How did we get here?

Kathleen Lowrey on identity politics, wrongthink, matriarchal sea mammals, and whether universities are becoming bastions of Christian piety in our secular age

In March 2020, U of Alberta anthropology Professor Kathleen Lowrey was fired from the position of associate chair for undergraduate studies. The reason? A handful of students complained to the administration that her views are making them feel unsafe. It was the first time the higher ups at the U of A would encounter the word “TERF”, a derogatory term for gender critical feminists who believe that “gender identity”, a self-declaration of one’s “inner gender”, does not and should not override biological sex in every imaginable context and that sports, prisons, rape shelters, clinical trials should remain sex segregated. No formal complaint was ever submitted to the university and no disciplinary hearing ever took place – and the received informal complaints were about nothing specific that’s been done or said. They were apparently made because “the professor is a TERF”, which was something that the complaining students gathered from her online writing and the signs in her office. Faced with an unprecedented request to fire a tenured professor because of a held opinion that sex is materially real and does not mutate on demand, the university went for what they probably saw as a compromise: it took away the professor’s administrative position in which, they thought, she would not be “effective” any longer, but she got to keep her job. Would an untenured professor’s career have survived a similar situation? Highly unlikely. 

The ensuing media coverage was not great for the university. A U of Alberta colleague wrote about the case for the Ryerson’s Centre for Free Expression, and the mainstream media got interested. When during my visit to Edmonton two weeks ago I got to meet Dr Lowrey, the first thing I wanted to know was what had her life been like after l’affaire TERF. “I think the university was embarrassed,” she says. “They probably thought, whatever, the students aren’t happy, this is not an important position, we just dismiss her, it’s fine. And I think the students were also embarrassed. I think they were shocked that they found themselves in a situation where they had to defend their position. A lot of young people today believe they’re brave because, hey, we’re fighting for the rights of trans people, but then they’re shocked when anyone disagrees with them. Which is so different from what the previous generation activists went through… We are similar age, and if you remember the actual gay rights movement -- and you and I don’t even remember the REALLY bad years, but we remember later activism -- you had to be actually brave and you had to actually defend your positions because people felt very entitled to argue back.”

The case continued to simmer however, as the work moved online. At a faculty forum usually concerned with less exciting stuff like library access or changes in health benefits, a colleague from mathematics posted something in solidarity with Kathleen Lowrey and said that he thought it was terrible what happened to her. He then got mobbed by the woke Faculty of Arts people who know that terfs are terrible, and the conversation got snowed under the terms like transphobic, homophobic, racist. He was made to feel like he was defending the KKK. A biologist who studies dinosaurs joined in at one point to say Hey I don’t really know but I can tell from dinosaurs’ skeletons that are millions of years old if they’re male or female. After which everyone jumped on him. He took his leave with “You guys have given me a lot of think about.”

“I didn’t really want to use the forum as my soap box, I just put a couple of links, thought they should read about Heather Mason for example and her activism around keeping prisons single sex. And people can feel how they want to feel about it. That also upset people… I have to say, I don’t mind the faculty who are wrong, those who’ve read about the issue and believe that gender identity is great and that trans women are literal women and OK fine I don’t agree with you but you have a right to your position. What bothers me is the many people who know that this is ridiculous but won’t say anything.” Soon after, the faculty union shut the forum down, because they said it was making people feel unsafe.

Campus stayed mostly closed since those events in 2020, but when she did go back, she noticed that there were colleagues who did not want to speak to her. Those were usually colleagues from the gender studies type departments. How does she explain this capture of the humanities and social sciences and of feminism itself? Post-structuralism was on the margins, anarchic and fun last time I’ve dealt with it, I tell her. “It’s a multi-part story,” says Lowrey. “If you lose a little bit here, and lose a little bit here, and lose a little bit here, then you’re at the point where you wonder what happened all of a sudden. Feminism actually debated this question for a long time, should we make women’s studies an academic discipline or would that corrupt us. Should we try to get into the institutions and transform them, or should be try to break the institutions from the outside. And, people need to eat. It’s hard to say no to institutions.”  She pauses. “One of my small private theories, and this sounds terrible I know, but probably one thing that was good for the second wave is the fact that a lot of women who got active in it… were housewives and didn’t have to make compromises to get into institutions. In a funny way, traditional marriage probably underwrote some of the second wave.”

