Future of Legal Gender academic talk

[Pota2]

Here is a twitter thread from someone who attended:

mobile.twitter.com/sarahstuartxx/status/1190048225161621504

It’s so depressing, it makes me want to cry. Is this supposed to be progressive? Professor Cooper, you’re right, you are fucking useless. The MNers had it spot on. You’re spending public money to try to make a name for yourself. I don’t for a second think that you genuinely believe this nonsense (or think that pointing out that male and female bodies are different is biological essentialism because it clearly isn’t). You’re chasing the cash. I hope you think it’s worth it.

[Ereshkigal]

Someone replying on the Twitter thread echoed what I think about this. These people are indeed batshit crazy. Why are they being given money to piss up the wall on such utterly unworkable nonsense?

[Pota2]

Really sad that that three quarters of a million of public money could have gone towards essential work needed to protect women and girls from violence.

Like you say, what they are suggesting is nonsense. It makes no odds whether sex is on our birth certificates for the purpose of discrimination. It’s whether we are visibly male or visibly female that determines whether we are discriminated against. If there is an X in my passport it doesn’t mean people will start treating me differently. All it will do is mean that there is no official record of women being treated worse and no means to challenge through sex discrimination laws. Cannot see a single thing that will be improved by it except maybe Professor Cooper’s salary and career.

[Ereshkigal]

It's like when Cameron pledged to "make child poverty history" and then the government literally stopped measuring child poverty. It doesn't take a genius of Cooper's calibre (heavy sarcasm) to realise that erasing all mention of a problem doesn't solve it.

[Pota2]

Exactly. Why don’t we stop recording statistics about race too? After all, we’re all part of the human race.
The state’s role in terms of birth certificates and passports is for statistical purposes. We’d know we were male or female without it, and long before official records started to be kept, people knew it. Therefore, the only possible effect it will have is to make it impossible to prove that certain groups are disadvantaged. The key is to tackle gender-norms and actually the work of first and second wave feminists who fought discrimination on the basis of SEX had massive massive positive effects. Maybe Cooper should show some gratitude for that work which has enabled her to be able to claim hundreds of thousands of public funds to indulge her own nonsensical musings. Had she been born 100 years ago, that wouldn’t have been possible.

[nettie434]

That twitter thread was very informative Pota2. I can't see how not recording sex or gender on a birth certificate can make the remotest bit of difference when so much stuff marketed at all of us is so gender stereotyped. Will it stop gender reveal parties, pink or blue decors for children's nurseries and selective sex embryo selection in dubious clinics across the world. Perhaps they'll start delaying FGM until children have decided what gender they want to be? Legal gender can't operate in a vacuum.

[Pota2]

Yes, nettie, exactly. It won’t, will it? We haven’t had birth certificates and passports for that long but I am pretty sure that it wasn’t a haven of equality before that.
The idea that medical professionals assign you a gender is bullshit too. Some babies are born at home with no medical intervention so cannot be described as having anything assigned. Doesn’t make them any less susceptible to gender stereotypes.

Under Professor Cooper’s model, nothing is done to challenge stereotypes. Instead, we pretend that they are freely chosen and therefore great.

[Waterl00]

Interesting Q&A posted by Sarah

Q: How do you determine what trans health care is if sex isn’t recognised? If a woman asks for breast augmentation for cosmetic reasons can she have it? Or does it only depend on whether the person is trans (i.e. a man)?

A: It could be psychologically evaluated, could consider what other politics is involved. Moreover trans people wouldn’t have to prove they were trans anymore. Sometimes women need breasts reduction because they have bad backs.

So Prof Cooper tells us that in genderless future a male human can go to a GP and ask for cosmetic breast implants on the NHS and he is "psychologically evaluated" to see if he needs them. No need to say he's trans, just that he is suicidal and will take an overdose if he doesn't get a pair.

I am honestly rather bemused by this.

[Pota2]

Wow, the mental gymnastics you have to perform to think that’s a coherent argument. The only beneficiaries of this that I can see are the small number of people who see themselves as non-binary and even they are only able to do so due to the existence of a gender binary.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to get rid of gender stereotypes and norms. But whatever it says in my passport, my body remains the same. There needs to be some sort of record of what sort of body I have because of the historical and current prejudice against it. This proposal doesn’t do anything about stereotypes (it wants us to ‘choose’ which stereotype we prefer....). It does want to get rid of an official record about my body. It’s especially concerning in the light of Caroline Criado-Perez’s research on the exclusion of female bodies in so many different areas. We need more attention to the body and what the body needs, not less. For that, we need some sort of record-keeping.

[Ereshkigal]

Yes this the opposite of Caroline Criado Perez's Invisible Women. It's not supposed to be a manual.

[Ali86]

Surely the best way for her to do this project is to look at countries and times where the state did not 'sex us' and then compare rates of 'male violence and female oppression'. E.g. pre-1837 England or the current position in Afghanistan (where less than half of children have a birth certificate). I am sure the comparisons would be illuminating.

