Our article on gender self-ID and policy capture in Scottish public policy

[MurrayBlackburnMackenzie]

We wanted to bring your attention to an article in the academic journal Scottish Affairs, which has been published today. It’s about gender self-identification, Scottish public policymaking and policy capture, a topic we’ve seen debated in FWR on more than one occasion!

We’re delighted to say the article is published on an open access basis, so you can all read the full text and share it as you see fit on social media and elsewhere.

www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/scot.2019.0284

We think Mumsnet is an important resource for women and we have definitely benefitted from following debates on here.

Like so many women involved in this debate, we have been doing this work in our own time on an unpaid basis, squeezed around work, childcare and other responsibilities. We do this work because we care very much about women's rights and we are pleased to be able to bring our skills to bear in analysing policy and practice.

You can read more about the work we’ve done to date on our blog. We welcome all feedback, so please do drop us a line via our contact form.

www.mbmpolicy.wordpress.com

Thank you!

Thank you for all your outstanding work and for the update. The piece by Cowan and the ubiquitous Harry Giles is dreadful - so unprofessional and just rude!

Your response is blistering - I hope they are suitably chastened (I know, they'd have to be able to do self-reflection), but you rightly demolished them!

That link brings up an abstract.

Please post a link to the full article or instructions to find it.

Brilliant, thank you guys (gals?) so very much for doing this :)

Hi Kath, Lucy and Lisa

I just wanted to say thank you for all the work you are doing, publishing articles in reputable journals and having to fight against the horrific backlash that this brings. You all deserve medals and I can’t imagine being that brave.

I have read Cowan et al’s article and was struck by how weak it was and how little it engaged with your argument. It’s so ironic that they proclaim their own work to be rigorous and scholarly when it fails to make coherent points and vastly misrepresents the arguments it is supposed to be addressing. On the other hand, your articles are well-written, succinct and engaged, and, importantly, they are accessible to a range of readers. I just find it so incredible that the weak scholarship is rewarded (lots of people fawning over it, saying how wonderful it is) and the well-reasoned work leads to its authors being hounded and their jobs being threatened.

Cowan et al and many other members of the academic profession strike me as school bullies. You are either part of their in-group or you are an outcast. It’s quite horrible watching it happen and leaves a nasty taste. If the climate ever becomes safer for people to air a range of opinions, I will certainly never forget how these people behaved towards those who had a different viewpoint. Thank you again.

Thank you for your amazing work and the update.

Going to take my time reading that tomorrow, but thank you — looks very authoritative.

I find it hard to understand how all those retweeting Cowan with laudatory comments aren't ashamed. It's such a shoddy piece of work! When law professors put ideology before any vestige of professionalism or academic engagement, you have to worry!

@Alicethroughtheblackmirror

I find it hard to understand how all those retweeting Cowan with laudatory comments aren't ashamed. It's such a shoddy piece of work! When law professors put ideology before any vestige of professionalism or academic engagement, you have to worry!

Yeah, it’s quite shocking. It’s also laughable how much stock they place on peer review in the social science. There, it’s not about replicating experiments etc because most of it is theoretical or opinion-based. So peer review just means ‘two people who agreed with me or didn’t criticise my work too much’. There’s a huge culture of fear around critiquing work based on gender ideology these days so finding two people who agree is not hard. Many journals, esp special issues, let you nominate peer reviewers yourself. So it’s not the sign of unquestionable quality and rigour that they claim it is (and in any event, the feminist piece WAS peer reviewed). I saw the same thing with Alex Sharpe’s terrible piece in the Modern Law Review which Sharpe has described as the first peer reviewed article to ‘prove’ that women’s fear over self-ID are unfounded. It’s nothing but an opinion-piece. No statistics, no new data, nothing. Just Sharpe saying ‘this is what I think and therefore that is factually correct’. The peer review bit is just ‘the editors sent this to two people who they knew would agree with it and the world of academia is so small that the reviewers knew Sharpe was the author anyway’. And they think that this process means that their opinions should form the basis of actual law reform. Quite baffling really.

Just to echo other posters, thank you.

Thank you Reality that is a really important point.

Also worth noting that these people always always engage in ad hominem attacks. It’s about discrediting the detractors as people rather than disproving what they are saying. This is because their own argument is deeply flawed and is not rooted in any sort of reality. The only thing they can do is to undermine the other person by saying that they are a poor scholar or a poor writer. Just look at any time Kathleen Stock publishes something. It’s never about undermining her ideas, it’s all about attacking her as a person and as an academic. We are told that she has no expertise in what she is writing about when she clearly does. We are told that she’s a right-wing fundamentalist Christian who wants to check people’s genitals in bathrooms. All of this is rubbish of course but it helps deflect from the need to actually engage in her argument, which is always logical, rational and based in material reality. Same with the Cowan piece. Cowan and her chums can only attack Kath, Lucy and Lisa by wilfully misunderstanding what they are saying and claiming that they are saying things they are not. If they actually engaged with the argument, they’d know they were onto a loser. It’s just so amazing that so many other academics wilfully turn a blind eye to this shit. They are clearly capable of critical thought (although with some I wonder), yet on certain issues, they refuse point blank to engage.

This is a really good piece, thank you for writing and sharing it

It seems like it took a lot of time and energy to wade through Cowan's piece and try to work out what the arguments were, in order to be able to counter them. Appreciate the effort you went to, and that you referenced everything.

I'll be returning to this article to support my own communications as it summarises the legal position clearly.

Thanks again.

@Abitofalark Hi there. You should be able to download the paper here:

mbmpolicy.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/sa-7.11.20-hunter-blackburn-et-al.-lsowr-again.-annotated-online-copy.-final.pdf

Placemarking .

Thank you and sorry you have to put up with this. Read your rebuttal earlier.

[quote MurrayBlackburnMackenzie]@Abitofalark Hi there. You should be able to download the paper here:

mbmpolicy.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/sa-7.11.20-hunter-blackburn-et-al.-lsowr-again.-annotated-online-copy.-final.pdf[/quote]
Thank you. I've only just seen this as I gave up a few days ago. At the time I was reading the thread and asked for a link, I didn't know that I was reading an old thread - one of the hazards of mumsnet. I am used to sites that don't allow bumping of old threads.

@Abitofalark You're welcome.

The paper has now been formally published by the journal and the editor has placed all three papers - our original, the rejoinder and our response - outside the paywall until the end of the year:

www.euppublishing.com/doi/story/10.3366/news.2020.11.20.500360

We've also written about the experience of publishing this response (and the original article) and the erosion of academic norms in the debate about sex and gender identity:

murrayblackburnmackenzie.org/2020/11/21/sex-gender-identity-and-the-erosion-of-academic-norms/

Thanks again for all of your kind comments.

Kath, Lucy and Lisa