Womanhood is lived; it is not biologically given or legally bestowed. - Centre for Women's Studies response to Court ruling.

[IwantToRetire]

The Centre for Women's Studies joins other UK university centres, research groups and networks in gender/sexuality/feminist/women’s studies to issue a statement about the Supreme Court judgment on the meaning of ’sex’ in the Equality Act 2010.

The statement reaffirms our commitment to trans-inclusion, and expresses deep concern about the judgment and its effects on trans, non-binary, intersex, and all gender nonconforming people.

https://www.york.ac.uk/womens-studies/news-and-events/news/trans-inclusion/

We reject the framing in the media and in public discourse that puts women, and/or feminists, at odds with trans people. This is especially the case in relation to the inclusion of trans women in women’s spaces. Womanhood is lived; it is not biologically given or legally bestowed. The rights of trans people and the rights of cisgender women are inherently connected. As academic experts on sex and gender, we do not agree that biological sex is ‘self-explanatory.’ As feminists, we see the weaponisation of ‘women’s safety’ to vilify and exclude trans people as shameful.

From the full statement available at
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTlPrVc6AjQSFRYgnpfggRZii7ee0LWmZUxH32cNojIExJzYUdqQLVLGbkIZwMi17UZDAijyiKB1Q9t/pub

(Can we blame Judith Butler for this word salad or is it inherently part of being an "academic expert on sex and gender")

AMAZING IF TRUE! No more periods, contraception, miscarriages, menopause, endometriosis, pregnancy, FGM, sex specific cancers. You just have to unlive your sex! When are they providing details of how to do this? Will obviously change things completely in Afghanistan.

Ah right, that makes sense, he's best off somewhere staff don't issue inflammatory statements on the subject. Though it is his choice in the end so if he wants to visit York I personally wouldn't sotp him.

Womanhood is the name to describe what is lived by women ? The effect of being a woman? Which in turn is the biology ?

Am not seeing a lot of academic expertise in that statement. I'd be embarrassed to have my name associated with this.
Funny how all their emphasis is on transwomen's 'rights' and very little mention of transmen (you know, the actual biologically female trans people). Says it all really about where women feature in this so called women's organisation.

Am also interested in what womanhood being lived, actually means to these 'experts' - it literally is biology and how the world treats people, both historically and now, on account of that biology. How can anyone call themselves an academic and think otherwise!

And the utter arrogance of putting out a statement on behalf of all feminists and thinking the Supreme Court should give a shit about their opinion anyway!

It’s absolutely possible to be ‘gender non-conforming’ whilst respecting the boundaries of biological sex and the basic premise of consent.

Supporting the right of biologically male people to be in female same sex spaces overrides the basis of consent and biological women’s right to say no, where the law is now clarified in this context. In any other context, surely this would be abuse. This is the bit I cannot get my head around.

I'm not sure what choices are out there to avoid. Even for Physics - you can certainly add Bristol and Cambridge to that list, for starters.

As academic experts on sex and gender

😁. I have noticed this about TRAs and their supporters. This appeal to their ‘authority’ without actually providing authoritative arguments to back their case. Just like this statement.

It reminds me of a thread a long time ago when a woman posted that her nursery was complaining that her three year old was pooing at nursery and couldn’t wipe his bum by himself. And the work placement student wrote to the Mum saying ‘ as an A grade student, I believe your child is behind in his milestones’
Those academics so remind me of that!

Plus no more discrimination based on centuries of ideas about what the female people should do, their caring roles and responsibilities as a result of their sex and the unequal pay and autonomy as a result. Excellent stuff.

If womanhood could be said to be lived, it would be through the biological processes, and the consequences of those processes. They are the only things that all women share.

Trans ideology is drag queen culture taken full time. Pose and pout.

The thing that really pisses me off about this approach to womanhood is that it really does not acknowledge the way society hems women in on the basis of their role as child bearers. We live in a world physically designed for male strength and stature, we have a standard career path based on not taking years out for children in our 20s or 30s, responsibility for children in our society to women because we get pregnant/gestate/give birth/feed them, our culture (most cultures) chastise women for being both frigid and loose (and, so, blames us for the sexual violence perpetrated against us). This is the basis of our oppression - society vilifying women for being child bearers. We have been property and chattel in the recent past and still are in effect in some countries. There are lots of different ways in which women are statistically different from men but we have broad abilities, act in varying ways, have interests that run the gamut and think about things in different ways. The reason we need a protected characteristic in the equality act isn’t because we have a somewhat different view of the world from men based on some sort of belief - if that were it we could be accommodated under the religion and belief characteristic. We need a protected characteristic of sex because it is our biology that sets us apart from men and is the source of the way we are discriminated against.

It’s convenient for these academics to ”define” womanhood in this wish washy way. Then any reality that doesn’t agree with their theories can be explained away as people not “living” womanhood right. those of us who do not fit in are non-women. Living our non-woman lives. Unlike all these trans women and their oh-so-authentic understanding of womanhood, born out of their innate female souls. That academics supposedly studying a set of people can come out with descriptions that very few of their “subjects” find acceptable is something that really ought to give them pause for thought. But that would require that they value rigour. Which is clearly not within their skill sets.

Show some respect for their expertise.....😉

@NumberTheory 👏👏👏100%

Womenhood is indeed lived - and you can neither opt out of it nor into it. If you try to opt out by presenting as male you suffer the adverse health impact, if you try to opt in you can never succeed.

