When a chair is political ...

It is reasonable for us, the public, to expect that our public educational institutions strive to remain free from political agendas. Indeed, our public educational institutions ought to teach how to recognize political agendas, as part of the process of teaching students how to think critically.

When a public institution accepts private funds, there is an immediate compromise on this expected intellectual independence. Even if the donor demands nothing more than their name on the lintel of a building, we are still imprinted with the message that what occurs inside that building is brought to us by the "good will" of the donor. That may seem harmless, and in this day and age of purported funding shortages, we are exhorted to be grateful for such philanthropy. However, it is impossible for our freedom of thought to be without compromise, to be free of coercion, when it is sponsored by a private individual. 

Often the political agenda is mild (personal aggrandizement). Often it is not, as in the situation of the creation of the "world's first chair in transgender studies." Its statement of purpose sounds great!

The Chair in Transgender Studies is devoted to fostering and supporting research into a broad range of topics concerned with improving the lives and circumstances of transgender and gender nonconforming people.

We exist because good research is the basis for solid reliable information about the real world. We need research to drive social change. We need research as the basis for good policies and better laws to improve the well-being of trans and gender nonconforming people.

Who could argue with such well-intentioned social justice? And yet ... it is exactly that, the rhetoric of social justice, carefully crafted to subtly intimidate by way of political correctness any questioning, which would be rebuked with accusations of prejudice, and when claims for inquiry are meted with censorship, we are back in the land of solipsism.

The agenda of this chair is not opaque. 

First, note the faculty in which it is placed: Social Sciences. Not the the Faculty of Medicine, not the Faculty of Science. It is not placed in a science-based faculty because there is no biologic science to the transgender paradigm.

Second, note the university: University of Victoria. Not McGill, not Harvard, not even the University of California Berkeley. And who is the first professor to hold this chair? Dr Aaron Devor, a self-proclaimed feminist butch lesbian sexologist who lives as a man.

And third, note the funding: the Tawani Foundation, created by Jennifer (James) Pritzker, of the Pritzker family, "one of America's richest families." 

One can say who else would fund and study transgender studies but those who are advocates? What's wrong with that? The problem is in the methods and the agenda. True science is furthered by searching for facts, for proposing hypotheses and then daring to set out to disprove them, to see them withstand the most stringent examination, rather than gathering narrative as evidence of proof. 

One more note: their statement of purpose includes the goal "to drive social change." This chair is simply a means of attempting to gain pseudo-academic credibility to advance the current narrative of transgenderism.