End-of-summer news roundup (cont’d): Progessive segregation

Copenhagen hosted the WorldPride festival (DK) last month. The rainbow flag and colors were on display everywhere. The final collective parade was canceled because of Covid, but there were six smaller parades that met in Fælledparken, the city’s largest park. The Nørrebro Pride section attracted special attention because of the strict entrance requirements for its opening party: No whites or heterosexuals allowed; nobody with a hairstyle stolen from another culture either. About the policy, which sported a new acronym - QTIBIPOC - one puzzled observer asked, “Isn’t it illegal to exclude people on the basis of their sexuality and skin color?” Lars Henriksen, spokesperson for the official Copenhagen Pride, thought the policy was “super positive… It’s brilliant that some separatist spaces are created…. Some people feel insecure in what we’re doing.” 

Nørrebro Pride: Photo: Ólafur Steinar Rye Gestsson © Ritzau Scanpix.

Global citizen or authoritarian fellow traveler?

After winning the Olympic gold medal in badminton in a convincing drubbing of defending champion Yu Qi Shi, Viktor Axelsen broke into delirious tears of joy, prompting journalists and social media commentators to wax rhapsodic about the sight of a man crying in public. A couple of weeks later, Axelsen decided to move to Dubai (DK) because of its better training conditions. The Danish badminton organization was disappointed, and others note that the oil states like to use Western athletes for PR and asked Axelsen whether the Emirate’s Sharia legal system bothered him. He acknowledged the "shitstorm," maintaining that he’s become less concerned with what people outside his inner circle think of him.

Did you take communion from this guy?

Denmark isn't immune from the grisly sort of domestic terror that graces Anglo tabloids. “A Danish parish priest confesses to murdering wife and dissolving body in acid," reports The Local. Inspired by an episode of Breaking Bad, Thomas Gotthard attempted to get rid of his wife’s body in a feed barrel at an abandoned country estate. The barrel was too heavy to move, so he divided its contents into two smaller barrels, buried them, dug them up again, chopped the body into smaller pieces, and burned them. The police found hydrochloric acid and caustic soda in Gotthard’s house, along with suspicious google searches on his computer. “I have sent my life out into the darkness where I want to stay,” he said. “No one should feel sorry for me.”

Family values gone wrong

The Danish Supreme Court sustained a ban on the criminal gang Loyal to Familia (DK). The Court concurred that the gang was a citizens’ association and that its ordinary activities included the commission of wide-ranging and serious criminality. Citizens’ associations (foreninger), which are very common in Denmark, are protected by the Constitution. This was the first case against an association in almost 100 years and the first time a criminal gang has been declared illegal. LTF, which arose in the Nørrebro district in Copenhagen, was banned by the police in 2017 after a series of shootings, and there are still estimated to be around 100 members in its seven chapters in the country. The police do not expect the gang to suddenly stop its business but are encouraged that they have greater opportunities to prosecute its members. Prosecutors were encouraged to bring similar cases against other criminal gangs.

Diversity and inclusion at Danish universities

A politically conservative young person enrolls in a social science program at the University of Copenhagen and is dismayed to learn that her fellow students aren’t very friendly or receptive to her opinions. Does that show a woeful lack of understanding of society in 2020 that might disqualify her from pursuing a career in this field? 

As I reported recently, Denmark may not yet be in full compliance with the social justice standards of the Anglosphere, but it is making strides to catch up. In that post, I looked back at highlights of political correctness in the country last year. Those were isolated incidents that were perhaps too easily conducive to jokes. But some people have to live with this code of conduct every day.

The University of Copenhagen’s student newspaper interviewed students and faculty members (DK) in the social science and political science departments and learned that, as in the US, both groups are overwhelming leftist. Conservative students felt they couldn’t express themselves candidly on subjects such as race, gender, inequality and immigration and sometimes found themselves shunned socially.

The sexual dimorphism heresy
One student said that of all the organizations he had experienced in schools and workplaces, this one was the most limiting of free debate. He felt he couldn’t discuss gender “because I believe there are two sexes and that’s almost an illegal opinion here.” A sociology student said that he couldn’t be sure whether right-wing students in his department felt marginalized because they’re weren’t any others left. The three others in their entering class had disappeared. There are certain basic assumptions that his fellow students agree on, he said, such as the multiplicity of sexes, and the only debates about them are between moderate and radical leftist positions. 

