Cambridge University ignoring the Supreme Court ruling?

Oh silly me thinking them making an effort to integrate with the world around them might be a better thing.

It would be terrible if they were to learn the wrong thing from their work place like men and women can function together without anyone going off the deep end because they caught sight of a stray piece of hair.

Or that women don't have to cover themselves up in order to work, that women can face the world uncovered and still be unmolested at the end of the day.

We wouldn't want anyone to learn about the benefits of living in a tolerant, secular world we.

No. I'm saying that taking steps, which have no impact on others bar being reminded to respect the basic manners of not barging into someone's office, to make the women of a religious minority feel more comfortable at work is a good thing. The alternative is to put them in offices with men where they'd have to keep their head scarves, and in several cases face veils, on at all times.

Are you saying a segregated work place is a good thing.

@KaleidoscopeSmile put it much more succinctly 😀

I'd like to introduce you to a few concepts:

• Preference falsification, where someone outwardly professes an opinion that they privately disagree with.
• Power imbalance, where someone has more power than others in a given situation and so can influence those others unduly.
• Ostracism, where a group shuns or expels one of its members to that member's disadvantage.

Can you see how, in a situation where you have power in a teacher-student relationship and are promoting the TWAW view, the students might feign agreement to avoid ostracism?

Hell, I keep as quiet as I can at work because I cannot contribute to the legal case crowdfunders run by braver women than me if I lose my job, which wouldn't have to be accomplished by a misconduct process but could instead be accomplished by letting peers bully me out. And I'm not a student whose one chance at getting a top degree depends on me keeping my head down.

Forgive me @SwirlyGates but I am being lazy and quoting you rather than the original poster of the passage you quoted.

........I dont believe that the 'media' are selling a belief that trans people are inherently dangerous. In fact the opposite could be claimed, that a lot of media outlets continually platform people who attempt to sell the lie that trans people are incapable of being dangerous by dint of being trans. That the trans status automatically means that theymust never be viewed as potentially being dangerous otherwise transphobia is screamed from the rooftops.

What I do believe is that trans people are humans like any other people and are just as capable of being dangerous as any other person. I believe that sex is a much greater identifier of potential risk thangender identity and no human can change sex.

That poster was talking about accommodation spaces, not teaching spaces.

There's very good reasons for accommodation spaces to be single-sex, which is why Newnham and ME were set up and is why US universities have sorority houses. Safeguarding, being able to relax without having to have one's guard up against male aggression, and being able to have a conversation without men dominating it are all great reasons.

I'd argue that there are arguments for some single-sex teaching spaces too, having benefitted myself from an all-girl secondary. But that's beyond the scope of a thread about colleges founded to provide accommodation and pastoral support to women within a mostly-male (at the time) university.

Muslim women who wear the hijab feel constrained to keep it on if there's a possibility of a man seeing them, whereas in a single sex environment they can relax and take it off.

My experience of working somewhere that had large open-plan offices and some small shared offices, say four-to-eight desks, and a lot of veil-wearing Muslim ladies was that, very quietly and without any formal declaration of this non-policy activity, the Muslim women somehow magically would be grouped into the small shared offices with no men in those offices, and would work with the door shut and a sign up that said "please knock and wait for a reply".

It's amazing what an observant and sensitive departmental secretary can do, very discreetly, to make people more comfortable at work.

selffellatingouroborosofhate
we would be called TERFs, fascists, Nazis, dinosaurs, and worse. We would be threatened with rape, torture, and murder. We would get no empathy at all from the trans side

quite often by the students whom oxfordfeminist assures us are tolerant. To be fair to them, they don't as a rule threaten rape, torture or murder, because the women they would be threatening with these things would be likely to be able to identify them in a court of law. But these oh so tolerant small-minded gits definitely set out to make into a little hell for her the life of any woman who dares to dispute their certainty that theirs is the only possible viewpoint.

How tolerant is it to no-platform someone for daring to speak facts you find inconvenient?

It's disgraceful that Dr Padman has been placed in this situation.

Even when opposing his appointment, Greer shows empathy to Padman in her recognition that the college has failed him by not saying "no" in private when it had the chance, putting him in the situation where the incorrectness of his appointment and his medical history has become public knowledge.

If the situation were reversed, we would be called TERFs, fascists, Nazis, dinosaurs, and worse. We would be threatened with rape, torture, and murder. We would get no empathy at all from the trans side.

I wasn’t allowed to study Economics for A level. My girls-only school didn’t offer it, and they wouldn’t let me go to the partner boys school, which did.

Perhaps Economics was seen as unwomanly at the time.

For general admission, FWS means that's already the case. For exceptional admissions, we don't actually want to lose the flexibility a single-sex school has to accept opposite-sex pupils from another school for specific classes in order to make a subject cost-effective to run.

Yes, I'm still sore that I wasn't allowed to attempt Further Maths because there weren't enough other girls wanting to do it.

