Aibu? Don't want to include anyone but women

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I recently took up a position at a university and will be undertaking research as part of this.

I had to propose the topic to three senior colleagues and my topic is women in my field - don't want to out myself too much here.

I was able to get almost to the end of my pitch and one of my colleagues cut me off when I said 'women' and stated that surely I meant to include non-binary and transwomen too. Felt like I was under pressure to say yes. So I did.

My field is notoriously difficult for women and I wanted to focus on this. I like to think that I'm open-minded but I just don't know how to handle this, as my colleagues seem very set on being as inclusive as possible.

Am I being unreasonable by fighting to keep my research purely about women?

TBF the number of transwomen experiencing period poverty is about as small as it's possible to be, so the argument made was accurate.

Is there a way you could frame this historically? So prior to (whenever) the field was male-dominated and it was difficult for women to enter and progress. Then something about developments related to sex-specific policies such as maternity leave where you can differentiate by sex. Why have these not been sufficient?
I would start with the group covered by sex-specific maternity legislation given that you want to cover topics like motherhood, and leave open the possibility of extending the study to other groups.
At least from what you have said here.
Work place inequalities have a longer history which relate to discrimination on the basis of sex.

As I understand it, AFAB/AMAB are supposed to be ways for trans people to talk about their past gender identity that was imposed on them by the evil cisnormies. But it's a terrible choice of term even for that, because plenty of biologically female babies are assigned male at birth (and vice versa) due to a simple medical or even clerical error, and go on to be perfectly normal women without any sort of transition (the problem usually gets spotted in a few days).

Until about 20 years ago it was legally impossible for people in France to change their sex, even if they weren't trans-identifying. There were cases of women being called up for compulsory military service (which was for men only then) and also being unable to marry because they had M on their birth certificate due to their sex having been wrongly diagnosed at birth (and they were often not even intersex). In the end the European Court of Human Rights forced France to update their procedures to at least allow mistakes to be corrected. It was pointed out that even Turkey, hardly a hotbed of woke, allowed you to change your sex on your documents.

Obviously I don’t know the exact subject of your research topic, but it might well be the case that some important parts of the issue are the way little girls are encouraged to play, and with what sort of toys, and how popular particular school subjects are with girls, and why that might be, and whether girls are encouraged to do further study in particular school subjects and choose them as A Levels, and whether they have many role models, and whether they are encouraged by school teachers to apply to study that subject at university.

And if any of that is applicable, your research will be compromised and inaccurate if your data includes people who were born and brought up as boys, regardless of whether they think they should have been, or "really were", girls.

Can't you do three or four?

1. Women
2. Transwomen (biological men)
3. Transmen (biological women)
4. Non-binary (?????)

I wouldn't be surprised if you find zero subjects in the last three categories or that the numbers are so small that they are of no research value.

Or if you really want to limit it to just women tell your colleagues that you are only looking at issues faced by the female sex and you don't want any findings to be distorted by the noise of entirely separate problems faced by trans subjects. I think somebody suggested a similar sort of wording on page 1.

If the objective is to correlate reported outcomes with observable parameters such as sex, why not include every category of individual (male/female/trans/not trans) in your data set (so the males are effectively a control group).

With the right questions and analysis, it should be possible to extract the significant correlations whilst identifying and eliminating any confounding effects caused by including trans (eg because numbers too small or because transness itself has a large effect which obscures the sex effect).

You never know what you might find. Though I'd lay odds against a finding that those vulnerable trans ladies are being viciously discriminated against via callous maternity policies.

Jeeze can women not have anything without involving men?

TransWomen are only TransWomen because they are men!!!!

The very fact that some posters are gaslighting the OP into accepting men as women shows how utterly ridiculous this whole subject is!
Regardless of surgery, drugs or twirly skirts, men are not and never will be women!

Maybe include trans men instead of trans women, if you must expand your research!

Can you state it is about female people no matter how they identify? That would include transmen and female non-binary.

I think this explains it perfectly.
Including non-binary or trans-women introduces more factors which could skew the results

Yes because they're not a woman.

