ESRC sending millions of pounds to Sally Hines / Leeds Uni to research gender bollocks

[QuietContraryMary]

Ht (twitter.com/DaveDavidDave_/status/1064836550448619522)

There's £700k, for example, for 'Living Gender in Diverse Times'

This features a motley crew of gender cultists:

Helen [redacted] (credited only as 'Helen', and with the email adress of press@mermaids) (she's on twitter as @mimmymum and has an adoring audience of diaper fetishists & furries as she says how great puberty blockers)

Meg-John Barker (partner of Edward Lord, non-binary freemason & big-time TRA), previously featured here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3339137-BACP-Gender-Sexual-and-Relationship-Diversity-by-Dr-Meg-John-Barker

Anna Carlile - gender cultist lecturer at Goldsmiths and Mermaids advocate

Justin Hancock - is a double act with Meg-John Barker (above) megjohnandjustin.com/about-us/

Ruth Pearce - Leeds Uni gender cultist ruthpearce.net/

Emma Renold - professor of childhood studies, promotes transgender identity to children www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5932855/Transgender-muffin-challenge-young-people-reads-like-satire.html

Vanita Sundaram - intersectional feminist type, busy retweeting tweets from TW calling for Rachel Stock to be fired for transphobia twitter.com/VanitaSundaram

Liam Tielemans - works for some sort LGBT charity. Strangely, the emphasis seems to be on the T. www.lgbtconsortium.org.uk/node/3308

Strangely there does not seem to be any non-kool-aid drinkers among their number.

It's not really surprising this crap becomes law & public policy when there's a never-ending stream of cash, public (as here), semi-public (like BBC CiN), and private (Lloyds, etc.)

Follow the money.

[QuietContraryMary]

This is the £500k for pregnant men project.

transpregnancy.leeds.ac.uk/

The advisors are equally dreadful

transpregnancy.leeds.ac.uk/profile_type/advisory-group/

E.g., Helen Belcher, who is a transwoman TRA/would-be Lib Dem MP, and whose relevance to pregnant 'men' seems to be tenuous at best.

Also Christina Richards, who is a transwoman who writes books saying how ABDL, DDLG, furry are not paraphilias but perfectly normal, alongside working for the NHS as a gender doctor.

Quite a few other non-uterus owners there also.

Money again looks to be going towards Leeds Uni salaries of Sally Hines & Ruth Pearce.

[QuietContraryMary]

Silentlyobserving, they are just making a living.

Same way that people burn millions in electricity to generate useless numbers (bitcoin), if you funnel money into something then people will follow.

And obviously anyone who isn't into chemically castrating children, send rapists to women's prisons, etc. will be very publicly humiliated & drummed out of employment for 'transphobia' if they even tried to get into this line of work, which is itself unlikely.

Absolute junk science. A circle jerk, if you will pardon the analogy (which of course could be a male or female penis).

[Bowlofbabelfish]

But how can the research COST that much? What is the money FOR?

I can waffle on at length about lab budgets (£1100 plus for a single millilitre of one thing i used to use, expensive sequencers, hybridisation ovens, arrays, blah blah.)

What is half a million quid actually being spent on in a project of this type?

[Mumfun]

Follow the money always.

So many of them make their entire living from this stuff.So if it goes down so do they. No wonder they defend the indefensible

[TheMinorityEngineer]

ESRC?

[OrchidInTheSun]

European Social Research Council I'm guessing?

[TalkingintheDark]

I just looked at the website of ESRC and their tagline is:

“shaping society”.

Yes. Indeed.

[rightreckoner]

I don't see one single thing in Helen Belcher's CV that makes them in any way qualified to advise on pregnant "men".

They ran a software company though - which very much accords with who these people are, typically.

[TalkingintheDark]

Economic and Social Research Council

[QuietContraryMary]

Bowlofbabelfish, I think the money can cover salaries.

There's a guide here:

esrc.ukri.org/funding/guidance-for-applicants/

Also in general I can only imagine that 'research' funding is what unis are all about, and can only be good for your career. £1.2 million for projects by Sally Hines in the space of 9 months just from the ESRC, and that's just two projects.

If you consider that these people's livelihoods literally depend on this crap then of course they will push it.

