Yesterday's English professor who doesn't speak English is now apparently behind this letter, whose contribution to scholarly debate and free thinking is to ask OUP for,
[A] clear and detailed account of what measures have been taken to ensure the scholarly quality of this forthcoming publication (while being mindful of the need to maintain reviewers’ anonymity), and what further steps the Press is taking to make itself accountable for the consequences of its publication should the book go forward to print. Measures the press could undertake to offset the harm done by the publication of this work might include soliciting and publishing trans-affirming scholarship by transgender authors, updating the house style guidelines to include specific guidance on language around transgender rights, donating a portion of the book’s profits to supporting transgender rights organizations, and/or developing editorial guidelines for the submission of works that challenge the human rights of any marginalized group. We recommend that these steps for accountability be undertaken in consultation with transgender rights activists and transgender scholars. We hope that this process can help guide OUP in editorial directions that affirm trangender peoples’ humanity and rights.
Of course, it is quite normal to demand that an academic press account for the publication of a book that none of the critics have read. I do hope OUP will ignore this little tantrum by the thought police.
It's particularly rich that the letter initiated by Professor Zuroski, who is also a professor of "cultural studies," declares that "'“Gender-critical feminism' is not a scholarly field, but a coordinated polemical intervention...." Stones, glass houses, etc.
One can get a sense of the rigorous standards of Professor Zuroski's own disciplinary and scholarly training from this essay:
[H]ere are some things I’ve learned from my position as a mixed-race she/her Asian American scholar who appears, in the eyes of the institution, promisingly racially ambiguous — a poster child, you might say, for corporate diversity schemes to bring a few of us in and keep us busy.
Minority status is not capital. It never is. Rather, it is a foundation of particular forms of knowledge and expertise that universities have a way of recognizing and extracting without crediting.
In her case, it may well be the only claim to knowledge she has.
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