In the student council election campaign in 2019, a conservative student displayed a poster that said “No to identity politics,” with a picture of a sombrero – a reference to a recent cultural appropriation scandal on campus. A photo of the poster was posted on Instagram with the description “white supremacist move” and a suggestion that the posters be torn down. The same thing happened to another candidate with the slogan “No thanks to grievance-readiness” (Nej tak til krænkelsesparathed). She said that other conservative students confided in her that they stayed in the closet or else got shamed for their opinions.

All opinions welcome – except yours 
Two anthropology students behind a Facebook group called “Inclusive environment at U of Copenhagen” believe it is legitimate to exclude certain opinions. One said that some conservatives have views of humanity that are directly harmful and violate human rights: “We have accepted the idea that there should be room for all opinions and views and that it is okay not to like immigrants, to be transphobic or to hate women a little. But it is not an opinion that some people cannot have the same rights as others.” The other draws the line at racist, sexist and otherwise oppressive views: “The question is how you treat other people. Are you discriminatory in the words you use? Do you wound other people and make them sad?”

It is not apparent what rights they thought the conservatives wanted to deny to others or what words they perceived to be discriminatory. Some conservative students may have committed such infractions against general guidelines for ethical behavior, but the ones interviewed seemed very cautious and self-censoring. These progressive students share the same beliefs and tactics as their American counterparts. They want to limit free speech for those with opposing views, they use subjective emotional reactions as the criterion for determining whether something is to be prohibited, they think disturbing language is violence, and they rely on straw-man – er, straw-person – arguments.

Maoism light?
The professor who conducted one of the surveys, Assistant Professor Frederik Hjorth, found a surprising degree of political prejudice and “affective polarization” among the general population in Denmark. He also found that leftists were more likely to show intolerance than others, and so it was likely that social science and political science students tended to fit that description since leftists are overrepresented in those fields. He noted that this wasn’t a completely new phenomenon, however. There was a similar conformism to left-wing opinions and an intolerance of others in the 1970s, at that time according to a more classical socialist or communist ideology. In any case, he concluded, such an atmosphere of polarization and tribalism is bad for democracy; fear of stigmatization or social retaliation stifles the free exchange of ideas.

But Hjorth himself has not heard many pointed political opinions expressed in the classroom. On the contrary, he thinks his political science students are rather apolitical. The fact that a professor can research and describe the situation in an impartial way in itself indicates that the situation hasn’t reach the tendentious anti-science and anti–free speech atmosphere of many elite American liberal arts colleges. But that’s little comfort to the students who are being discouraged from entering these fields by subtler pressures. And their exclusion because of intolerance for intellectual diversity is a loss for the professions they were preparing for and the society they are supposed to serve.

PC in DK, 2019

Perhaps I was too quick to say that Denmark is trailing the Anglo-American world in social justice activism and scandals.  Peter Rasmussen has posted a useful list of the “most absurd PC moments in Denmark in 2019” (DK) on Quora. He links to his individual commentaries on five incidents - good examples of how the country is striving to catch up to the achievements in outrage and grievance in more advanced precincts.

 Hating hate
The first concerns Facebook comments  by Black Lives Matter spokesperson Bwalya Sørensen about Pernille Vermund, the leader of the New Right party (and subject of a recent post). Vermund had expressed her happiness that a 14-year-old Thai girl who had been forced to leave Denmark because of strict family reunification rules was allowed to return. Sørensen wrote to Vermund: “You disgusting Nazi shit… How dare you use a little girl to spread your racist, hateful, verbal diarrhea… You stinking pile of garbage …” (my translation, may differ from the original English). Sørensen seemed to imply that Vermund  favored deporting all Muslims (“her evil wish to shamelessly follow in her Fuhrers [sic] footsteps and cleanse Denmark of a whole religious group, 30s style”) and was therefore being hypocritical. As far as I know, the girl, known by her nickname, Mint, is not a Muslim. 

Job theft 
The second instance involves criticism in an op-ed piece of a thin actress for playing a fat character in the film Harpiks (Resin). This was considered discriminatory and fat-phobic because fat characters should be played only by fat actors – the same type of objection that led Scarlett Johansson to drop out of a transgender role. The writer is shown wearing a shoulder bag with the slogan “Fatties against fascism.” 

Depicting another ethnic group
In a similar vein, a documentary film, Dreams from the Outback, was excluded from film festivals (DK) because the  director was white and whites should not be allowed to make films about Australian aborigines and other minority cultures. The director noted that aborigines don’t often have the resources to make a film themselves, and they might well benefit from an increase in awareness in the outside world.

