Post B0z4EjFZ0QMCLNCVfc by PG@spinster.xyz
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 (DIR) Post #B0z4EjFZ0QMCLNCVfc by PG@spinster.xyz
       2025-12-06T20:39:37.621081Z
       
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       Nowhere is the decline of analytic clarity more visible than in the university’s treatment of sex. As a category, it has collapsed entirely into “gender,” sliding from the empirical and material into pure subjectivity. At the conference, this was reflected in the pronoun badges we were encouraged to wear. (After several attempts, I managed to delete mine online and print a badge with only my name and university.) It also appeared in presentations featuring the all-too-familiar patois of gender ideology: “female-identified bodies,” “womxn,” and pregnancy as something that happens to “people.” One paper described “pleasurable violence” within a Central American trans-feminist community as “healing” when consensual, collapsing harm and care into the same category. Another uncritically mapped contemporary Western “nonbinary” gender categories onto non-Western cultures, regardless of the local realities, in the name of decolonization. It was jarring to confront scholars unable to distinguish vastly different cultures and civilisations, and committed to romanticising pre-colonial systems.The slide from empirical clarity into therapeutic reassurance wasn’t confined to the panels. Some of the same conceptual moves on display here have already appeared in high-ranking journals: a reminder that these tendencies are not fringe aberrations, but are increasingly institutionalised as “scholarship.” In the book hall, Princeton University Press was prominently displaying Sex Is a Spectrum, the establishment’s polished argument that biological sex can be dissolved into gradations and feelings — a theme reinforced by the book’s author, who was ubiquitous at the conference. Here was another face of the Therapeutic Scholar-Hero: more philosophical than performative, but still committed to dissolving material categories in favor of subjectivity.I have had a front-row seat at this unraveling, across many disciplines and arenas. The American Anthropological Association conference was hardly unique; but what I saw there was the distillation of the trend into its clearest form. The tragedy is not that universities have become ideological; it is that they have become unserious. A culture that once prized discipline, depth, and rigor now rewards emotional display, political conformity, and autobiographical performance.The university has forgotten what it was for: to preserve and extend knowledge across generations. That requires hierarchy, apprenticeship, discipline, shared categories, and a recognition of material reality. When these collapse — when reality becomes optional, subject to feeling and “lived experience” — there can be no transmission of knowledge, only performance and self-display.https://unherd.com/2025/12/tears-tales-and-tatters-social-science-in/