To the best of my knowledge, despite their claims there's really no money at all in being gender-critical. (Oh, someone raised a crowdfunder for £20k? Wow! You and your colleagues' salaries are prepaid for the next several years)

[QuietContraryMary]

"ESRC is part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), a new organisation that brings together the UK’s seven research councils, Innovate UK and Research England to maximise the contribution of each council and create the best environment for research and innovation to flourish. The vision is to ensure the UK maintains its world-leading position in research and innovation. For more information visit the UK Research and Innovation website.

UK Research and Innovation is a non-departmental public body funded by a grant-in-aid from the UK government"

"ESRC's total budget for 2017-18 was around £202 million. At any one time ESRC supports over 4,000 researchers and postgraduate students in academic institutions and independent research institutes."


So it's public money going to already-tax-funded uni departments to 'research' nonsense.

[JamieAndPukka]

It's like the charity and professional help industry funded by the tax payers to distract whilst the upper class become more privileged. A career creation scheme to fund the middle-class, provide virtue cookies at the expense of the actual vulnerable who are kept in their place.

[Hefzi]

The ESRC have changed the way they do their funding relatively recently, and basically, you need to bid as a consortium to have the best chance of getting funded. They've always been a bit subject to the whims of fashion in terms of research, but this is a new low even for them

[Bittermints]

Economic and Social Research Council, I think. Analogous to the Medical Research Council.

What's it going on? Well, all that verbiage doesn't write itself, Bowl! Committee meetings, ethics applications, focus groups, reports, surveys, lengthy interviews with research subjects (qualitative research, takes ages to do and then to transcribe and analyse, I believe), glossy leaflets and posters, financial reports to the funder, time to write it all up and get it published, conference presentations and posters.

(I'm not an academic but used to work in university admin. My colleagues would have killed for grants of this size and could have made really good use of them, with immediate benefit to society given the work they were doing.)

[QuietContraryMary]

You can check grants here gtr.ukri.org

E.g., Kathleen Stock has got nothing, £0, zero, nada, for being gender-critical. James Caspian, nothing. Michael Biggs, nothing. (Though they have grants for other things completely unrelated to gender)

People are given millions of pounds to produce nonsense, while those who stand up to it only risk their careers and have no financial gain.

[Bittermints]

Just to add, universities get funding from government to cover infrastructure but the funds needed to pay staff to do research all come from grants these days. Hence the prevalence of short-term contracts for postdoctoral workers and research assistants. They are usually funded from specific grants and when the grant ends so does the post.

[Melamin]

It all seems to be about funnelling public money. The charities that support it are the same. The money, power and ideas all seem to move around in circles.

[scepticalwoman]

Good grief! And yet these people lecture women about daring to use our own money to ensure the that removal of the the rights of women and the safeguarding of children is stopped.
Some massive gravy train.

I really hope that some journalist is joining up the dots of all these massively influential people paid from the public purse to pursue their own beliefs at the expense of the rest of society.

[QuietContraryMary]

There's publicly funded jobs for people all over the place with this shit.

E.g., gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FN019067%2F1

"Project consultants will organise two health practitioner training events, which will be co-coordinated with Public Health England. Key target audiences here will be midwives organisations and general practitioners. Dissemination events with health professionals are planned in the UK, US, Australia, Poland and Italy, and are costed into the project's broader impact strategy."

So that's (apparently?) nice tax-payer funded trip to Australia, the US, etc. to teach midwives how to handle pregnant men.

And of course more public cash for the doctors & midwives being paid to be trained in this nonsense.

[QuietContraryMary]

Because of course it has to be

'An International Exploration of Trans Male Experiences' in pregnancy.

A shitty, provincial, West Yorkshire-based exploration of Transmen just wouldn't hit the mark would it.

[QuietContraryMary]

Haha lol these cheeky beggars

"As this is an international project, long-haul travel is necessary."

Yeah I bet it fucking is.

There's new laptops (£900 a piece, wtf?) among lots and lots of other gravy.

It looks like Sally Hines' salary is paid to to the tune of 11.25 hours/week.

lssi.leeds.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Pregnant-men-an-international-exploration-of-trans-male-experiences-and-practices-of-reproduction.pdf

Absolute piss-taking bullshit.

[breastfeedingclownfish]

Ah, got it, she's here

living-gender.leeds.ac.uk/members/advisoryboard/

[ProfessoressWoland]

I'd like to see the research proposals. Are they available by FOI, I wonder?