Future of Legal Gender academic talk

[Pota2]

Here is a twitter thread from someone who attended:

mobile.twitter.com/sarahstuartxx/status/1190048225161621504

It’s so depressing, it makes me want to cry. Is this supposed to be progressive? Professor Cooper, you’re right, you are fucking useless. The MNers had it spot on. You’re spending public money to try to make a name for yourself. I don’t for a second think that you genuinely believe this nonsense (or think that pointing out that male and female bodies are different is biological essentialism because it clearly isn’t). You’re chasing the cash. I hope you think it’s worth it.

It wasn't rambling, it was great

Marie I am so sorry to hear about your experience. I think I should explain a bit more clearly what I meant. I meant that these women running the Future of Legal Gender have not endured what many other women have had to endure as part of their job in terms of harassment and abuse. They don’t experience the issues that GC women are facing because they are ‘on the right side’.

Of course many academics do live in the real world but I sense that these people do not. And while they might have faced struggles, someone like Professor Cooper entered academia at a different time to the current climate and occupies a very privileged position at present.

I just get the sense that if these women had to put up with daily sexual harassment from colleagues (which many women do) then maybe they wouldn’t be so quick to believe that these measures would be positive. I think they have led privileged existences.

@Pota2, thanks for that reply. As far as these particular academics are concerned I would agree with that observation, and believe this to be a real betrayal of the rest of us. It is a position of privilege, and the power it exerts is immense. The slew of abuse and coordinated campaign of harrassment leveled at Nina Power - referred to as a 'disgraced T*RF' - is a case in point of what happens to women, even senior academics and renowned feminists, who take the opposing stance. There's an open letter online denouncing the poor woman as a fascist.

It's a bit like nailing handmaids' heads to the Gilead wall as a warning to other would-be disobedient handmaids.

Where does this leave quietly-living trans people who simply want to live their lives in peace under their assumed gender? Why are men apparently immune to all this criticism? And how on earth does any woman not on the side of legitimized misogyny and homophobia even begin to fight such a battle?

Someone has just pointed out this comment, which shows that they are aware that they are being scrutinised by mumsnet even if they try and make it seem like a joke:

"I attended the lecture on 30th.
Sheila Jeffreys was said to be an “essentialist”. And, Mumsnet discussion was offered up on Pieerpoibt with prompts for ridicule - students obliged with laughter.
Absolute misogyny.
I was horrified."
twitter.com/bindelj/status/1183379219839102976

Apropos to this thread is this submission by Jan Rivers to a Select committee below. I am eternally grateful for Speak Up for Women and their vigilance on behalf of New Zealand women and girls. ( Apart from the Abortion Law legislation, proposals to ban all counselling for gender dysphoric children other than instant affirmation would have gone through Parliament on the coat tails of a bill to ban gay conversion therapy if not for keen eyed SUFW members. See the links below).

Jan Rivers’ Abortion Legislation Oral Submission

Supporter of Speak Up For Women, Jan Rivers, spoke at the Abortion Legislation Select Committee in favour of the bill, but in opposition to calls from other submitters to exchange the word ‘woman’ for ‘person’ throughout the bill

Jan Rivers refers to the Legal Gender Project in her submission

If this change is made can we realistically expect no untoward ramifications? Should not women have been forewarned about something which would finally encode in law what has been just a legal opinion and which has already had a such a significant impact on their status and rights? Should legislation that will fundamentally change what it is to be a woman from material reality to belief not be subject to an impact assessment at the very least? In the UK the Future of Legal Gender project is a well-funded 4-year investigation into possible impacts of encoding gender into legislation and it is proving deeply divisive and problematic

speakupforwomen.nz/sufw_essays/jan-rivers-submission/

speakupforwomen.nz/speak-up-for-womens-submission-to-parliament-gay-conversion-therapy-and-counselling-of-gender-dysphoric-individuals-cannot-be-equated/

speakupforwomen.nz/speak-up-for-women-pleased-government-wont-scrap-counselling-for-gender-questioning-children-and-adolescents/

Ani O'Brien's recent article in Medium on how to approach being fair to transgender people without losing women's rights to sex based protections. As always Ani writes with clarity and reason.

medium.com/@aniobrien/making-room-human-rights-are-not-a-pie-9519c02bc67e

Sorry to throw all these links at everyone, but I was genuinely appalled to see how fast things are moving in NZ to erode the rights of women I try to keep up, and I support SUFW, but I think I am going to have to go onto the Parliament's website daily, see what legislation is proposed and make submissions if needed.