Even if they joined your field post transition, their entire past will affect their likelihood of getting there. If for example, female socialisation during childhood makes it less likely girls/young women will acquire the necessary skills, like with STEM subjects or sport etc, that girls aren't encouraged into in the same way boys are. Or if it's an area where been 'pushy' or self-interest helps, the person who has been raised with male privilege is more likely to have these traits, them women/girls who are raised been told to be kid and think of others.

Is it notoriously difficult for trans women who were men until later in life, who were men when they studied and entered and became established academics/professionals?

I'm doing a study on mice. Should I include a few rats? This is what it's feels like, and it surely just skews the data.

Is this the most recent way of shutting women down now? Has the woman's name that is used by certain individuals for this type of thing changed to this ridiculousness?

I suggest that you target “women” without having to define women,

but carefully craft your questions to get to the core questions of your research.

Don’t let it become a controversial research piece, you don’t need to actually say you include special categories of women. It’s just women, let the results tell the story.

Be strict and focused.

You could do a study specifically looking at the trajectories for female nonbinary people versus male nonbinary people

You could look at experiences of nonbinary women vs transmen, correlated with age of a defined transition event

I'm not sure that was such a great answer. Would have been better if she'd challenged the absurdity of the premise that transwomen have periods

I did my top up research on breast implant illness in women i had to write this. I was told to. I don't agree with it btw at all.

'No, males won't be included in my research into issues which specifically affect females. Females who 'identify' as something else will be included as they are, and always will remain female. Obviously'.

How can any research be taken seriously if its basic premise is flawed through using nonsense parameters?

'I'm doing research into issues faced by people who live in a specific Edinburgh suburb, but I'll include people from Surrey who came up for the Festival a couple of years ago and felt that Edinburgh 'really spoke to them'

Hi OP. I understand that you specifically want to look at the experiences of women in your field, specifically cis women.

I also get where your colleagues are coming from. They are challenging you to look at the broader issues and also probably trying to save you from some pushback further down the approvals track.

Some of the possible issues that come to the top of my head are:

• I'm thinking that you could certainly put a call out for cis women subjects only. But then it's not outside the realms of possibility that you might then come up against claims that you have discriminated against non-binary people and trans women.

• You may even find this happens when the project goes to the further ethics committee approval stage, which occurs at all tertiary institutions. Hence your colleagues broaching it with you in the initial discussions.

• Also, even if your proposal got approved as a 'cis women only' project, what are you going to do when someone, say, a trans woman, participates in your project having not declared that they are trans? As they are under no obligation to do so, I could see this could present some challenges for your research in a number of ways.

My opinion, for what it's worth, is that it's therefore probably far more straightforward and reasonable, as some PP have already said, to open the subjects to cis and trans women, and non-binary people from the outset. That way you should also get around the issue of the possible non-declaration of identity.

In your introduction, subjects and methodology, you would obviously define and delineate all subjects, variables etc.

As some PP have also said, the sample size of trans women and non-binary people may be quite small. That is fine and not really an issue for you. You would simply note this for an area of further study in your discussion section.

As for the possibility of confounding factors that other PP have mentioned, such as what ages trans women have transitioned, that is a good point, and an obvious complicating factor. But again you could simply note it as an area for possible future study (and quite a fascinating one for someone to take up, I would say).

Overall, I don't really think this is a major issue unless you want it to be. I get that you wish to focus only on the experiences of cis women in this project. And I still think you will be largely able to do exactly that with some of the provisos I've mentioned. There'll be other issues I haven't thought of, which will no doubt come to light during further levels in the approval process. This is the nature of doing research at the tertiary level.

Try not to get sidetracked by the idea that some PP are espousing that it somehow 'isn't fair' that groups other than cis women may be included. We live in 2025. We are inclusive whether some people like it or not. Solve the research issue at hand.

(Also: a number of ridiculous and clearly false analogies abound in this thread. Ignore all silly comments about race and mice etc. That is all quite foolish and certainly doesn't assist you to solve your research issue. It's just people creating unnecessary drama.)

Best wishes with the project.

'Cis' 🙄

What on earth is a 'cis' woman? Do we have 'cis' any other mammals? Cis-cats? Cis-cows?