Channel 4 reported not just the protest but also the subject of the protest, and did it rather well, too.
They talked to Maryam there. Meet Maryam!
Chris Moos, a PhD student at the London School of Economics, who is attending the protest, told Channel 4 News: “What we want to achieve is for Universities UK to immediately rescind their guidelines condoning gender segregation, and issue guidelines that clearly lay out that any kind of segregation, whether under racist, cultural, religious, nationalistic or sexist pretences, is wrong and has no place in the public space.”
Erin Marie Saltman, research project officer at Quilliam and PhD researcher at UCL (University College London), told Channel 4 News: “This is a bigger issue of racism of lower expectations, of avoidance.
“There is a fear of offending the Muslim community but there are a lot of modern Muslims that would never allow gender segregation.”
I was a little disappointed that the protest was fairly small, but channel 4’s reporting it makes up for that and then some. Well done Chris Moos and Maryam and all!
In a statement, UUK said: “The guidance was approved by senior legal counsel as properly reflecting the law. It is not prescriptive. Universities are independent institutions and will make decisions on a case by case basis.
“The guidance does not promote gender segregation. It includes a hypothetical case study involving an external speaker talking about his orthodox religious faith who had requested segregated seating areas for men and women.
“The case study considered the facts, the relevant law and the questions that the university should ask, and concluded that if neither women nor men were disadvantaged and a non-segregated seating area also provided, a university could decide it is appropriate to agree to the request.”
They just refuse to understand. Or pretend to. You can’t segregate women from men and then talk about that in terms of “if neither women nor men were disadvantaged” – being segregated is being disadvantaged. By itself. It doesn’t have to be in worse seats, or in the back, or farther away, or standing up, or hung upside down, or under a leak in the ceiling, or on broken glass. The segregation itself is disadvantageous. Separate is not equal. Get a fucking clue.
Channel 4 talked to Saleem Chagtai of the iERA, and asked him quite assertively what gave him the right to demand segregation. Channel 4 was a lot tougher than the BBC would have been, I think.
*Facepalm* Are the officials at the UUK appointed or elected? Is there any way for the students and alumni to hold them accountable for being willfully dense segregationists? It sounds like there’s a few someones who need to look for work elsewhere.
Separate is not equal. That’s not what Jesuits say about the Trinity.
Aren’t they embarrassed by this gutless stance? I suspect they are.
This is one of those situations in which changing course completely will ultimately be far better for them than continuing on this plainly loopy path. They do not want to wait for a concrete case.
I see the UUK dipshits are still bent on pretending they’re a bunch of especially dull-minded extraterrestrials on their first visit to earth. They’re ignoring why a speaker would want a segregated audience in the first place: to maintain a system that disadvantages women.
The Beeb has got a bit better at this. I heard an item on Report on 4, where they cornered some head of a mosque about their softness towards those who were going jihadist and did actually press him. I think the tide is turning. When The Guardian runs its Islamist/ultra Islamic apologetics these days almost every comment will be hostile. I imagine The Guardian will eventually stop publishing pieces supporting the burqa etc.
Has anyone gotten a response from these nitwits on the subject of non-binary-gendered individuals? The very existence of intersexed and trans people makes the entire thing not merely offensive and discriminatory, but absurd on the face of it.
@6-If it’s anything like the fundamentalist Christian response it will be denied that there is any such thing. There are no homosexuals you see, only confused heterosexuals. There are no transgendered people, only cis-gendered people the evil liberals/socialists/communists/atheists (take your pick) confused into thinking that they are transgendered. And noone is “truly” intersexed, since a loving god would never let that happen. The doctors just need to find out whether their chromosomes are XX or XY (the possibility of mosaicism doesn’t occur to them either) and make the person’s genitals match their chromosomal gender and all will be well. Or something. To most fundamentalists the existence of intersexed and trans people is what’s absurd and offensive.
I sometimes like the running-out-of-time gambit played here; for good purposes only, of course.
The other week our local Crypto-Xenophobic Party held their annual congress and the leader was interviewed on TV news by a prominent Assimilated Alien, a well-known news anchor, who repeatedly put the same question to the Party Leader about how some tier-1 party figures got caught on (their own) camera in a hostile street argument with opponents late at night, while obviously intoxicated, and later while jokingly wielding as weapons some scaffolding steel pipes which they stole. Party chief finally sighed: “Well, I had hoped you came here to ask some pertinent questions about our policies!”
The news man snapped back: “We did actually offer you 12 minutes of interview time, but you declined. Sorry, your time is up.”
Tableau, Time-Out, Sudden Death or whatever the colloquial term is. (Walk-Over?)
Well done, Channel 4.
For Islamists, the non-binary gender question is one thing; they can answer with any nonsense.
For UUK, the non-binary gender question is another thing; they need to provide answers that make sense.