “views simpliciter” but instead in response to the “situation” that arose in my academic department around my views. The arbitrator held that while I was permitted, as a tenured academic, to express potentially controversial views, the university was simultaneously within its rights to dismiss me from a service position in the face of actual controversy manifesting in response to those views.

                My faculty union, to its credit, was persuaded that this ruling would be fatal in its consequences to academic freedom in Canada and applied to appeal it.  An Alberta Court of Appeal judge has now agreed with the University that the arbitrator did nothing untoward and his decision poses no particular hazards.  I’ve already explained at length why I think this is disastrously, even ludicrously, wrong and will not rehash those points here.

                Today I want to assert something I’ve refrained from banging on about in prior rounds of this now nearly five year long process.  Because in legal and contractual terms my case is about academic freedom, when discussing what happened to me at work I haven’t talked very much about whether or not I am correct in the position I take on issues of sex and gender. 

                Academic freedom protects academics’ ability to affirm views that may turn out in the short or long term to be dead wrong.  Mounting an argument for academic freedom – including one’s own academic freedom – is best done without any special pleading.  Being right is no defense.

                But now that the arguing is over, I’m free to say it out loud:  I *am* right and this whole thing has been an infernal farce.  I’m not alone in being right, many women and men are right in saying that humans are a sexually dimorphic species, that sex is *not* a spectrum, and that assertions to the contrary are not disinterested but motivated.  The motives vary:  obsessive male fetishism, corporate profiteering, messianic fervor, pick-me pseudo-feminism, confusion, isolation, sadness.  A juggernaut of absolute error has been steamrolling women and children for over a decade now, and attacks like the one on me have frightened a lot of people out of their wits.  Everyone who helped or sat on their hands has a harvest of shame awaiting them.  A few people may well go to prison for what they have done to children.

               It’s going to be a rocky road for some, but not for me.  I stood up early and have been shoulder to shoulder for years now with women and men who did so as well.  We revere in turn the women and men who stood up even earlier and weathered much more than we did.  We few, we happy few, we band of terfers.