What’s funny is that Starmer is doing it with an utterly hostile media which would be desperate to savage him even if he were the greatest prime minister in history while Trump is doing it with a slavish media desperate to surrender to him yet both are heading for similar fates

I feel that this is two things. It's both a bad faith effort to go after trans employees but it's also an attempt to wreck higher ed in the state.

I completely agree we shouldn't be second-guessing it, but I also think it's worthwhile to defend her grading decision on the merits (especially since there are some large accounts who've been challenging it on the merits). In defending it, it's important to emphasize the need for deference.

There are cases where getting a bad grade at a university could be a 1A issue, but this would require a set of facts entirely different to what we have here, and pretty much require the instructor to give out poor grades for primarily/solely discriminatory reasons, which is not the case here.

Assuming they do actually fail any student who refuses or declares support for 3rd parties.

Again though, this story does even come close.

You could get to a first amendment issue in theory, but this is not anything remotely close to that and it's not even close.

Say you had a professor who declared "I hate people who vote 3rd party in elections" and required all students to swear they'll vote for a major party.

That's a 1A issue.

This alone should have been enough to keep the TA and make the assignment have a 0 grade, in addition to declining any appeal of the grade.

In almost all circumstances, you should not go to the media/governor/courts first to appeal a grade.

the media, specifically, broadly and from everything i've been able to see, is like "haha isn't it cute that people are pretending to care" when, yes, real live flesh-and-blood Republican congresspeople are going "hang the fuck on that's fucked up"

The quality of the essay was a worthwhile discussion topic for like the first hour of the debate as the facts and circumstances were being established. Anyone who is still discussing the rubric or the essay is either stupid or in bad faith. Indulging them only gives cover to the actual goal.

I'm not as optimistic that this tactic won't spread beyond the anti-trans crusade. Doesn't take much in the way of imagination to predict a future where anyone who's not a white cisgender heterosexual Evangelical man gets put in these exact same crosshairs.

There is, fundamentally, no content to analyze. The actions of this person and the context in which they acted are perfectly sufficient to explain what happened and why. Engaging with this on any level more elaborate than "Fuck you no" is falling into the epistemic trap.

IT IS A CATEGORY ERROR TO TREAT THIS AS ANY DIFFERENT FROM SPRAYPAINTING A SWASTIKA ON A SYNAGOGUE

Not only does it make us miss the forest for the trees, it's also just true that what i (a white cis dude who is cartoonishly professorial) would do in that situation isn't relevant for what a trans grad student would do because the options available to an instructor are identity-sensitive.

and in this case the enemies in question have a very long track record of operating in bad faith

"assumption of bad faith" is the proper way to treat right wing complaints like this and I have a hard time thinking of a situation in which it was incorrect

I understand that there are a lot of people out there who think they have good intentions and love to take their ideological opponents in good faith because it makes them seem fair and reasonable and I truly cannot overstate how dangerous this is to trans people and how much they should stop

like it was good fun to make fun of the dogshit writing and all but we know what this is! she's not pretending this is anything other than an attempt to ban trans people from teaching! she clearly had that as the end goal before she wrote the essay! it is exhausting that we are doing this