Wow, I didn't know that academia was getting this bad; what happened to letting the truth be debated a la the Socratic dialogue in the academia of all places!
The Bailey paper proposes three steps: 1. Women have been historically discriminated against. 2. Women are currently discriminated against by people using the Socratic dialog. 3. The Socratic dialog discriminates against women.
The leap from 2. to 3. is reminiscent of "Hitler was a vegetarian. Therefore vegetarians are Nazis."
Sometimes, a thing --- a word, an institution, a bit of history --- has cultural power. It's surrounded with an aura (or valence, if you will) of gravitas and mystique, usually accumulated over decades, or millennia.
Acrivists notice that these things have cultural power and hijack them, turning them into something useful for the cause while denying that anything has changed. Consider, for example, how many people claim, in all earnestness, that disagreement is "literal violence". Disagreement is obviously not violence, but by using this word, activists can "steal" some of the emotion attached to the word "violence" and weild it for their cause.
This hijacking works for a while, until people catch on. At that point, activists, like locusts, move on to areas not yet stripped bare of meaning.
The same mechanism that at micro scale operates on words operates at macro scale on institutions.
Academia in particular has been ravaged by this process: huge parts of the academy no longer practice anything resembling science. Their studies do not reproduce. Their papers go unread. Their lectures become diatribes. Their students become zealots. The forms are present, but the substance is gone.
This article describes the early stages of such a hijacking.
I like that term, "valence hijacking" and I don't disagree. Ultimately I think we as a society are approaching a pivotal point where any body (individual or institution) are so afraid of a drag through the public square for their statements/image that we have created de facto censorship on what is "appropriate" and what "is not", which might have negative repercussions on what is allowed under freedom of expression and free discourse.
Well hey, there you have it! That's precisely why you see "mirimir" as the author of this comment. Because, you know, my meatspace persona can't tolerate anything at all controversial. I learned my lesson on Usenet :( And the climate is way^N worse now.
Of course, the trouble is that this cuts both ways. Because "science" is associated with trustworthy, evidence-based statements and "activism" isn't, one technique I've seen is people with an audience and a political axe to grind declaring a particular niche theory that goes against the consensus to be "science", and any criticism of the scientific merits of this to be an example of "activists" attacking "science".
I think what happened is, liberals learned from conservatives that it's much more efficient in the short term, to make the voicing of an opinion a crime than to fight it on its merits.
Censorship is as old as organized society. Historically, the power to censor belonged to those in power (the Church, royalty, etc.) But it was never exercised openly, it always rested on some higher justification (to prevent offending God or upset the social order). And so, censorship, which is always, in effect, an instrument of domination, somehow became "the moral choice".
At some point (I'd say, fairly recently, sometime in the 70s) minorities fighting "the Good Fight" (tm) discovered the power of moral censorship and they are now basking in it. But it's a double-edged sword and it's very difficult not to cut yourself when using it.