This was always the end game. Self-ID is merely a stop-gap.

Yogyakarta Principles +10 - Principle 31:

STATES SHALL:

A) Ensure that official identity documents only include personal information that is relevant, reasonable and necessary as required by the law for a legitimate purpose, and thereby end the registration of the sex and gender of the person in identity documents such as birth certificates, identification cards, passports and driver licences, and as part of their legal personality;

B) Ensure access to a quick, transparent and accessible mechanism to change names, including to gender-neutral names, based on the self-determination of the person;

C) While sex or gender continues to be registered :

i. Ensure a quick, transparent, and accessible mechanism that legally recognises and affirms each person’s self-defined gender identity;

ii. Make available a multiplicity of gender marker options;

iii. Ensure that no eligibility criteria, such as medical or psychological interventions, a psycho-medical diagnosis, minimum or maximum age, economic status, health, marital or parental status, or any other third party opinion, shall be a prerequisite to change one’s name, legal sex or gender;

iv. Ensure that a person’s criminal record, immigration status or other status is not used to prevent a change of name, legal sex or gender.

(my bolds)

yogyakartaprinciples.org/principle-31-yp10/

I'll be going to the round table discussion on the 8th. Hope to see some of you there?

Yogyakarta Principles: International Threat to Women's Rights

This article mainly summarises the key points made in a speech by Sheila Jeffreys (entitled “Enforcing Men's Sexual Rights in International Human Rights Law”) at Venice Allan's We Need To Talk event, 'Inconvenient Women', held in London on June 13th 2018.

www.objectnow.org/news/2018/7/27/yogyakarta-principles-international-threat-to-womens-rights

It includes a link to a full transcript of Jeffreys' speech. Quote:

The Plus 10 includes, for instance, the demand that sex, the biological basis for women’s oppression, be eliminated for official documents. They call for an end to ‘the registration of the sex and gender of the person in identity documents such as birth certificates, identification cards, passports and driver licences, and as part of their legal personality’ (31) (Yogyakarta Principles, 2017). This eliminates the sex class of women and the possibility of recording any information relating to discrimination against women and violence against us. If sex cannot be mentioned, then woman as a category is disappeared and feminism and the idea of women’s rights cannot exist.

Hi Pencils, I'm going, I will message you.

When Women's Studies became Gender Studies this was entirely predictable. Some female academics are almost queueing up to sell women and girls out.

From the Twitter feed:

Destroying binary may wither away all gender discrimination. Would open up conversation for what gender you could become, in turn would radicalise power relations.

This makes me think of the time when women had no words or spaces to discuss sexual abuse, violence and rape by men. In particular child sexual abuse which wasn't spoken of at all. It was feminists who found the language and created the spaces so women could talk. Those spaces had to be fought for and they are precarious.

Now these morons want to remove the term 'woman' and 'man', 'male' and 'female' so once again we will no longer be able to talk about male violence against women and girls. If we're not talking about it, it's not happening, right?

Also the gall of that woman to claim that radical feminists only talk about men outside the family being dangerous to women and girls, whilst ignoring what men do to their closest female relatives. Radical feminists named what men did within the family, radical feminists set up the first domestic violence refuges and are still running some of them. It's us that are fighting back to keep men out of those spaces, whilst she rolls over for a massive grant and patriarchal back pats. Sickening.

Wow good point Pencils. I was at that meeting (and asked a question based on the Mumsnet trans moderation rules which had just come in the day before I think) but somehow didn't perceive the full import of the YP with relation to the category of sex itself, I guess because I wasn't aware of things like this ludicrous research seriously happening.

Link to the meeting below which is well worth a watch. Sheila doesn't explicitly cover that there is a push to get rid of recording any sex or gender marker at all, but she does talk about the erasure of biological sex in favour of gender starting at 0.37, and then again when I asked my question about how to frame what is happening within ever stricter moderation rules on social media, at around 1.27.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=KdQuYMjaqHY

Sheila doesn't explicitly cover that there is a push to get rid of recording any sex or gender marker at all

By which I mean that she doesn't unpack it fully.

