article in The Oxford Student:
'Students Condemn ‘Transphobic’ St Hilda’s Professor
29th April 2019 by Grace Davis
(extract)
"Professor Selina Todd, a professor of Modern History and tutor at St Hilda’s College, has been accused of being ‘transphobic’ by St Hilda’s students, after she was found to be retweeting transphobic groups on Twitter.
Amongst these include the parody twitter account ‘British Gay Eugenics’. She retweeted a tweet from this group which joked: “Please join our MASSIVE thanks to @stonewalluk, @ruth_hunt, Gendered Intelligence, & Mermaids UK for helping #transawaythegay.
“Parents, there is an alternative to having an embarrassing gay son or lesbian daughter! All it takes is timely intervention!” (continues)
As well as this, Professor Todd has retweeted several tweets from the group Women’s Place UK, and Fairplay for Women, which have previously been condemned by Oxford SU LGBTQ+ Campaign for being “transphobic” and “threatening trans people’s rights and safety”.
She is set to speak at the third London meeting of Women’s Place UK on 20th May this year, alongside Meghan Murphy, Julie Bindel, Nina Malik, and Ruth Serwotka.
On her website, Professor Todd describes herself as a “a gender critical feminist, [who faces] intimidation via social media about expressing my views, sharing the evidence that informs those views, and calling for a debate.”
She then goes on to claim: “Like every other gender critical feminist I know, I encountered the current debate about whether transgender people should be able to self-identify as such (without fulfilling other legal and medical requirements) from the instinctive standpoint that I wanted to support transpeople’s rights. But after months of research, I concluded that this position would harm the rights of women, because so often what is being asked for is free access to women-only spaces.
“I then began to question the whole premise that someone can ‘transition’ from being a man to a woman or vice versa.”
She adds: “You can’t change sex – biologically, that is impossible. And the notion that people can ‘feel’ like a woman or like a man seems socially conservative, implying as it does that being a woman rests on dressing or behaving in a ‘feminine’ way. Being a woman rests both on certain biological facts and on the experience of living in the world as a woman, from birth, an experience that is shaped by particular kinds of oppressions.
“A movement that claims to be advocating a liberating kind of ‘fluidity’ is in fact reinforcing and promoting highly conservative gendered stereotypes.” (continues)
www.oxfordstudent.com/2019/04/29/oxford-professor-found-tweeting-transphobic-tweets/
I heard Selina Todd speak a few years ago about her recent book, 'The People: the Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910–2010'. She's brilliant & an inspiring speaker
Background Wiki
"Selina Todd was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1975 and, after schooling at a state comprehensive, she completed her undergraduate degree in history at Warwick University. After working in Canada and Cuba, she took a master of arts degree and then a doctor of philosophy degree in history at the University of Sussex.
Career
After holding a Scouloudi Fellowship and Economic and Social Research Council Post-doctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research, Todd was elected to the Ottilie Hancock Research Fellowship in History at Girton College, Cambridge, in 2004. The following year, she was appointed a lecturer at Warwick University, and in 2007 took a lectureship in modern British history at the University of Manchester. In 2010, she was appointed a Fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and a lecturer in history at the University of Oxford In 2015, she was awarded the title of Professor of Modern History by the university. She is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and, as of 2016, is vice-principal of St Hilda's.
Todd's research focuses on the history of the working-class, gender and feminism in modern Britain.
In July 2017, it was announced that Todd had accepted nomination as the President of the Socialist Educational Association."