How the PC brigade hailed hoax study as ‘outstanding’

THE po-faced nature of ‘gender studies’ makes it ripe for ridicule.

So it’s perhaps no surprise that two academics who wrote a hoax paper titled ‘The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct’ were lavished with praise.

Peter Boghossian and James Liddle, from Portland State University in the US, confessed to inventing the nonsense article, saying they wanted to expose what they saw as the low academic standards of ‘gender studies scholarship’.

Mr Boghossian, a philosopher, said the ‘absurd’ paper was constructed in the style of ‘post-structuralist discursive gender theory’. He added: ‘But we made no attempt to find out what “post-structuralist discursive gender theory” actually meant.’

Mr Lindsay, a mathematician, added: ‘As they seem to have a fondness for claiming that concepts like gender are best under- stood as social constructions, we figured it would be likely to succeed if we wrote a bogus paper claiming that we shouldn’t think of penises as anatomical organs and yet as the cause of many of the world’s evils.’

Their jargon-laden scribblings included the phrases ‘gender-performative, high fluid social construct’, ‘exclusionary to disenfranchised communities’, and ‘isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity’.

They even associated male anatomy with climate change. It read: ‘Through detailed poststructuralist discursive criticism and the example of climate change, this paper will challenge the prevailing and damaging social trope that penises are best understood as the male sexual organ.’

A spokesman for Taylor & Francis Group, which publishes the journal, said it was investigating.