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")

See the Ig Nobel Prize. A few prizes are satirical but most of the time they're awarded to genuine research on whacky questions. One of the winners got a Nobel prize later and I'll bet his Ig Nobel research was rock solid too. Academic rigour can be applied to whacky (or whacky-seeming) questions.

But I'm not sure if it matters in this case. The Centre for Women's Studies doesn't have the right to impose their views of womanhood on anyone. Including their own academics.

This.

Very moving post. I echo what you say about the women you know. These women are many of us, everywhere in the world.

@Evolutionarygoals here you go. It's quite depressing.
https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1vsIDUSSv8S8i9GwT1cVH-HQod_GakDCZ2lqt_zJCDNs

Many thanks! Depressing indeed. I thought we'd moved past sword=man but apparently not. I'm quite relieved not to recognise any names on that list though. I do wonder what my old osteoarchaeology tutor would have made of it all

I think it went
Sword=man
Sword=woman now we've looked at the bones because they can also fight/lead
Sword=man, or woman who wants to be a man
Not sure where we're at now. Possibly sword=sword?

Fairly recently, an Anglo Saxon warrior was presumed to be female because a mirror was found in “her” grave, despite mirrors of various sorts having been used in war since antiquity as signalling devices.

”She” was most likely he, and a communications officer.

Reminds me a bit of when I was pregnant with DD. We were buying a greenhouse and decided to go for the toughened glass, for safety reasons. The man selling it to us said "yeh, coz if it's a boy you want the greenhouse to survive having a football kicked at it" I replied "girls can play football too!" And he said "oh yes, of course they can...they can play football with the boy.."
It was like he couldn't compute the idea of a football being played with and there being no boys in the mix at all.
There's a sword, it must be a man, but it's a woman...can't have a sword without a man...the woman must have wanted to be a man...

Also presumably couldn't compute 'we don't want any of our children to be hurt regardless of sex or chosen outdoor activity' 🙄

Exactly this. A lot of the reason the 1980s poststructuralist feminists were so sold on the concept of gender to begin with was that it wasn't set in stone; that it was constructed and disseminated socially by and through language. Even Judith Butler was on with the game then, developing the theory that 'new' identities were iterated, reiterated, then performed via what she called a 'chain of signification' (based on something very like Foucault's ideas of discursive subject formation). None of these ideas for one minute suggests that gender is biological.

Earlier feminists thought gender freed us from the biological trap: the 'gendered' assumptions that women belonged firmly in the kitchen with our aprons on and our traps firmly shut. They kicked against the idea that nurturing is innately female, or that provision and protection are solely the domain of the male. By the same token, they discovered that social assumptions about what gender entailed, and their diktats as to how males and females should appropriately look and behave in accordance with their sex, were pretty much as inescapable as biology; if less fixed and permanent. They simply shifted in accordance with time and place. You can defy them; you can be as gender-non-conforming as you like; but you can't alter a whole set of cultural assumptions through one individual's stance against them - nor even through a subculture like the New Romantics or the Goths.

I don't know (and haven't read) how 'gender studies' moved from this position to the idea that gender exists on a spectrum (believable), to the idea that we can pick exactly where on this broad spectrum we sit, and that the spectrum somehow magically involves our innate, sexed bodies which can be mangled to fit the same definition as that of gender. Who told us in the first instance exactly how and why this would not be possible: that we cannot control how gender assumptions and stereotypes are created and disseminated?

Oh, yeah. That would be the queer theorists.

Can anyone recommend me some good books on feminism? I feel the need to educate myself.

I think where you click with books on feminism will vary with individuals and what you care about. I was very influenced by the classics of the American second wave from my mother's bookshelves - The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, Our Bodies Ourselves by the Boston Womens Health Collective, amd above all Against Our Will by Susan Brownmuller (as well as Sexual Politics by Kate Millet, but I understood that a lot less). However, they were all published a very long time ago in a different society. Misogynies by Joan Smith is UK and a belter of a collection, 100% readable, but still a while back now. You can find the original late 80s essay on Intersectionalism by Kimberlé Crenshaw online - it's so crystal clear and well argued - and makes a mockery of those who just say 'we need to think intersectionally' without apparently feeling the need to explain further.

I'm currently reading Who's Afraid of Gender by Judith Butler and Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks to try and update myself a bit. I wouldn't currently recommend either. Looking out for more recommendations from other parts of the world.

A good one for getting to grips with how feminists engaged with gender constructivism is Chris Weedon's Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory.

Maggie Humm's Feminisms: A Reader is a good general guide.

As to polemics, de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Kate Millett's Sexual Politics are always good reads: also Elaine Showalter's The Female Malady (that being, as if we didn't know, hysteria).

I'm not fond of the brand of namby-pamby third-wave feminism that accuses older feminists of 'gatekeeping' and lays claims for choice, 'inclusion' and other forms of inspidity which would all have been impossible without the gains made by the first and second waves.

Judith Evans' Feminism Today is also good in relation to the equality vs. difference debate. It's a fairly old book rooted mainly in 20th century feminism.

