Text continues: Three months later, a brash male student in my feminist philosophy course -- who had just a week ago sticked around after class and waited until the room emptied to pose a disquieting question, couched in a transphobic dogwhistle, about his sibling's transition - abruptly alluded to carrying a gun during a class discussion of structural sexism.
After coming up to confront me at the end of the session, he stormed out of the classroom, only to wait again until all other students cleared out to burst back in. As he raised his voice aggressively and intimidatingly to me, the flight instinct sometimes I wish I didn't know as well kicked in. I have a hard time remembering what happened next. Somehow I found myself in the safety of my office, terrified at what I'd just experienced, unsure of how to talk with anybody about any-thing, and convinced that I was clearly, definitely, most certainly overreacting.
Text continues: If my student meant to scare me for the rest of my life, it has worked. But was he after something more? How lucky am I to get to sit here, wondering about what-ifs?
Three months later, a kitchen knife tore through a philosophy of gender classroom at the University of Waterloo, badly injuring a feminist philosopher and two of her students. To be absolutely certain that his blade would meet its intended targets, the attacker had twice asked and confirmed that it was a class on gender indeed. The next morning, the most upvoted Daily Nous comment dismissed as "complete-ly unsubstantiated, if not absurd" the suggestion that trans-antagonistic philosophy has blood on its hands. In fact, "what's the point of saying that these ideas lead to violence?" another philosopher was just asking questions. "I don't know what the takeaway is supposed to be. Any and all ideas/rhetoric might lead to violence."
Text continues: Another three months later, timely hate mail informed me of my debut on the front page of the infamous Professor Watchlist maintained by Turning Point USA -- a diehard MAGA activism group whose leader had called people like me "so against our senses, so against the natural law" as to embody "a throbbing middle finger to God" and whose ghouls were busy harassing a faculty member at a neighboring institution for his involvement in Drag story Hour Arizona.
They eventually cornered him on his way back from teaching, shoved him facedown onto the pavement, and filmed and published the assault on Twitter. My institution's public safety office, newly established in the wake of the administration's catastrophic failure to take seriously death threats culminating in the murder of a faculty member on campus, advised a "longitudinal" or "wait and see what happens" approach.
Text continues: My dean, apologetic about targeted harassment being above a grad student's pay grade, offered to have a keyword filter set up on my emails (it makes you wonder which words would've been included, or if my office, class, and department locations and hours weren't publicly accessible). She then poceeded to slash graduate student funding to foot the bill for the university's $200-million-accounting-mistake-turned-budget-crisis.
Yet, somehow, despite 1t all, I can't help but feel like the luckiest girl in the entire universe to get to introduce my sweet, sweet eager beaver students to a captivating world of ideas, issues, struggles, and experiences rarely reflected in the classes they take, to get to pass on a legacy gifted to me by all the beautiful misfits who have come before me, who have fought to make space in the profession for people like me to stay.
“When trans people say that philosophy isn't done in a vacuum, this is what we mean.” [2/3] @not.dingherself.com #beingtransinphilosophy