They are paid by their employers - the universities. It is a kind of academic scam: spout clever-sounding "theory" and win points for being "progressive". This is how they make their living.
No nefarious undercover funding stream required.

All that statement does is make me wonder how many women are actually in The Centre for Women’s Studies.

Probably best to bypass archaeology at York too 😉 (the source of an unpleasant shit-stirring woman-denying 'open letter' for which York archaeologists are currently trying to drum up signatories)

Well what a load of sexist drivel.

Honestly makes me sick that academic institutions are sticking their two fingers up to women and our rights.

Isn't it strange how rapists always know who the women are?

A few years back, I spent quite a bit of time reflecting on my dislike of the word ‘womanhood’. I don’t mind ‘sisterhood’, for me, this depicts looking out for other women, whereas womanhood seems to be intertwined with social constructs relating to femininity. I think this is because I think, outside of feminist discourse, people think of womanhood as being about being womanly. I am definitely a woman but I am not womanly!

Words that have the suffix ‘hood’ (eg womanhood, childhood, parenthood) have a base word that is a concrete noun that denotes a material phenomena (eg adult human female, aged between 0-18, reproductive material has led to conception or is legally granted the status through birth/adoption certificates). The derivational suffix ‘hood’ transforms the concrete noun into an abstract noun representing a state, condition, or quality. With this in mind, the noun woman (adult human female) is transformed to have a different meaning - the suffix ‘hood’ turns it into a word that refers to a quality or condition.

Posters on this board are likely to argue that the quality or condition referred to in the abstract noun ‘womanhood’ is limited to those for whom the base word/ concrete noun ‘woman’ applies. The statement cited in the OP seems to suggest that the abstract noun ‘womanhood’, in being abstract, applies to anyone who thinks it does.

As much as I hate to agree with TRAs, I agree in part here, because the case they are making taps into my aversion to the concept of ‘womanhood’. I am throwing this out there as it might interest some of you!

Ok then.

If it's 'lived'

Please write a definition of this, which is workable in law and will give women protection from discrimination.

Are we going to end up with idiots writing shit like 'anyone who wears a dress or lipstick' leaving women with no choice but to wear a dress or lipstick otherwise they might lose their rights?

Have they actually fucking thought this through?

You cant legislate for sex discrimination on the basis of sex being a philosophical idea that's a fuzzy concept in someones hand you absolute roasters. All you end up doing is removing rights for all minority groups (including transpeople) because you can no longer clearly identify the people who need legal protection cos the law cant see them.

Stop trying to Marty McFly us!

Academia is all about different models. It's not my field but I can more or less understand the radical feminist model, the intesectional feminist model, the queer theory model... from an academic point of view these are all models, simplifications which capture different aspects of the real world and pass over other aspects. None of them capture the full complexity of the real world.

Academic argument is often about the limits of these models, the contradictions that they lead to if you push a model far enough. In the real world most of use bits and bobs of our preferred models.

You can have departments that focus on different models and the insights they get from their chosen model. But as soon as someone issues a statement about how the world is (or how they think it is) based on one of their models and ignoring all the others they are not really being academics any more.

Each of these HE signatories is subject to the Public Sector Equality Duty in the EA 2010, and therefore shouldn’t be doing anything to create an offensive, degrading or hostile environment towards women or people who hold gender critical beliefs.

The PSED places an additional duty on these institutions to eliminate harassment and discrimination of those with protected characteristics generally (i.e. not just for their employees and students), so each signatory organisation breaches that by repeatedly labelling biological women as ‘cisgender’, by insisting that women should not be protected under the Equality Act, by creating a hostile and offensive environment for people with gender critical beliefs, and by criticising those organisations, including the EHRC and BTP for respecting these protected characteristics and for upholding the law.

Furthermore, the PSED places an additional duty on each of these signatories to foster good relations between people with a protected characteristic and those without, including fostering good relations between biological women and transwomen, and between trans people and people with gender critical beliefs.

By pitting these protected groups against each other in saying things like

Womanhood is lived; it is not biologically given or legally bestowed. The rights of trans people and the rights of cisgender women are inherently connected

which asserts that the separate characteristics of women and gender reassignment are only one characteristic and denies that the protected characteristic of philosophical belief should be respected at all, these institutions breach the EA 2010.

It shouldn’t be the case that institutions can expect to randomly sign every protest letter floating around and not face any legal consequences for their actions. These institutions need to understand that each of them is making this unlawful statement in breach of the EA 2010, and they need to be held to account.

You'd think York would have better things to worry about

https://www.yorkvision.co.uk/news/difficult-and-painful-272-staff-members-cut-as-the-university-tackles-financial-crisis/13/12/2024

I hate to think of the quality of the staff who have been cut if these intellectual light weights are still there. The UCU sound quite combative. Perhaps too combative?

https://archive.ph/TUfjm

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ucu-accused-silencing-staff-internal-rows-turn-toxic

@LonginesPrime I wouldn't want to push that argument too far. I'm not a letter-signer myself but I have friends who signed open letters in support of GC academics when that was generally seen as just stirring up trouble and contention.

And academic freedom and free speech matter too. These academics are being utter tits but I'm not going to bring the law down hard on them or their bosses for this.

Whenever I read these things I think two thinks.
1- I am astonished that people who write for a living, and pride themselves on their writing, can produce something so nonsensical.

2- I think of the Young Ones. 'We are riders at the gates of dawn, and we take no prisoners'.

Some academics just never left student politics behind