[Waterl00]

The only beneficiaries of this that I can see are the small number of people who see themselves as non-binary and even they are only able to do so due to the existence of a gender binary.

How do they benefit though? What are the tangible benefits? They are happier because no-one can enforce legal obligations based on the words man and woman anymore in law?

If you think you are not a woman or a man then you are welcome to opt yourself out of the Equal Pay Act. Just don't use it. Go ahead. Wrecking it for everyone else may make you feel "valid" but it is massively "privileged" to wreck this for others who still need it.

[Pota2]

Ali86 ah yes, Afghanistan. That famous bastion of gender equality. It’s so so dumb. This is why it’s so convenient to be able to label any dissent as bigoted hatred.

[Pota2]

Waterl00, oh, no tangible benefit beyond feelz of course. But yeah, instead of trying to free all people of the harmful effects of gender stereotypes, NB people instead remove themselves and label themselves as special and different to all the other girls/boys. How progressive.

It’s also amazing how neoliberal this all is. It’s all about the individual and the rational mind being detached from the body. Ironic because many of the people who peddle this stuff claim to be left-wing and go round calling each other ‘comrade’.

[stumbledin]

Hi - this whole fake project has come up on a number of threads, because:

1. the enormous amount of money it received
   
2. the survey used had invalid questions
   
3. the academics, the funders and the university all failed to respond or actively censored any criticism of it.
   
   This was the last thread and in that it has all the previous threads - for anyone who is interested!
   
   www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3710099-What-if-the-state-no-longer-sexed-us-Meeting-in-London-on-30-October

[stumbledin]

I just dont know if people who do this work genuinely believe any of it, or that it has become such a gravy train for so many people - and an ego trip as they will get plaudits from all the hyper woke fanatics who seem to be obsessed with denying the reality of women as a sex, the reality that sex is the basis on which women experience, disrimination and violence.

The capture of the media being the most significant thing they have done.

Imagine in MSM reported as being of the utmost important comments on mumsnet, in the same way as the report tweets as somehow being the most significant source of representation of current thought.

[Pota2]

Thanks for the link to the previous thread.

As for whether they believe it, I think a large part is the money it generates. That sort of cash will lead you to command a high salary from your university or be promoted to professor if you aren’t already. I also think it’s ivory tower syndrome. Many academics have never worked outside academia and think that it’s like that in all other areas of society. While there are problems in academia in terms of sex discrimination and harassment, it’s nothing like other sectors. If you think real life is like academia, of course you would advocate for stuff like that because the unpleasant aspects of sex discrimination have never and will never affect you.

Kathleen Stock tweeted a list of Prof Cooper’s previous publications. They are very middle class, navel gazing pie in the sky on the whole. Lots of ‘queering’ things. Zero engagement with issues like domestic violence, female poverty, sexual abuse, or unequal division of care. These things and the impact her proposals will have on them obviously aren’t on Prof Cooper’s radar. Must be a nice position to be in but not an option for many women.

[stumbledin]

I promised myself I wouldn't get caught up on this again, but have just looked at the home page of the project and right there on the home page, they talk about babies growing up without a "legal gender".

This is a law project and they dont even know that nobody in this country has a legal gender.

And yet in the paragraph before (which shows they are aware of criticisms) they say "we use gender here to emphasise the social character of this categorisation".

If this is the level of university work then everybody who has been conned into taking out a loan to get a university education should get their money back.

Apart from the nonsense of their ideas it is just so appallingly badly and unprofessional.

They should all be ashamed of themselves and the university should be deregistered.

[stumbledin]

missing link to project futureoflegalgender.kcl.ac.uk/

[nettie434]

What worries me about all this is that the debate is being led by individuals who have led quite privileged lives. I am very willing to believe a woman professor of gender studies has faced far less discrimination of any kind compared with a trans woman from a lower socio economic background, particularly if the trans woman is perceived not to 'pass' very well in her preferred gender. However, this analysis completely ignores the sex based discrimination that also exists. Even in this country where FGM has been illegal for many years, I think there has still only been one successful prosecution for carrying out or facilitating FGM. FGM doesn't exist because of gender stereotyping. It's misogyny. In the same way, it's not because of transphobia that I would get short shrift if I decided to identify as a man in Afghanistan.

These very privileged people think it is ok if they are responsible for decisions that disproportionately affect poorer women and girls from marginalised communities. That is what upsets me.

[Ereshkigal]

I genuinely don't understand how people like this rise to the top and get given huge grants. It's such Emperors New Clothes bollocks.

[Pota2]

It is infuriating. They must have convinced themselves that they are doing the right thing and are being progressive by pissing on the centuries of feminist work before them that has allowed them to now have the freedom to spout this idiocy.

One of the worst things is their constant dismissal of radical feminism as biological essentialism when it’s the exact opposite. But how how can they explain why we are not all subject to the same gender norms? Why are some of us expected to perform femininity and some us masculinity? Is it really due to the state assigning a gender or could it maybe be that women are recognisably different to men in their bodies and that it’s this that determines how we are treated? You know just like animals don’t have a ‘state’ assigning gender but still manage to mate and reproduce, so evidently recognise sexual dimorphism.

