Antioch Review Piece Criticizes Leftist Theories Of Transgenderism: Academic Left Characterizes It As "Hate Speech," Compares It To Nazi Eugenics

Holy crap.
   That petition is an embarrassment of epic proportions.
   First: what the hell is the petition requesting? I honestly can't tell. Second: "hate speech" as, Reason points out, is, indeed, protected speech. Third: "hate speech" is a bullshit category largely because most of what the term is used to categorize can't reasonably be described as hateful. Like, for example, the article in question. There are some angry bits in there...but they seem to be acceptable by the standards of literary essays. Fourth, there's this embarrassing bit:

Today, Gender Studies is a reputable, advanced field of study throughout academia.

In fact, of course, Gender Studies is an embarrassment to academia. It very much deserves its reputation as a cesspool of pseudoscholarship in the service of nutty politics.
   As for the article itself...well, it makes some good points and some marginal ones. It's literary, which means that it has weaknesses and strengths that most philosophical discussions don't have. I've made some similar points here before. Others seem novel. Others I'm skeptical of. The author says he was a transvestite for awhile, and so that gives him an unusual perspective. But really the particulars of the thing don't matter much.
   What really matters, however, is that a decent essay that makes decent points about a topic that deserves discussion is being branded as "hate speech" by the academic left. Discussion is verboten. So it has been decreed. Worse, the relevant critics of the piece seem to believe that "hate speech" is not protected by the First Amendment. Or perhaps they hope to make it so by declaring it so...saying so makes it so is one of their axioms, apparently...  Whatever the particulars about this topic, they are less important than this general point: the illiberal left is pushing hard to eliminate the right to free expression (or, rather: to eliminate protections thereof. The right itself cannot be destroyed.) Today at universities; tomorrow, if things go their way, at a national level. Few liberals seem to be taking this sort of thing seriously. The most worrisome thing about that is that I can't tell why. Maybe it's because they think these lunatics cannot succeed. I'm not so sure about that, but at least it's not disastrous if that's their reason. The other, genuinely frightening, possibility is that these "liberals" don't actually disagree with the illiberal left. That's the possibility that keeps me up at night.

(Also:...is Change.org just the first place lefties go now when something pisses them off?  What nonsense.)