Everyday abuse is worse on holidays 
Fourth, Micah Oh, who teaches structural racism and cultural appropriation at the University of Copenhagen, warned against girls’ dressing up for Halloween as the Arab Princess Jasmine from Disney’s Aladdin because it could be perceived as “everyday racism" and offend people. Parents should tell them that they should be Sleeping Beauty instead. But with “Little girls first of all need to pretend to be princesses,” wasn’t Oh being somewhat discriminatory herself by stereotyping girls like that, besides ignoring the same pitfalls for all the little boys who might also wish to play princess?

Fighting racism with its own weapons
Finally, the Nørrebro Pride parade is an alternative to and protest against the annual Copenhagen Pride parade because of the latter’s commercialization, its acceptance of sponsorship from capitalist conglomerates and financial firms, and the participation of “racist politicians.” In the Nørrebro Pride parade, the LGBT+ people of color - “double minorities” - marched at the head of the procession, while white LGBT+ persons came afterward and cleaned up after the party. The parade thus not only offered an alternative for those who didn’t wish to be associated with mainstream racism; by reintroducing racial segregation, it also provided an opportunity for the descendants of racist oppressors to experience racism themselves.

While these events represent  noteworthy strides in identitarian political action, they fall short of the dramatic harassment, physical attacks, vandalism and riots that greeted, say, Milo at Berkeley or Charles Murray at Middlebury. No one was fired or even hounded off social media for following a custom or holding an opinion that was unremarkable ten years ago. Some targets may have suffered slight reputational damage, and others might have been slightly guilted – those racist princess costumes! These results may be disappointing to subjugated and aggrieved groups whose existence is being denied or erased, but the local warriors are mashaling their forces and learning the necessary epithets, tropes and tactics, and perhaps this is only the warm-up stage in the long struggle for intersectional justice and equity in Denmark. 

Tak, Peter.

Why there is less social justice warfare in Denmark

Why doesn’t Denmark have as much controversy about social justice issues as do the US and the UK?

First, racial and ethnic tensions are not as acute because Denmark does not have the same history of slavery and colonialism. Slave trade was conducted in the Danish West Indies until 1848, but there is no segment of the Danish population that has descended from slaves and endured centuries of discrimination. There is an ethnic underclass, but only around 13 percent of the population has a foreign background. The largest group are the descendants of “guest workers” who came mainly from Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s. It is difficult to remember a case of the police killing a person of color person under suspicious circumstances.

Second, conditions for women are more favorable because of the extensive welfare state and a tradition of greater egalitarianism.

Third, the country has historically been one of the most tolerant towards LGBT+ groups. It was the first to recognize same-sex partnerships, and it legalized same-sex marriage in 2012. 

Fewer enemies
Fourth, the right-wing radicalism that provokes activism on the Left is less extensive and prominent. White supremacist and neo-Nazi groups are very small and are looked down upon by the general population. The extremist Stram Kurs (Hard Line) Party, which advocated deporting all Muslims, received 1.8 percent of the votes in the 2019 election and didn’t qualify for seats in Parliament.

Fifth, universities, where most social justice agitation and scandals have taken place in the US, have an infrastructure in Denmark that makes them less susceptible to activism. They are not residential colleges. There are some dormitories, but very few are located on campus. Many students commute from home or live in apartments. They do not congregate as often as American students in clubs and interest organizations and perhaps for that reason do not develop a tribal mentality. They are also more professionally oriented. They do not simply “go to college” to get a B.A. They choose their major fields when they apply and begin to specialize after one year. It is likely that more of them are more interested in pursuing their careers than in political activism. Additionally, they aren’t burdened by the prospect of a sizeable undischargeable debt upon graduation. 

Sixth, Twitter, which offers the quickest and easiest way to engage in ideological warfare, is less widespread in Denmark than in the US. Facebook is the most popular social media forum here. It does sometimes attract heated debate but has less rapid-fire escalation of denunciation and insult-trading and, in the extreme, mob frenzy. 

Marxism was here first
Seventh, the European socialist tradition already offered a theoretical framework and vocabulary for addressing social injustice. It was more firmly established and intellectually coherent than, say, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and intersectionalism, which need to explain themselves. 

Eighth (a corollary of the preceding), there were already well-established political parties on the far Left with a voice in Parliament and influence on center-left administrations. The Red-Green Party’s platform is more extreme than the American progressive movement’s. Activists have a channel to promote their causes and need not always be an protest element that is not taken seriously.

