The Academic Freedom Commission recently found that nine major universities, including Imperial College London, Sheffield Hallam University and London Business School, have policies in place that consider gender-critical views to be “transphobic”. It revealed that.
Phoenix himself said universities can be “difficult and very bureaucratic”, pointing in particular to the impact of Stonewall on universities. “Stonewall was very important to me,” she says. “But after gaining employment rights for gay men in 2010, they started working primarily on transgender issues. “It’s deadly. It has been.”
She also feels that the attacks on her and other academics are nothing but “old-fashioned sexism” – a “burn the witch” ideology against women who advocate for women’s rights. But what’s most frustrating for her is that her schoolwork has been overshadowed by the campaign.
“As academics, we make a name for ourselves by speaking out. But I’m in this perverted world where I’ve been canceled and now I’m considered a high-risk speaker, so I don’t actually have to is infamous for not saying it.
“I also lost my community because the criminology community was only about 300 people and much of the organizing against me was led by them.”
Her work relates to women, crime and justice, but since 2019 she has been researching transgender prison policy and why prisons need to maintain homosexuality.
Her job was very important to her, and the damage it suffered was all the more devastating because her career did not come easily.
She was born in Sheffield, but moved there with her parents and two siblings at an early age when her father, who was also an academic, secured a job there.
She “vaguely knew” that she was “different” from an early age, but didn’t have the words to express it until she was 15, when a friend came out as a lesbian and Phoenix told her: Ta. ”
She also came out to friends and family, describing it as a “train wreck.”
“This was Texas,” she says. “There were still Jim Crow laws back then. It was the 1970s. Kids played a kind of violent tackle game called smear the queer.”
Whatever difficulties she was having, she claims months later were completely unrelated incidents, but during her lunch break at school two boys (one 18 years old, the other 15 years old) ), she was replaced when she was raped.
She doesn’t want to tell exactly what happened — “one in six women who have been sexually assaulted would understand” — but a week later she confided in her mother, who told her was forced to go to the police.
The men were arrested, Phoenix attended a preliminary hearing, and the case was prepared for trial. She is told by the district attorney to wear pink to prove her innocence, and she is cross-examined and informed that she will be assassinated.
“Ultimately, both perpetrators pleaded guilty in plea deals,” she says. “But it changed my life. I could never go back to being innocent.
“When you’re a rape victim, you learn that size and strength matter, and that there are physical differences between men and women. There’s no way you wouldn’t know that.”
For a while, she ran away from home and lived on the streets, but it was such a dark time in her life that she doesn’t want to talk about it. Then, at the age of 18, she moved to England without any formal education, considering how “bad” Texas was for her.
She lived with a large family in Shropshire and managed to work part-time as a nanny while taking A-levels in English and Sociology at night classes. (Her parents in the U.S. have remarried and she still has a large family in the U.S. with whom she communicates regularly.)
After gaining two B grades at A-level, Phoenix studied sociology at the University of Bristol and then became a lecturer in criminology at Middlesex University. Her meteoric rise through the ranks led her to become a lecturer in sociology at the University of Bath, before becoming head of department at Durham University, where she moved to the OU in 2016.
All of this brings us to the three-week courtroom that took place last October. Phoenix found this incident particularly traumatic because it reminded her of the same issues as the rape case.