Aibu? Don't want to include anyone but women

[Getthatwindowclosed]

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?

Say it's for cis women. I hate that term but it should help keep your colleugues them happy. And to justify it, says it's because you belive that transwomen have their own set of issues and barriers in the industry and you didn't want those to skew the results. Can't argue with that, surely

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

Surely you are already aware. However, as a quick google will inform you:

Cisgender is a term that is used to describe people whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. For example, someone who was assigned female at birth (AFAB) and identifies as a woman is a cisgender woman.

The rest of your question is of course spurious.

I mean, that's just a jumble of ideological jargon though, isn't it? Using latin prefixes co-opted by social science researchers in 1994 for the purpose of making women a subset of their own sex category is laughable. And sex is observed and recorded at birth (and often before), not assigned.

No point pandering to the realityphobes by using their jargon. By their standards it's just as transphobic to exclude transwmen by saying you're only interested in 'cis' women's existence as it is to exclude them by saying you're only interested in women.

assign

verb
past tense: assigned; past participle: assigned
1.
allocate (a job or duty).
"Congress had assigned the task to the agency"

designate or set (something) aside for a specific purpose.
"managers happily assign large sums of money to travel budgets"

But your word-salad arguement is based on the pretense that the sex of mammal babies is "assigned" at birth?

I’d simply state that the research subjects are women, then put a foot note in which you state that “by ‘women’ you refer to women that other literature and research may define as: ‘cis’ [ref], non-binary biological females [ref], persons AFAB [ref] and that for the purposes of your research, definition excludes TW, AMAB, etc.” and then I’d not mention it again… this is, in fact, along the lines of what I plan to do provided I can do so without sounding to arsey.

Rather than AFAB, at least follow Cass and use the less ridiculous 'registered' (or it may have been 'recorded') instead of 'assigned'.

Your research is about sex, not gender identity. If you include trans women then your study is no longer about women, It’s about both sexes. So that’s what you make clear. Absolute bloody idiot colleagues of yours don’t seem to be aware that literally nobody actually changes sex and women’s challenges are just that.

That doesn't really help because non-binary people will still have menopause and maternity issues if they are biologically female.

I think the challenger must have meant transmen, not transwomen. Transwomen are biologically male and do not have periods. It would be nonsensical to include them in research into period poverty.

surely that would open up the topic too much - I would suggest they specifically need their own research project the results would be skewed otherwise…just you won’t be doing it

Sseeeeeeeexxxxxxxx!!!!it's sex!!! For God's sake, if you could 'identify out of your gender' we should probably let the women of Afghanistan ,as the Taliban would have no way of knowing who to oppress!!!

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the questioner did mean transwomen...

Post transition would definitely matter. A whole different set of inclusion issues to women, everyone would know they are male.

Does this actually head it off? Well done 👏

Exactly.

Agreed. We are living in times when apparently logic and biology don't matter. Hopefully sanity will start being restored on this side of the pond too.