Ninth (something that could have been mentioned first), some of the main objectives of the social justice movement have already been accomplished here, most obviously universal health care, tuition-free university, and policies to prevent environmental damage and climate change. There is not as much crony capitalism and lobbyist influence to protest against.

Tenth, children here are less “coddled” than Americans, as famously documented by Lukianoff and Haidt. They are less sheltered and are encouraged to be more responsible for themselves and therefore less likely to develop an entitlement and grievance mentality.

Biology 101 
Finally (and more speculative), both academics and, where relevant, politicians appear to be stronger adherents and defenders of free speech and a scientific viewpoint than their American counterparts. Denmark is proud of its democratic tradition, which is linked to its egalitarianism. It has high voter turnouts and numerous local organizations and cooperative housing associations founded and run by citizen groups that span socioeconomic strata. There is less tendency to attempt to silence and suppress opposing political positions and probably less need for students to insulate themselves from exposure to ideas that might make them uncomfortable.

I don’t know how deeply social constructionism has influenced the social sciences here, but I doubt that the natural sciences are seriously threatened by ideological campaigns to deny the distinction between sex and gender, for example. If university faculty are under less pressure because of the factors listed above, then there is less need for them to cede an evidence-based approach.

Children with gender dysphoria in Denmark

In the Anglosphere you see things like this everyday: An IT contractor sues Nike for failing to protect them (the contractor) from misgendering harassment by coworkers who didn’t refer to them by the desired pronouns. Dozens of psychologists resign from a British clinic because they think it overdiagnoses gender dysphoria in children and they’re afraid of being labeled transphobic if they don’t conform.  With the arrival of 2020, there seem to be some signs of fatigue with aggressive transgender activism. Some people who might have been sympathetic to the issues are tiring of the dogmatism fueling the more questionable demands and judgments: their insistence on the right of biological males who self-identify as women to compete against cis-women in all sports, their branding as bigots heterosexuals who are not interested in dating transpeople, and their automatic approval of transitioning for pre-adolescents.

Below the statistical radar
Transgender issues also arise in Denmark. There has been a steady increase in requests for hormone treatment and surgery in the past few years. But the trend appears to be at a simpler, more exploratory stage, and issues concerning transgender rights, inclusion and pronouns are still rather novel. Schools are only beginning to adapt restroom and locker-room facilities (DK) to dysphoric children. Earlier this year professors were still surprised when students criticized the use of the categories “male” and “female.” One case involved a statistics course (DK) in the biology faculty, in which students were to analyze differences between the sexes in phenomena such as left-handedness and height. Some objected that the assignments were offensive to people who don’t identify with either category. They weren’t questioning the validity of the studies, only the conventional limitation to two sexes that made some people feel overlooked and left out. 

The professor couldn’t change he statistics, but he offered to use colors instead of the sexes, however that might work. After the evaluation meeting, he felt that his freedom of expression was being constrained and it made his teaching difficult. It seems rather quaint in comparison with what happens to American professors who run afoul of transgender activists. The same article tallies up the number of formal complaints about sexual harassment and offensive behavior at the University of Copenhagen: there were only five from 2016 to 2018. 

Taking the plunge
Last month the Denmarks Radio television network broadcast a documentary about the youngest child in the country, at age 11, to begin hormone treatment: “I don’t want to be a girl, Mom” (DK). It gave a sympathetic, sometimes moving account of the child’s situation and the difficulty of the decision. Altogether it offered a balanced treatment of the factors at play: the children’s discomfort in their innate sex; parents’ and doctors’ uncertainty about the best course and the timing; sex researchers’ and politicians’ caution about irreversible long-term effects of the treatment; and the possibility of regret and a desire for de-transitioning. There was widespread agreement about the need for better knowledge about the consequences of such treatment. 

And the process for determining whether to offer the treatment reflects those concerns. It consists of a referral to a sexology clinic, several interviews and tests, including psychiatric assessments and intelligence tests, consultations with school personnel, and a comprehensive evaluation by a group of psychologists and doctors. Contrast this with the position taken by American Academy of Pediatrics, whose guidelines for children who seek treatment for gender dysphoria recommend an immediate “affirmative” response, that is, a commencement of the treatment process. 

Whose interests are being served?
In a recent podcast with Quillette Magazine, Dr. James Cantor discusses his critique of these guidelines in a peer-reviewed article in which he cites several instances where the Academy misrepresented research. Among them was a dismissal of the previously accepted approach of “watchful waiting,” which was supported by replicated findings that after puberty two-thirds of children with gender dysphoria come to accept and prefer their natal sex. Most of them found that they were simply gay and not born in the wrong body.  