OK but a lot of second wavers weren’t married and even actively sought alternatives to traditional marriage. “Yes, that too. Second wave feminism gets criticized for being this white lady middle class thing which is not true, but I think there were a lot of middle class white ladies who were able to be more radical in a way because their livelihood didn’t depend on it. Now everybody who’s involved in feminism is attached to an institution somehow and you have lower degrees of freedom.”

In the years that followed, as feminists began to enter or form the institutions, the women who got really picked up and promoted were always the feminists who would point out the problems with feminism. “Their version of feminism was the one that would say Feminism is racist, feminism is ethnocentric, it’s just this western thing, maybe those other women in other cultures don’t even feel oppressed.” This absolutely matches my academic and para-academic experiences, I tell her. “I’ve read a guy, a Canadian academic who I don’t speak to any more,” she says, “who wrote this piece about six years ago – it got published in a pretty major journal – a sort of lyrical defence of cliterodectomy… Feminists talk about how you can’t have orgasm once your clitoris has been cut off, he writes, but these women who’ve had cliterodectomy obviously are having orgasms. The idea that orgasm comes from clitoris is, like, a socially constructed western notion of what orgasms are.” What the hell? “No that’s an actual paper. My reaction was, if I cut your leg off, it’s social construction that you can’t walk any more. It’s funny how the social constructionism that really does well has always been antifeminist. Or it’s something that calls itself feminism but is relentlessly antifeminist. That was the way to become a successful feminist academic. That was the thing that got you promoted to the skies.”

Then another thing that happened, she says, was that the left changed in a lot of western countries, from leftism that was about anti-imperialism, to leftism that was about liberating the body. Focus on subjectivity and identity is not necessarily bad, but it displaced a lot of real politics. “So I think it’s coming from all sides. Left politics has fallen apart, left academia has fallen apart, and I think it was a tiny sequence of rewards. This person who publishes this kind of article gets a little more promoted and this other person gets little less promoted, and then overtime, it’s like watching an evolutionary process in a way, pretty soon this kind of a species dies out and this kind of a species has totally taken over the landscape. And the same happened in politics.”

And the class analysis is gone, I grumble. “Yes. But I too used to think that there is such a thing as too much class analysis. The idea that women have to wait, that first we have to liberate the working class, then we’ll have to take care of feminism, I was on the side of “screw that”. Or gay and lesbian liberation. “First let’s solve global capitalism and then you can be liberated.” I was on the side of No, let’s have gay and lesbian liberation now, let’s have women’s rights now, and yes we can still talk about class politics. I didn’t realize then, but it was a win and a loss. And now no one talks about class politics. No one gives a shit what’s happening in Yemen, they can all be bombed, starved to death, nobody’s paying attention.”

The trouble was that the old school leftist professors, and they were all men, just didn’t get it. “I remember back in the 1990s it felt that the against postmodernism people were also sometimes the old lefties who were sexist assholes. I don’t like those guys so I’m with postmodernists because I don’t want to be with the sexist Marxists. So what happened was that feminism had to make these terrible choices again and again: do you want to be with the Marxists who really understand the working class struggles and can see the dangers of postmodernism but who are oh maybe rape apologists. Well no, I’ll hang out with postmodernists. So twenty years later the postmodernists are like, oh there’s no such thing as women. And who cares about the working class. And you think, wait, should I have hung out with the sexist Marxists instead?”

What’s the situation like in anthropology, I ask her. Where does she stand on this government-funded push to indigenize research in universities and pluralize “knowledges”. I always imagine anthropologists would be in favour of that. “Twenty years ago I was all for that. The original critique was, what’s so great about western science that’s got us stuff like plastics poisoning the oceans and nuclear bomb? Maybe we could arrive to the truths about the world by starting from a more connected perspective? The idea that everything’s connected, that we should reconsider the Cartesian mind-body dualism, that all seemed very groovy. But where it’s ended up, again… I’m at this university-wide thing that I got elected to, the General Faculties Councils, probably the last one I’ll ever be in, and our sessions open sometimes with an Indigenous elder reading. The thing that bothers me is -- it feels like opening with a prayer. It’s like hearing what Jesus wants us to do, and you think, OK, but this is a public university. I was very on board with the project of not doing the kind of science that ends with nuclear bombs. That critique I really liked. But it seemed like where we are now is a new form of religious oversight that you’re not allowed to question. And that’s not that’s not what university should be doing.”

