Philosophy professor Rebecca Tuvel was all social justice-y, through and through, but she still wasn’t pious enough to survive being devoured by her own.

She talks about “biological sex” and uses phrases like “male genitalia.”

What was she thinking? After the townsfolk, armed with their torches and pitchforks, marched on feminist philosophy journal Hypatia, which collapsed like a cheap pantsuit, a bold voice come forward in Tuvel’s defense. Suzanna Danuta Walters, editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, took to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Explain this:

We are in the midst of the Trumpian apocalypse. Actual bigoted provocateurs like Charles Murray and Ann Coulter throw flames in the academy. Hate crimes against trans people and people of color and Muslims are on the rise; women’s reproductive rights are on the line, as are just about every other aspect of bodily autonomy and gender justice. So what’s making scholars hyperventilate in outrage? A feminist academic whose body of work is clearly on the side of progressive social justice.

Wipe that smirk off your face. Sure, she asserts that Charles Murray is an “actual bigoted provocateur” because that’s how she feels. Isn’t she entitled to her opinion? Yes, she premises her post on insanely ignorant hysterical tropes, as is her right as a feminist intellectual. But what of her point, that “scholars hyperventilate in outrage” at a feminist academic on their own team?

Consider the intent and background here. By any measure, Tuvel is a committed feminist philosopher who repeatedly and clearly states her absolute support of trans rights. She is not Coulter or Murray or even the predictably contrarian Camille Paglia. Surely, Tuvel should not be immune to critique — none of us are. But to organize a petition and demand retraction should be an action reserved for work that is willfully erroneous, improperly vetted, and riven with demonstrable falsehoods. If those of us on the left are unable to make distinctions between legitimate intellectual disagreements and damaging lies, we will be hoist with our own petard. Our eyes aren’t on the prize but on mutual evisceration in the name of holier-than-thou rectitude. This isn’t substantive intellectual debate. It’s schoolyard name-calling.

The realm of acceptable “substantive intellectual debate” ranges from how a “scholar” should give her life to social justice to how many of her children she should sacrifice on the altar of social justice. The irony here eludes the true believers.

But since she asks the question, “explain this,” and since I don’t have to appease the social justice gals to avoid schoolyard name-calling, which is their preferred weapon in the battle for feelz, the least I can do is offer an answer. Here’s where it goes terribly wrong:

I cannot help thinking that something has gone seriously wrong when a scholar who is not transphobic or working against the interests of trans people, but, in fact, considering an important question, is labeled as “doing harm.”

Like the religious zealots who put to death heretics for their failure to believe as demanded, you are the epitome of intellectual death. You change all the words, calling your priestesses scholars and labeling any thought that fails to adore your god enough as “doing harm” and “enacting violence.” The nonbelievers are “actual bigots” because they don’t pray at your altar, but even the believers must pass the ever more stringent test of your orthodoxy if they aren’t to be burned at the stake.

So Tuvel was “clearly on the side” of a progressive social justice scholar? Like the priests who argued over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin? Like the painters who were permitted to paint the madonna cradling her crucified son? As long as the scope of inquiry is limited by your piety, it ought to be acceptable?

That’s not how it works in your tribe, in the land of the breathless girls and their pathetic boy toys.

More broadly, academics should take a long, hard look at ourselves and ask whether we are truly committed to a culture that is generous of spirit, open to debate, and deliberative in its judgments. Must one be “of” an identity to examine it, and who decides that?

It chokes me up to read your call to be “generous in spirit” while calling Murray an actual bigot.

What intellectual questions are simply off the table for argumentation, and who determines that?

That horse left the academic barn already. See your first paragraph, where you’ve already determined that the only intellectual questions left on the table for argumentation are the ones that address how much you should love your fantasy world.

But it’s not just academics who should take a “long, hard look” at themselves. One might suggest that those academics who still have actual thoughts in their heads might appreciate that look, except they’ve been purged from the Academy when the lunatics took over. And should any remain, they know better than to open their mouths and engage in open debate, lest they be dismissed at best, and more likely burned at the stake for the heretics, oops, the “actual bigots,” they are.

Let’s focus our animus on the real enemies of feminist, queer, marginalized lives. They are hiding in plain sight but are harder to see through the bluster of our own misdirection.

Your enemies aren’t hiding. They’re the ideas of philosophy that have been around for millennia, propounded by people whose names you learned and now revile. They’re not enemies of feminist, queer or marginalized lives, but enemies of your vicious hatred of any idea that doesn’t conform to your religion where you murder thought in the name of your god.

When the mean girls are done ripping each other to shreds for not wearing the “right” designer thoughts, maybe the Academy will have a renaissance of actual thought so that another generation isn’t lost to your orthodoxy, and people won’t prefer to risk a Trumpian Apocalypse to the certainty of your insanity.