Newnham College Cambridge restricts women’s fellowships …

Well, if there were tantrums over the fellowship being restricted to women-only, just wait til they fix the admissions policy.

The "Feminist Gender Equality Network" reminds me of that famous comment about the Holy Roman Empire: 'Neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.'

I'm so glad I left academia in the UK a couple of decades ago due to ill-health. I would have been cancelled and hounded out by the blue-haired gender-special overgrown children who seem to run the place now. As it is, I still have to keep my feminism [the real thing, not that meretricious, MRA-in-all-but-name nonsense-on-stilts paraded around by the FGEN] on the down-low.

I attended an Oxbridge mixed-sex college in the 70s, but was sad when several of the traditionally female colleges went co-ed, and I am still glad my school was single-sex. Here's hoping Newnham hold the line.

Aaaah! ...... That explains the de-peopled TIFs

If entrance criteria allows all women but only some men to apply, aren't they just one court case away from being forced to be mixed sex?

Feminist Gender Equality Network. Run by Natacha Kennedy, he who partners with his male self to co-author papers.

Aims

• advance the understanding of gender and sex as fluid categories
• protect the rights and needs of people of all (or no) gender
• counter transphobia and transmisogyny in social life and institutions, legal structures, political movements and media and cultural representation
• counter sexism and gender-based violence and discrimination
• further intersectional understanding and political mobilisation to stress the relationship between gender marginalisation and other social inequalities
• forward self and bodily autonomy and reproductive choice and rights

Men's rights organisation.

I am very glad to hear this indeed! Newnham should be about and for women, not men.

I also don’t think we can assume anything about what relatives in the past may have thought. I’m like a PP in that if I’d been offered a place in Newnham in the 80s I would have turned it down, partly because I come from a heavily Newnhamite family and partly because I saw single sex provision as obsolete. Maybe my past relatives would have felt the same? I can’t be certain. Goodness knows a lot of women have been front and centre in promoting TRA views, from a variety of angles.

The solipism is shocking. But wholly unsurprising.

I think it’s important to recognise that this announcement comes in the context of the SC ruling and is a positive development suggesting a direction of travel under the current Fellowship. Decisions made in the past in this field take a lot of unpicking. There may or may not be an appetite to tackle undergraduate admissions now as well - I would have thought they would have to from a legal perspective.

Strachey used to have Jack and Jill bathrooms, but the knocked it down (due to corroding concrete or something), i haven't seen the replacement.

But some students cho(o)se Newnham because it is/was single sex....

Something very special will be lost if they fuck this up. I helped out at the ceremony in 1998 where they celebrated 50 years of women being awarded degrees rather than just studying. We had so many elderly women come, I spoke to several in their 90s, because the apology from the vice chancellor on behalf of the university meant so much to them. They had amazing stories to tell, I definitely never took my dress off in the street to climb over the railings after curfew like some of them. It was a wonderful weekend.

Of course. How typical of an MRA organisation.

They de-peopled TIFs in their statement (as in literally ceased to exist in their world)🦧

Great.
I support opportunities for transmen and women.
Why is that transphobic?

Maybe the transwomen should ask for a scholarship programme just for transwomen?
Just a thought.

The joy of working in a Regulated industry is "OOoops waa that the law I broke" is not a get out of Jail card.

Staff are in for a culture shock when the legislation rolls down to the individual.

'I’m convinced that there are biological differences between male and female brains

Most people like to think that gendered behaviour is mostly a question of conditioning.

Lately I’ve been reading primatologist Frans De Waal’s books about chimpanzees and bonobos, whose ancestors only split off from ours six million years ago — I’m interested in how like ours their societies are.

He reveals how deep-seated male and female behaviours are. Young female chimps carry stick “dolls”. Adolescent females beg to be allowed to hold the babies.'

'I guess those parts of my own brain are just miswired'

Padman. https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/cambridge-university-lgbt-history-month-14233154

I was being slow on the uptake because I had forgotten, or never knew, that Newnham is still single-sex.

They're only exempt from sex-discrimination law in this case because there's a pre-1990 instrument (the 1917 College Charter) requiring them to appoint women as fellows. Their announcement refers to Article 3 (attached) which is about promoting women's education generally, but the College Statutes presumably contain more by way of detail.

Schedule 22 para 3 is about employment. I don't know why single-sex colleges are allowed under the Act, but they clearly are. AI thinks it's a Schedule 3 matter, and might very well be right, but there could (also) be a relevant 'enactment' under Schedule 22 para 1 for all I know (the Act contains its own provisions for single-sex schools).

Whatever. If the college is to get out from under its sex equality obligations under the Act, it has to obey its Charter and any relevant laws and - if it's relying on Schedule 3 - admit only biological females as undergraduates.

Why am I banging on about this? Because it's just one example of the way in which civil society (insofar as it embodies different or separate treatment of the two sexes) is held together by a Heath-Robinson arrangement of laws, instruments, and custom. This plays into TRA's hands by making the application of the SC ruling beyond a tight reading of EA2010 itself tricky, if institutions can't be persuaded to do the right thing. And it seems quite a few of them can't.

Ah.

'[he] was publicly outed as transgender in 1997, when [he] was elected as a fellow of Newnham College, one of Cambridge’s three all-female colleges.
The decision was strongly opposed by feminist academic and Newnham fellow Germaine Greer, who insisted Dr Padman should be removed, or forced to resign.'

https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/cambridge-university-lgbt-history-month-14233154

https://newn.cam.ac.uk/newnham-news/newnham-academic-receives-gay-times-honour

And I wouldn’t be surprised if this happened.

Excellent work Newnham

Re Murray Edwards, they were mixed sex at postgrad and fellow level anyway. Newnham was the only (supposedly) purely women’s college. Until they introduced self ID about 5/6 years ago, they only admitted female undergrads. (No idea how many males they’ve accepted since then).

Legally, any man could challenge the admissions criteria as discriminatory.

Well done Newnham but 🤦‍♀️ for the admissions criteria. Here’s hoping it catches up.

Doesn't seem like intellectual cowardice to me.

Although the additional info that @ArabellaScott has posted is worrying.

Good.
Another Newnhamite here.