Ann Farmer
mercatornet.com
Ann Farmer lives in the UK. She is the author of By Their Fruits: Eugenics, Population Control, and the Abortion Campaign (CUAP, 2008); The Language of Life: Christians Facing the Abortion Challenge (St Pauls, 1995), and Prophets & Priests: the Hidden Face of the Birth Control Movement (St Austin Press, 2002).
A law student in a Scottish university is facing disciplinary action after saying in an online seminar about transgender issues that women were born with female genitals and that the difference in physical strength between men and women is a fact.
Lisa Keogh, a 29-year-old mother of two boys, is in her final year at Abertay University, in the city of Dundee. She was reported to university officials by classmates and faces a formal probe for allegedly offensive and discriminatory comments.
This is lunacy, Ms Keogh told the Daily Mail. “’How is it OK for a child to be learning that women have vaginas at school, but not OK for me to say it in a university seminar? It doesn’t make sense.”
Having initially refused to comment, the University finally issued a statement suggesting that the issue was not what was said in the seminar but the way in which it was said.
However, from her account of the issue, it sounds as if the lecturer should be investigated. Her words in the online discussion were (allegedly) to the effect that “all men are rapists and we should lock them up after 6pm”.
“I took offence at this,” said Ms Keogh. “I have two boys and a partner who is a man. I don’t think all men are rapists. Of course, they are not. What I find terrifying is that they were talking about men as if they were guilty. We are law students. Above all else we believe in the principle of innocent until proven guilty … Do we really want a society where we cannot even state biological fact, without being reprimanded?”
Besides, she said, biology is biology.
“I was trying to make the point that there are physical differences. Women tend to have smaller hands and smaller frames, and mostly aren’t as strong.
“Before I had my boys, I trained as a car mechanic. I completed an apprenticeship and I was the only woman in a garage of 12 male mechanics. I offered up as evidence — because it’s what we do as law students — my observation that I wasn’t physically as strong as the men. There were things I couldn’t lift. A woman’s centre of gravity is in a different place.
“Not all women will be weaker, but it’s simply not true that there is equality. We were talking about the issue — which is legally important —of trans women taking part in women’s sport. I used evidence to support my arguments. Some of the others turned on me. I was accused of being a white, cis woman who was speaking from a position of privilege.”
Now Ms Keogh fears that she might not be able to complete her degree. “Even if I am exonerated, that won’t mean free speech is alive and well,” she says. “What people who haven’t been through one of these investigations don’t understand, is that that process itself is punishment.”
During the Covid pandemic we have been continually urged to listen to the men of science. But where were these champions of science when school chaplain Bernard Randall was dismissed from his post at a private Church of England school and reported to the anti-terrorism organization Prevent — for telling pupils they could respectfully disagree with anyone who tried to indoctrinate them in the tenets of sexual diversity?
The sexual diversity bandwagon is being driven by far-left activists interested only in exacerbating differences and creating chaos – celebrating diversity in everything but opinion.
They are certainly not celebrating the British sense of irony. They fail to notice the irony of condemning all men as rapists while demanding that female-only public facilities be thrown open to men who identify as women. Or, more to the point, the irony of crying for the voices of women to be heard and silencing them when they question trans ideology.
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