Les Green (Oxford) has an illuminating discussion of the tempest in a teapot du jour; a taste:

Sex is cluster-concept, a bundle of attributes, some of which do not develop until puberty or later. And gender is another cluster-concept. Gender is constituted by norms and values that are conventionally considered appropriate for people of a given sex. Gender is a lot more vague than sex, and a lot more historically and geographically variable. But gender has another interesting feature. It is path dependent. To be a woman is for the pertinent norms and values to apply a result of a certain life history. Being a woman is not only ‘socially constructed’, as they say, it is also constructed by the path from one’s past to one’s present. In our society, to be a woman is to have arrived there by a certain route: for instance, by having been given a girl’s name, by having been made to wear girl’s clothes, by having been excluded from boys’ activities, by having made certain adaptations to the onset of puberty, and by having been seen and evaluated in specific ways. That is why the social significance of being a penis-free person is different for those who never had a penis than it is for those who use to have one and then cut it off.

The whole piece is worth reading.

Ironically, in the last paragraph, Green writes,

Greer’s remarks are correct and are neither dangerous nor hateful. The number of critics of students who supposedly want to ‘no-platform’ speakers dwarfs the number of students who want to ‘no-platform‘ anyone. Maybe the transgender tsunami hit the press, not because of some seismic event in our universities, but because commentators want threats to freedom of speech and inquiry to come from a politically safe source.

The second sentence, alas, is unduly hopeful. Nearly 3,000 people signed the petition to cancel Greer's talk, and incidents like this are cropping up all over the U.K. and the U.S. In the U.K., there are certainly other more serious (government) threats to free speech, but that is neither here nor there: at least those threats are recognized, usually, as wrongful, while the "I'm offended" crowd thinks their authoritarian preoccupation with controlling thought and speech puts them on the moral high ground.

As if to make the point how wrong Green is in that last paragraph, note the reaction when one tweeter, Justin Weinberg (South Carolina), quoted only the bit from the last paragraph, ignoring the actual substance of Green's essay. He was denounced quickly and furiously by those purportedly rare "no-platform" folks. Aidan McGlynn (Edinburgh) demands clarification whether Weinberg is endorsing the actual content of the piece. Toby Meadows (Aberdeen) worries that Weinberg is making a "broad endorsement" of the whole piece. Weinberg then tries desperately to deny that he has committed a thought crime: "I was clear in response to Aidan what exactly in Green’s post I was endorsing." And then from Rachel McKinnon (Charleston) there's this: "You're endorsing a post that *agrees* with Greer's transphobic view of trans women. How do you not see that?" And also this:

Weinberg replies:

@ rachelvmckinnon Hi. I’ve been on a plane. Can’t engage now but look forward to learning more about this from you soon.

Which produces the following from McKinnon:

I'm not optimistic either, given that these people may be the future of the "profession." In any case, Green's nuanced discussion is worth reading.

UPDATE: It's good to see that Prof. McKinnon has learned from this episode that throwing a tantrum because someone committed a thought crime (or, in this case, a link crime!) and trying to bully them into submission on Twitter is not the right way to behave. Or maybe she didn't?

ADDENDUM: Even the metablog is feeling sorry for Weinberg! (For those not familiar, the irony is that Weinberg has repeatedly championed violations of academic freedom and punishment of lawful speech in the name of sensitivity to the children.)