Don’t confuse charter rights with academic freedom

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/03/2023 (927 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On March 3, a public talk at the University of Winnipeg — and responses to it — raised important issues concerning academic freedom and harms to the trans community.

The talk and the UW administration’s reaction illustrate that academic freedom can be too easily misunderstood and used to propagate narratives hostile to the lives and safety of trans people.

The day prior to the event, the UW administration released a statement explaining that, despite calls to cancel a lecture entitled “The Commodification of the Human Body: The Case of Transgender Identities,” it would go ahead.

The reasoning appealed to the mission statement of the university, including principles of academic freedom and values of respect and diversity. It also claimed “(t)hese values are informed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

This confusing of academic freedom with the charter right to free expression is both mistaken and had serious consequences to the university’s commitment to respect and diversity, in this case related to trans students, faculty and staff.

The charter right to free expression is what prevents the government infringing on us saying whatever we wish, regardless of how silly, unwise, offensive or ridiculous.

Free expression is, of course, not unlimited, but those limitations are set by laws against hate speech, defamation, copyright infringement and the like. They are separate from issues of respect for others, diversity and workplace expectations.

Most importantly, the charter right to free expression is distinct from scholarly obligations and goals, the heart of academic freedom. To confuse the two weakens both by misunderstanding the specifics of each. It also ignores the 1990 Canada Supreme Court case, McKinney v. the University of Guelph, ruling that the charter does not apply to universities.

If we define academic freedom along the lines of what individuals should be able to say without government censorship, the university will not be able to fulfil its core functions including education, rigorous scholarship and critical inquiry.

Originally scheduled to be delivered on campus, the event was moved online after students, staff and faculty began to speak up with serious concerns. The advertisement described the lecture as addressing the “economic interests involved in transgenderism.” The poster and talk speculated that economic and profit-driven forces lay behind the growth in trans and gender-diverse visibility and the expansion of the umbrella of gender diversity itself.

As Julia Serano argues in her 2022 book Sexed Up, this framing plays into common transphobic arguments about the supposed sudden increase in the number of trans people. This perception fails to account for the fact that an increase in the number of visible and socially recognized trans and gender diverse people of all ages is fundamentally an issue of people being about to express who they are, hopefully safely.

To deny this reality and suggest there are profit motives behind the expanding acceptance of gender diversity is a subtle but ultimately transphobic line of inquiry.

If existing research into trans identities had been explored in the talk and its poster, much of the controversy and harm might have been prevented. Unfortunately, the use of term “transgenderism” in the talk’s poster signalled the opposite. It is a known anti-trans dog-whistle, not used by trans people themselves.

Trans people are not an ideology, a social contagion, a trend or a threat to women’s rights or spaces. The existence of gender diversity is not a new phenomenon and should not be treated as such by the media or within academic research.

In cases like these, discussions often devolve into a simplistic framing about cancel culture and whether it is fair to de-platform speakers. This distracts from the core of the issue — that it is vital university policies are used to protect rather than harm members of the trans community. The university’s choice to do nothing but issue a statement of platitudes about academic freedom while saying it is “proud” and “supports” members of the LGBTTQ+ community, left little option for trans people and their allies but to organize to protect themselves.

This included the work done by 2SLGBTQ+ Students’ director Brie Villeneuve, a first-year student who organized a counter-rally celebrating trans people and advocating for the safety of trans and gender diverse people on campus.

Many others joined the effort, and we can only hope that some education and community-building has resulted in spite of the attempt to hide behind academic freedom.

Peter Ives, PhD, is a professor of political science (he/him). Noah Schulz, PhD, is an instructor in women and gender studies, and political science (he/him).