While she is in favour of equity, diversity and inclusion, Professor Lowrey was the only faculty member in that university-wide committee to vote against introduction of the EDI policies. “Twenty years ago, as a leftist feminist woman I would have said we need more E D and I, but now the way it gets used is very McCarthyist. You have to adopt a particular set of beliefs. And I think you can’t have this kind of ideological commitment at the university-wide level because what if you’re a sociologist and you want to research for example the unconscious bias – whether it exists, in what form, whether the tests for it are a load of bunkum? Under EDI it seems like you may not be allowed to do that research because training in unconscious bias is part of it. And I’ve almost given up trying to apply for grant money. There’s now a section where you have to explain how you intend to support the E D and I with your project. Let’s say my project is in some way on why ‘gender identity’ ideology is nonsense, I’d flunk the EDI part completely. And I know I can’t be appointed to committees because university committees have in-built EDI.”

Here our conversation turns to the case of Dr Frances Widdowson, who was recently fired by her university even though she had tenure. According to the account in the C2C Journal, the university handled the firing spectacularly clumsily. How is it possible it’s come to this? Dr Widdowson was on record about not willing to blend in, she admits to asking PITA questions in meetings, she’s had complaints from students but they all appear to be of the variety that her opinions are making them feel unsafe… and there was something about her criticising BLM? Some black people criticize BLM too. A few years ago, you couldn’t be fired for being unpopular, if memory serves? “You’re allowed to be all that,” she agrees. “You may think, I don’t want to be friends with that person. But at a university you’re allowed to express reservations about BLM and right now you can’t. There’s a huge debate about all of these things, but not in university. The university is constantly taking sides. I’m not a religious person, but I agree that the Christian virtue is a wonderful idea. Do unto others and so on. But you can’t have that as the official policy of the university. Many things about BLM are a wonderful idea – same way I think the idea of Christian virtue is a wonderful idea – but it can’t be the official policy of the university.”

I tell her that I have both of Prof. Widdowson’s books and although I disagree with some of her stuff, I think she’s incredibly brave. Her advisor was Leo Panitch, a mainstream leftist academic. She was part of the mainstream once. But she was made a pariah over the last few years within the academe. “And it’s actually fine to make someone a pariah, even,” says Lowrey. “But you cannot fire them from a tenured academic position. As far as I know the Canadian Association of University Teachers, which is a union of unions, haven’t said anything. Back in the day they defended Philippe Rushton. He basically did racist science, treating racialized groups as distinct genetic populations. He had this theory that in ecology there are certain kinds of species that have a lot of offspring and don’t care for them very well – like sea turtles, for example, that have zillion babies, lots of them die, some survive. And then there’s other species like bears or something, you have two cubs that you take super good care of. So he applied this to races. And CAUT defended him because he had tenure.”  

“They also defended a guy who does extrasensory perception research. And CAUT said, he got tenure on the basis of more conventional research and now this is what he wants to research and that’s what tenure’s for. He’s allowed to research ESP, Rushton is allowed to have crazy racists theories. You don’t have to be friends with them, you don’t have to take their classes, but academic freedom means that they can be fired only if they’re falsifying data. But if you’re doing something that people consider very objectionable, or crazy, that’s protected.”

And CAUT remains silent about Frances? “They were silent about my case too. They should have said, Look, one of the components of an academic job is service, and you appointed her to a three year term, some students don’t like her views, too bad. And I think same thing with Frances Widdowson. You don’t have to hang out with Frances. You can treat her like a pariah on all social occasions. You cannot fire her. I think what Mount Royal has done is really shocking.” [Dr Widdowson is currently fighting through her faculty union for a full reinstatement.] “My university, while they dismissed me from that administrative position, were very precise and said, she is free to continue her research.”