I don't think much has been written about the fourth-wave - this having been mainly a social media campaign along the lines of #MeToo against VAWG. I believe this needs writing about. Feminism needs dragging, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century, against the prevailing, nauesating winds of pandering to the penis.

But it would be a brave academic who took on the task of writing about women's material, oppressed reality. Just look at what happened to Kathleen Stock.

Thanks @SerafinasGoose and @PermanentTemporary I come from the perspective of a parent whose child would definitely have been caught up in all this if I hadn’t held firm and said wait and see. So I’ve a lot to thank these boards for.

Misogynies by Joan Smith is UK and a belter of a collection, 100% readable, but still a while back now.

Most of what I know about feminist theory comes from her detective novels 😁

Agree about novels. I read the Feminine Mystique and it helped me understand a bit more about my mother. And I tried not to be so judgemental.

But it was Margaret Atwood's earliest novel The Edible Woman that really meshed with me. I have never tried to re-read it as I suspect that for each of us it will be at a particular point in time that you read something and it really connects.

As a slight side step, I listen to Radio 4 extra a fair bit to help with boring work, and was amazed on hearing a radio play version of Ann Veronica by H G Wells (!!) where much of her comments about herself and her life could be said to day. (Has a bit of a soppy ending.)

So think what I am trying to say is that feminism is always going to be personal to each of us, and quite honestly I think we can learn as much about feminims by being on FWR as any book.

Because in the end it is about our lived experience and finding out whether it is unique to you or in fact common among other women.

Books often try to make theories (usually nothing more than a selling point or hook) or to claim that a particular analysis is the right one.

Just as what may have happened in previous decades or even centuries may be interesting or useful, but the sad fact is, that as yet, none of them have truely liberated women.

How would anything written 10 years ago, let alone 50 or even longer ago have in any way addressed the complete madness of trans activism that has set back women's rights so much, and if anything been more devisive between women - sadly!

As someone who has studied feminism and gender (degree level) and has been very concerned on a societal as well as a personal level about the erosion of women's and girl's rights, I think it's shameful of this academic department to suggest that women's safety is being weaponised. Levels of male sexual violence towards women and girls is at crisis point at the moment along with a total failure of the Police and legal system to defend victims and prosecute offenders.

Five years ago I would have agreed with people who said trans people in women's spaces is not an issue but after several scary experiences due to organisations allowing self ID and not applying the Equality Act as it was intended and having to resort to using the disabled toilet because of severe PTSD symptoms means my nervous system is really not feeling safe (and will not no matter how much an academic body tells me it should do).

This academics are totally out of touch with the experiences of women and girls and we should not be human shields for transpeople, nor have to suffer threats of violence from TRAs for expressing our fears, needs and concerns, nor for asserting our rights. Makes me wonder who is at the helm of these departments.

👏 Totally agree with this...they are out of touch with what women and girl's have been dealing with in reality, due to sexist and misogynist gender ideology

Yes what happened to Kathleen Stock was dreadful ...

I'm sorry about your trauma.

I have 2 adult adopted daughters and I cannot convey tovtrans activists how they have no control over their trauma response. They both refuse to undress in a changing room unless I am there with them to keep a look out - they certainly can't cope with males at the sinks in a toilet. They would be having a panic attack before they even knew what hit them.

Tras tell me I should teach them not to be afraid, that it's my fault, when actually their trauma is so deep, it is triggered at an unconscious level and no one can reach it.

They need the scaffolding that same sex spaces to be able to go out and it is awful that the personal wishes of a bunch of men trump theirs.

I thoroughly agree with you. I'm an academic. I work with these attitudes day in, day out. I've taught a lot of young trans people. Most are respectful. A small number have been gallivanting around in fetish gear - tutus etc - and mimicking the 'sissy' thing. But many are vulnerable, and like all vulnerable students know they have an advocate in me and that I would stand up to protect them. They come to me as a 'safe' person to talk to (that's without displaying pronouns or a rainbow lanyard). If those people could see into my head, though, doubtless they would buy into the line that I'm transphobic.

I'm also a victim of child abuse, sexual abuse, and rape, and have cPTSD. I can tell my conscious mind to 'Be Kind' as much as I like - were I so inclined - but my reflexive reactions will pick up immediately if there's a male in my room, no matter how they present, and I cannot control any involuntary trauma response. I also suffered sexual harrassment in my workplace, and could easily have been followed into the women's by the male perpetrator, which would have been terrifying. At one point I took to locking my office door from the inside when the department was quiet.

I have a further hidden disability, so in these circumstances have used the disabled loos on occasion, much as I'm loathe to do so. I don't really feel I qualify as disabled. But this lobby and its aggression and hatred of women hasn't left me with much option.

Young, impressionable or vulnerable people - even those going through a rebellious phase and dressing to shock - I can forgive. My colleagues, who signed the open letters objecting to the SC ruling and women being designated their own protected category? Never.

I really want to know

1. Why they think women weren’t awarded degrees at the beginning of the 20th century.
2. How it was possible to distinguish between men and women
3. What changed that?
4. Do they think we can take these changes for granted?