Like much of the transgender debate that goes beyond questions of fundamental civil rights, discrimination and equal protection, the Academy’s attitude is baffling in its apparent disregard for both science and common sense. Does it reflect a tendency toward overtreatment in American healthcare, a general trend toward ideological extremes and rigidity in American public debate, both? It's encouraging that Danish healthcare professionals and researchers maintain a more deliberative, agnostic approach to this fraught issue and the transition bandwagon.

Campus grievance culture revisited

Last month there was a little ruckus over a questionnaire (DK) for a thesis project that two University of Copenhagen students sent to 7,000 other students over the University’s shared email system. One of the respondents hit Reply All and complained very politely, almost apologetically, that they [sic] couldn’t complete the questionnaire because it asked the subjects to identify themselves as male or female and the student was neither of those.

The student was attacked less politely in further replies by people who thought they were a whining snowflake or worse. Others asked for the administration to take action, particularly against the first student’s accusers. The associate dean explained that the administration hadn’t been aware of the inappropriate Reply All function in the email system and afterward shut down the system. He added that it is important to have a space where people can discuss topics such as sex, gender and identity, and it should preferably be offline.

Rules on outrage 
That was apparently the end of the incident. The most striking thing about the report is that it reminds us how little in Denmark we hear of the kind of culture wars that are raging in the US and the UK, particularly on campuses: bias reporting, protests, deplatforming, calls for resignation, self-censorship. Identity politics is hardly unknown here, but it doesn’t have a pervasive influence on academic life. In fact the most noteworthy recent event on this front was the University of Copenhagen’s revision of its guidelines on offensive behavior (DK) to define such behavior more narrowly.

The University had instituted a set of guidelines in 2018 after the so-called Sombrero Scandal in which students at the Law Faculty objected to costumes based on ethnic stereotypes at a Mexican theme party. The Faculty banned such parties, and a controversial debate on cultural appropriation and “offense-culture,” as it’s called here, ensued at the University. The result was a set of rules that defined offensive behavior very broadly as any action that caused a perception of violation on the part of an individual university employee or student; that is, any subjective feeling of harassment, discrimination or even discomfort. 

This is the key sentence: “It is the employee’s or student’s experience of having been subjected to offensive behavior that is the basis [of the case].”

Anything qualifies for a citizen’s arrest?
The guidelines in turn prompted a new debate about whether the criteria for an offense should be an individual’s opinion or more objective categories of behavior. They occasioned protests by some faculty members that they would hamper academic freedom, classroom discussion and research. This phase led to a re-evaluation and eventually a revision of the guidelines at the end of October of this year.

The new guidelines are no longer based on a subjective perception of violation but rather on the definition set forth by the Danish Working Environment Authority. The Authority’s definition also takes the individual’s experience as the starting point, regardless of whether or not the behavior arose from a deliberate intention to offend. But it makes an important qualification that an individual’s reaction is not automatically accepted as evidence of a violation:

“It is a case of offensive behavior when one or more persons grossly or repeatedly subject other persons to behavior that is perceived by the latter as demeaning. This implies that there may be situations in which a person feels violated but management determines that it was not offensive behavior.” (my translation)

Rolling back the presumption of guilt
The new guidelines state that they do not cover referrals from students about the content or methods of teaching or about teaching assignments. They also set forth a procedure for persons who feel violated: First they should object or refuse to participate in the situation, and then they should speak to others about the incident and possibly to their manager or administrator. For their part, managers should investigate the circumstances that led to the report before opening a formal case. 

These are significant changes not only because they moderate the policy but also because they defer to the civil rights that apply to society as a whole and do not treat students as a vulnerable class in need of special indulgence. Students are already protected by laws against discrimination and harassment that protect all citizens. The University opted out of the more expansive conception of harm that can be problematic to implement and that can have negative consequences for the fundamental principle of free expression. 

Uncommon sense 
The University Rector, Henrik Wegener, explains that the guidelines are intended to balance the interests of academic freedom and need for students and employees to feel that they are in a safe environment. That sounds like obvious common sense, but the University’s position doesn’t appear to be a very common viewpoint on American campuses. One problem with the welfare state is that once a social group receives a specific benefit, it becomes almost impossible to scale it back, even if economic or other factors argue for doing so. The same may be the case for the burgeoning diversity and inclusion bureaucracy in the US that has a vested interest in its own prohibitions.