Before we wrap up our kaffeeklatsch, I ask The Question. Did the matriarchy ever exist? The feminism of 1970s and 80s embraced this idea… A society without aggression, where women ruled, which was matrilinear, and preceded the patriarchy… that’s just a fantasy? There’s no proof that such societies ever existed, right? “I think so. At least the societies since the Neolithic.” So, from the age of agriculture? But we’ve also been romanticizing the hunter-gatherer societies, which we see as hippies, I suggest. “The hunter-gatherers weren’t either patriarchal or matriarchal, they just weren’t hierarchical either way,” she says. “But there are some interesting possibilities. It would be very hard to prove that earlier, like, Lower Paleolithic era, human societies may have been more female focused, but the matriarchy wouldn’t be the right word. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of Elaine Morgan, the Aquatic Ape? So she has this theory – it sounds crazy at first, but she thinks that one of the things that make humans differ from all other primates is that we went through a semi-aquatic stage. That’s why we’re hairless, she argues, that’s why we have a layer of subcutaneous fat, unlike our closest primate relatives… We may have gone through a stage where we lived a bit like the hippopotamuses. Basically, a land mammal that spends a lot of time in the water.”

“So this hippopotamus-like stage, where you spend time in water, is not energetically costly, the water supports you and – hippos have enormous bodies but they don’t eat as much, and still get fat. One of her ideas is maybe that’s when our brains developed. Brains are, energetically, very costly, so the idea is that while consuming the same amount of food we didn’t need as much energy to sustain our bodies and we could have diverted more energy to developing our brains. The parallel would be the aquatic sea mammals, like dolphins etc. We’re not related to them, we’re mammals, but some aquatic sea mammals have big brains and it probably has to do with the energetics of their bodies. By living in water you can devote those calories to building a brain.

“And aquatic sea mammals are the only other mammals that have menopause. Humans have menopause. And menopause is an evolutionary puzzle. Our nearest primate relatives don’t have it; old chimpanzee ladies keep having babies pretty much till they die. Old gorilla ladies too. And why does menopause exist in human females? Other way to put it is, why do we stay alive after we stop being able to have children? Evolutionarily you’d think, we’re done; time to go. And sea mammals are matriarchal in the sense that their pods are led by post-menopausal females. They’re not matriarchal of course in the real sense: they don’t have a society, don’t build buildings, don’t have rulers… One of the things I’m interested in writing about – it’s all speculative, of course, but a lot about evolution is speculative – is, did we go through a period when we lived in a kind of more sea mammal society where, like sea mammals, we had developed menopause? We got menopause, we got big brains, and maybe we went through a long period of time where we were more or less female led, egalitarian, but it was before we really became a society? This would be very early hominin.”

“Egalitarianism hones your brain, because you have to develop what’s called the counter-dominance strategies. If you’re like male primates, like the gorillas, how do they rule? They just bonk you on the head, right. Bonk bonk bonk. You don’t have to be a genius to bonk others on the head. Whereas if you have a more egalitarian society, you have to work out things like cooperation, and that requires you to have a bigger brain and also makes your brain bigger, the more you figure out strategies of non-dominance. Another difference between us and other primates is that we have what’s called the “cooperative eyes”. You can tell what a faraway person is looking at and we pay a lot of attention to one another. Even at a distance you can see because the iris stands against the white background. We’re much more attuned to social networking. Primates eyes are brown against brown, essentially. From a distance you can’t tell what a chimp or a gorilla is looking at. There are all these ways in which the human trajectory is different than that of other primates. There might be some aspects of the sea mammal trajectory that can maybe give us some ideas about what early hominin development was.”

That is so interesting! “It’s super interesting. But it may not be true,” she laughs. “I’m working on a book on the anthropology of woman and I realized to prove anything I would have to dig up the fossils that are 4 million years old and get from them the kind of information that the fossils never come with: how much fat the fossilized animal had.” When is this coming out? “Not this year. Just having some early expressions of interest from a publisher and beginning to wade deeper into the literature.”

Conversation to be continued, then.