From that thread it doesn't sound like this is some kind of random academic musing. They want to go the whole hog and have sex legally abolished as a category:

Cooper asked was the project a ‘worthwhile project for academic study?’ (Just a rhetorical question, she wasn’t actually asking). She saw it as as ‘pre-figurative feminist project’ and was consulting stakeholders widely.
A Parliamentary Bill would be the outcome.

This could be happening faster than we expect. Trans has been fast-streamed and mainstreamed so quickly, the men in power obviously see this as very advantageous to them.

Just open mouthed at her claim that rad fems don’t focus on violence from men within the family. That is basically what radical feminism is about. She can’t be this dumb- this is a deliberate strategy to smear radical feminists. She knows that is an outright lie.

draft Parliamentary Bill

Just open mouthed at her claim that rad fems don’t focus on violence from men within the family. That is basically what radical feminism is about. She can’t be this dumb- this is a deliberate strategy to smear radical feminists. She knows that is an outright lie.

Re what stumbledin said below:

Someone has just pointed out this comment, which shows that they are aware that they are being scrutinised by mumsnet even if they try and make it seem like a joke:

https://twitter.com/bindelj/status/1183379219839102976

It's worth reading the whole Twitter convo, especially the argument between Julie Bindel and Cooper. Cooper apparently tweeted smearing gender critical and radical feminists and then deleted and refused to discuss the wording.

The massive backlash against their idiotic project means that any draft bill submitted would surely not get very far. If they really think that removing all reference to sex on any registration will work, it will get shot down in an instant due to the valid arguments about needing statistical evidence. It would be pretty stupid to put that forward. If they submit something like a self-ID law, then that has already been done and halted due to backlash. So that would be totally unoriginal.

I think they have massively overestimated what they can do here and their influence in changing the law. Their interests seem very niche and incomprehensible by the average person on the street. I don’t think they can add anything useful really and I am pretty surprised that this got the funding it did. They should have left it to someone with much more experience in policy-work. When you’re dealing with policy, ‘queering the norm’ isn’t really what you want to be doing. Might go down well at a gender studies conference but not so much in the real world.

If they weren’t so disingenuous, I’d feel sorry for them. I think they will end up looking like idiots.

FFS, Ershkigal that’s awful and I can’t even see her original tweet. I hope someone somewhere has a screen shot. I don’t know how to use caches etc but apparently it was posted on 12 October. She has developed a dislike for radical feminists for some reason and is trying to misrepresent and smear us.

Julie Bindel and her partner has done real on the ground work actively fighting for women’s rights, vastly improving their lives. See for instance Sally Challen, Emma Humphreys etc. Direct tangible effect on law. What the hell has Prof Cooper done that could even come close to comparing to that? Someone who could make a genuine difference should have had that money.

This reminds me of when Ash Sarkar claimed that Julie had done nothing to help women in prison by doing a twitter search. These people will say what the hell they want with no accountability, no fact checking. Just smearing people in the process and not caring about the consequences.

A "feminist law reform project"

twitter.com/DavinaCooper5/status/1061256888795435008?s=20

I liked Dr Jane Clare Jones' take:

twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1190227846012264448?s=20

Step one: force participants to accept that everyone has an innate gender identity and then get all snippy and surprised when some of them call you out on it.

I’m sure it’s right up the street of all the male feminists whose feminism consists of threatening women who disagree with them with violence.

I love Jane. Always straight to the point. Essentialism is ‘people exist’. Quite.

Well colour me surprised!

Sorry MNHQ mods - I know you have a job to do, but you also know that it's true.

Anyhoo, normal service will resume now.

Wow, I hadn’t seen the text of the yogakarta principles before. Really shocking.

I simply do NOT understand how the same people / political position can support on the one hand metoo/yesallwomen/name the problem (male violence), whilst at the same time support legislation that will eliminate ANY legal status to male / female?

How can we “name the problem” if we cannot legally refer to it???

How can we “name the problem” if we cannot legally refer to it???

I think the queer pomo bullshit artists would say that there isn't any objective reality and things only exist because we socially construct them with language and such.

So if we can't name the problem then there isn't a problem. We will have deconstructed it by removing all the words and the problem will have gone away.

It's a bit like when toddlers hide their head under a blanket and think they're invisible.