The Ex-Harvard Professor ‘Off the Leash’ on the Trans Debate

In the Times, Andrew Billen meets Jimmy Doyle, the former Harvard philosophy professor who, now finally free to speak, brands transgender rights “the most obvious social contagion since the Children’s Crusade”. Here’s an excerpt:

One Tuesday evening last month in his mother’s house on the Wirral, the recently ex-Harvard philosophy professor Jimmy Doyle took to X to say, at last, what he really thought about the state of free speech in American academia.

In one tweet he wrote: “For unrelated reasons I’ve resigned my position at Harvard. But I haven’t been able to speak frankly with anyone for [about] five years. And it’ll be hard to forget the spectacle of this nation’s intellectual elite enforcing moral auto-lobotomy as a condition of entry to polite society.”

In another he identified exactly what he had been unable to be frank about. He accused the trans movement of “provoking the most obvious social contagion since the Children’s Crusade”. And that was 800 years ago. …

When he first taught in America, constraints on academic free speech were few. Had anyone, until a decade ago, said someone with a penis was a woman, they would be asked what on earth they meant.

“And it’s not as though the introduction of that proposition into the discourse was accompanied by any kind of explanation or justification. I mean, in logic, an axiom is a sentence that you can assert without having to prove it. The point of an axiom is that it’s a proposition on the basis of which you can prove or justify others. If you didn’t have any axioms, you wouldn’t be able to prove anything interesting. But the slogan ‘trans women are women’, that couldn’t possibly have entered the discourse as something that people had arrived at a consensus about.

“And I think that’s a pretty dangerous position to be in with regards to free inquiry.” …

Although he is a new entrant to the public trans debate, he has a personal reason to know the territory. His sister, Ursula Doyle, worked at the publisher Hachette in London, where she acquired a book by Kathleen Stock, the British philosopher who resigned from the University of Sussex after being attacked by colleagues for her views on gender.

Doyle, who suffered online abuse for her part in the book’s publication, left Hachette last year claiming she had been treated “as an emotional basket case who made a fuss about nothing”, and brought a (now settled) employment tribunal case against her employers. Her brother is a fan of Stock’s, trans-critical writers such as Graham Linehan and Hadley Freeman, and his sister.

He insists he could never vote for anyone like Donald Trump. Politically he is a “plague on both their houses” kind of person. But when I ask if he is not shocked by Trump’s attacks on Harvard’s funding and his attempts to stop it recruiting foreign students, he replies that he is ambivalent.

“Harvard is just like a lightning rod for this kind of stuff but over the last ten years or so universities have done a terrible job of creating safe spaces of intellectual inquiry. And they’ve done a terrible job of ensuring that what’s supposed to be education doesn’t slide into indoctrination.”

Worth reading in full.