That blog post from the other thread was also infuriating. Wide-eyed ‘oh I can’t believe the hate, those statements were innocuous and are commonly used in social research’. Totally obscuring the point that they were forcing people to accept a contentious statement through answering the question. ‘I feel I have been oppressed due to being a woman’ is fine. ‘I feel I have been oppressed due to my gender identity’ requires acceptance that there is an innate gender identity and that this causes oppression. Big difference. Either they are very thick or they are totally disingenuous. I don’t know which is more worrying tbh.

[Pota2]

nettie you’re so right. They are middle class, largely high-ranking so presumably financially well-off too. All of them are white. None of them have any history of working with poor or working class women or victims of male violence, either in the UK or abroad.
futureoflegalgender.kcl.ac.uk/people/

[Fallingirl]

It’s the same blatant denial of the existence of any power structures at all. -the belief that ‘gender’ has no social, or socialised, aspect, that result in a sense of entitlement in males and a collective belief that women and girls should always be kind.

This nonsense assumes that an unkind women and an unkind man would be met with identical responses from others. We know that isn't true. We also know that the current trans ideology is only making such massive headway because it is backed by affluent, white men.

It is not just misogynist, it is academicially sloppy. -and ironically, overlooking power-structures is not foucauldian at all.

[MarieIVanArkleStinks]

While there are problems in academia in terms of sex discrimination and harassment, it’s nothing like other sectors.

As someone standing inside academia, I have to tell you that you couldn't be more wrong. Sexual harrassment etc is absolutely rife in Higher Education. Universities have a bad name for this, which is all the more worrying in a supposedly 'enlightened' sector that is left-leaning and has traditionally concerned itself with inequalities. I've been seriously ill - ended up having PTSD diagnosed - as a result of being sexually harrassed and stalked by a male colleague, which although I didn't know it at the time triggered a whole host of issues relating to past abuse. A close colleague has recently had to deal with appalling threats of sexual violence made to her during the course of her work, with the result that she can't leave the premises to go home unchaperoned and is living in a state of constant stress and fear. These are not isolated cases. Meet with other academics at conferences up and down the country, and you hear myriad variations on the same story - so many women have similar experiences to relate of which sex-based discrimination is only the mildest. Yet the 'T' word (the acronym, that is) looms large in keeping people quiet out of fear of losing not only their academic credibility, but also their livelihoods.

My observation in my workplace is that misogyny is being legitimized by the recent assaults on women's protection and women's rights, and that this has become demonstrably worse over the past 5 years. And the more ground we lose in relation to our protected spaces etc., the more I suspect this kind of abuse will increase.

I'm bitterly resentful of politics like those the OP has related above, which are contributing to this madness in my once-valued work-space. I'm also in a peculiar catch-22. LGBTQ and non-binary colleagues and friends - one of the most collegial, inclusive, lovely bunch of people I've worked with in a recent project on sexuality (albeit in a different period) - would probably never speak to me again if they could see my more recent mindset. Sadly, this division is becoming inevitable. I have no intention of ceding over my rights as a woman or of accepting the legitimizing of homophobia and misogyny that the TRAs have made commonplace. Added to which, my employer is neck-deep in 'Allies' - an organization that was supposed to represent my interests and now no longer does. There's a very legitimate risk that voicing views like these could lose me my job.

I'm a relatively recent convert to 'Peak Trans'. As a victim of rape and violent sexual abuse, it took two campaigns to help me see the light: #MeToo (or, more accurately, its backlash) and the 'cotton ceiling'. This kind of coercive rhetoric has shown me all-too loudly and clearly what women are dealing with here: an ideology that's rapidly pushing any gains women have made toward equality back into the dark ages.

Academics and feminists who don't buy into this shit are in a seriously precarious position. I've seen colleagues de-platformed. Horrific threats are made against them as a matter of course. Even so-called moderate colleagues are unsympathetic to the 'TE*Fs'. They're then disappeared from social media and gone to ground. It's only the very well-known ones who are able to stick their heads over the parapet and keep their positions (and even they're bullied relentlessly) - others arre effectively silenced. And I suspect others as well as me are newish to waking up to these issues and are contemplating how they're going to negotiate it.

I'm considering how to bring these issues into my current work in a way that tries to resist these trends, but I'm aware I'm swimming against a prevailing tide that's running fast in the opposite direction. Taking on such a task is going to require a lot of thought. I'm under no illusions about the risks it carries, but the alternative is capitulating to this misogyny and remaining silent is tantamount to rolling over, accepting it, and admitting we've lost.

Universities are not sequestered. Their staff live in the real world too. Many of us have suffered very real consequences because of the bullying and abuse that's rife in academia. And we too look at the Emperor and see, not only that he doesn't have any pretty, feminine new clothes on, but that he has a bloody great todger and it's swinging in carefree abandon for all to see.

[MarieIVanArkleStinks]

Apologies for rambling post - I hit 'post' instead of preview so it's unedited.