@MyAmpleSheep wrote
Education in Cambridge is provided on a university-wide basis, coeducationally. Lectures and exams are provided by the various university departments and not by the individual colleges. A women-only college provides accommodation and pastoral services for women, and (in some cases) tutorials. It's not intended to be a segregated education soup-to-nuts, and I wouldn't support it if it was.

I agree with most of your post, but not “college provides…. (In some cases) tutorials.”

A distinctive feature of Cambridge, Oxford and possibly other universities (Durham?) is that students have weekly one to two (or one to one, or one to a small group) hour-long supervisions (called tutorials or tutes at Oxford). Students can miss lectures but they cannot avoid supervisions.

To check this I’ve just spoken to someone who did Maths as a first degree at Cambridge. She normally did four courses each term, so had four supervisions every week.

Some people make a living acting as supervisors. Work is set in advance (eg essays, or questions for Maths) and discussed in the supervision. College pays for this: if they don’t have a relevant person as a supervisor, perhaps for a course without many students on it, students may go to another college for their supervision but their own college pays for it.

Don’t underestimate the value of a college to a Cambridge (or Oxford) student’s academic education. They are not just the equivalent of a hall of residence + occasional pastoral support at another university.
At Newnham, at least in their first year, a student may be having four supervisions every week, each with a fellow Newnham student, very possibly in a fairly small room with just them and their supervisor. It may be very important to the students that they are both biological women.

At least Geography - a friend of mine stumbled on a news article a few years back.
Will PM you.

Nailed it.

need to change your name, this isn’t feminism

I agree. In fact, that is part of what I was getting at. If the category is "male applicants with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment", then the question becomes what legal basis exists for admitting those males while excluding other males. That seems to me to be one of the legal difficulties the college would need to address.

'Course they don't express any discomfort.

"Oxford feminist" my arse

Students in general are ... not bothered about self-id

That would be a reasonable argument for changing the law. It's a terrible argument for ignoring it or violating it.

What would you have said and done if they did say they felt very uncomfortable?

It probably doesn't really happen because they have already been so brainwashed into #BeKind and 'people are whoever they say they are' at Secondary school. I know DC's school even had a list of protected characteristics up and instead of gender reassignment they'd just put 'gender'.

There is no easy way for kids to say 'I don't agree' without being viewed in the same way someone with racist or homophobic views would. They don't want that so they all think they have to believe that boys/men can be girls/women if they want and vice versa and stay quiet if they don't.

There's an interesting thread by Professor Alice Sullivan analysing some data on student attitudes: https://x.com/ProfAliceS/status/2064693670264136073

The question asked in the survey is about biological males who identity as women using female changing rooms, which seems a reasonable proxy for dismantling single sex spaces in general. A clear majority of students are opposed, with only white middle-class female humanities students in favour.

This may partly explain why TRAs in that demographic may have the erroneous view that theirs is the majority view in general. It's not.

a defined category of male applicants will be considered for admission year after year

I would ask what is this defined category of men, and what could it be other than "men who hold the protected characteristic of gender reassignment".

This could no more be lawful than "men who are not Jewish" or "men who are white".

I'd say given the way you approach things, there's no way a student would feel comfortable speaking up about males in female spaces.

I'm a retired barrister, so there are others here who may be more up to date on the latest developments, but I don't think the legal position is clear cut.

It seems to me there are at least four possible avenues of challenge.

First, a challenge based on direct sex discrimination. If a college describes itself as a women's college, but admits some males on the basis of gender identity, one immediately has to ask what admissions criterion is actually being applied. Is the institution operating a sex-based admissions policy or not?

Secondly, there is the position of male applicants. If females are admitted, and some males are admitted, but other males are excluded, the question becomes on what legal basis that distinction is being drawn. The answer may well be Schedule 12, but that rather assumes the exemption is available in the first place.

Thirdly, and to my mind most interestingly, there is the college's reliance on Schedule 12 itself. The exemption exists to permit genuinely single-sex institutions. Newnham appears to rely on the provision allowing the exceptional admission of students of the opposite sex.

However, if there is a settled policy under which a defined category of male applicants will be considered for admission year after year, it is at least arguable that this is no longer "exceptional" in any ordinary sense of the word.

If that argument succeeded, the foundation for relying on the exemption may fall away.

Fourthly, I can see the possibility of a judicial review challenge. Universities exercise public functions, and a claimant might argue that the college has misdirected itself in law, misunderstood the meaning of "sex" in the Equality Act, or adopted a policy inconsistent with the statutory scheme.

What concerns people most here is men in women's protected spaces, facilities and categories. Men who 'identify as' women are still male. If they identified 'with' women, rather than 'as' women they may show a lot more empathy and consideration and not impose themselves in this way.

Have you ever considered that some women may well feel too intimidated to voice their discomfort, certainly if their tutors are waving the flags and delivering the spiel too.