Cambridge University ignoring the Supreme Court ruling?

[yoursweetpotatoesarebland]

Dd is going to the Cambridge open day coming up, I got an email through about the colleges and was having a read through. There’s a section about “gender identity” and how it impacts on what colleges you can apply to. There are two women’s colleges but both accept anyone who identifies as a woman!

This is from Murray Edwards:
“At the admissions level, we will consider any student who, at the point of application, identifies as a woman“

How can this still be allowed? It’s self ID too so has NEVER been legal for the purposes of the eqA.

Students in general are ... not bothered about self-id

That would be a reasonable argument for changing the law. It's a terrible argument for ignoring it or violating it.

'Course they don't express any discomfort.

"Oxford feminist" my arse

I agree. In fact, that is part of what I was getting at. If the category is "male applicants with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment", then the question becomes what legal basis exists for admitting those males while excluding other males. That seems to me to be one of the legal difficulties the college would need to address.

need to change your name, this isn’t feminism

Nailed it.

At least Geography - a friend of mine stumbled on a news article a few years back.
Will PM you.

@MyAmpleSheep wrote
Education in Cambridge is provided on a university-wide basis, coeducationally. Lectures and exams are provided by the various university departments and not by the individual colleges. A women-only college provides accommodation and pastoral services for women, and (in some cases) tutorials. It's not intended to be a segregated education soup-to-nuts, and I wouldn't support it if it was.

I agree with most of your post, but not “college provides…. (In some cases) tutorials.”

A distinctive feature of Cambridge, Oxford and possibly other universities (Durham?) is that students have weekly one to two (or one to one, or one to a small group) hour-long supervisions (called tutorials or tutes at Oxford). Students can miss lectures but they cannot avoid supervisions.

To check this I’ve just spoken to someone who did Maths as a first degree at Cambridge. She normally did four courses each term, so had four supervisions every week.

Some people make a living acting as supervisors. Work is set in advance (eg essays, or questions for Maths) and discussed in the supervision. College pays for this: if they don’t have a relevant person as a supervisor, perhaps for a course without many students on it, students may go to another college for their supervision but their own college pays for it.

Don’t underestimate the value of a college to a Cambridge (or Oxford) student’s academic education. They are not just the equivalent of a hall of residence + occasional pastoral support at another university.
At Newnham, at least in their first year, a student may be having four supervisions every week, each with a fellow Newnham student, very possibly in a fairly small room with just them and their supervisor. It may be very important to the students that they are both biological women.

For general admission, FWS means that's already the case. For exceptional admissions, we don't actually want to lose the flexibility a single-sex school has to accept opposite-sex pupils from another school for specific classes in order to make a subject cost-effective to run.

Yes, I'm still sore that I wasn't allowed to attempt Further Maths because there weren't enough other girls wanting to do it.

I wasn’t allowed to study Economics for A level. My girls-only school didn’t offer it, and they wouldn’t let me go to the partner boys school, which did.

Perhaps Economics was seen as unwomanly at the time.

It's disgraceful that Dr Padman has been placed in this situation.

Even when opposing his appointment, Greer shows empathy to Padman in her recognition that the college has failed him by not saying "no" in private when it had the chance, putting him in the situation where the incorrectness of his appointment and his medical history has become public knowledge.

If the situation were reversed, we would be called TERFs, fascists, Nazis, dinosaurs, and worse. We would be threatened with rape, torture, and murder. We would get no empathy at all from the trans side.

selffellatingouroborosofhate
we would be called TERFs, fascists, Nazis, dinosaurs, and worse. We would be threatened with rape, torture, and murder. We would get no empathy at all from the trans side

quite often by the students whom oxfordfeminist assures us are tolerant. To be fair to them, they don't as a rule threaten rape, torture or murder, because the women they would be threatening with these things would be likely to be able to identify them in a court of law. But these oh so tolerant small-minded gits definitely set out to make into a little hell for her the life of any woman who dares to dispute their certainty that theirs is the only possible viewpoint.

How tolerant is it to no-platform someone for daring to speak facts you find inconvenient?

Muslim women who wear the hijab feel constrained to keep it on if there's a possibility of a man seeing them, whereas in a single sex environment they can relax and take it off.

My experience of working somewhere that had large open-plan offices and some small shared offices, say four-to-eight desks, and a lot of veil-wearing Muslim ladies was that, very quietly and without any formal declaration of this non-policy activity, the Muslim women somehow magically would be grouped into the small shared offices with no men in those offices, and would work with the door shut and a sign up that said "please knock and wait for a reply".

It's amazing what an observant and sensitive departmental secretary can do, very discreetly, to make people more comfortable at work.

That poster was talking about accommodation spaces, not teaching spaces.

There's very good reasons for accommodation spaces to be single-sex, which is why Newnham and ME were set up and is why US universities have sorority houses. Safeguarding, being able to relax without having to have one's guard up against male aggression, and being able to have a conversation without men dominating it are all great reasons.

I'd argue that there are arguments for some single-sex teaching spaces too, having benefitted myself from an all-girl secondary. But that's beyond the scope of a thread about colleges founded to provide accommodation and pastoral support to women within a mostly-male (at the time) university.

Forgive me @SwirlyGates but I am being lazy and quoting you rather than the original poster of the passage you quoted.

........I dont believe that the 'media' are selling a belief that trans people are inherently dangerous. In fact the opposite could be claimed, that a lot of media outlets continually platform people who attempt to sell the lie that trans people are incapable of being dangerous by dint of being trans. That the trans status automatically means that theymust never be viewed as potentially being dangerous otherwise transphobia is screamed from the rooftops.

What I do believe is that trans people are humans like any other people and are just as capable of being dangerous as any other person. I believe that sex is a much greater identifier of potential risk thangender identity and no human can change sex.

I'd like to introduce you to a few concepts:

• Preference falsification, where someone outwardly professes an opinion that they privately disagree with.
• Power imbalance, where someone has more power than others in a given situation and so can influence those others unduly.
• Ostracism, where a group shuns or expels one of its members to that member's disadvantage.

Can you see how, in a situation where you have power in a teacher-student relationship and are promoting the TWAW view, the students might feign agreement to avoid ostracism?

Hell, I keep as quiet as I can at work because I cannot contribute to the legal case crowdfunders run by braver women than me if I lose my job, which wouldn't have to be accomplished by a misconduct process but could instead be accomplished by letting peers bully me out. And I'm not a student whose one chance at getting a top degree depends on me keeping my head down.

@KaleidoscopeSmile put it much more succinctly 😀

Are you saying a segregated work place is a good thing.

No. I'm saying that taking steps, which have no impact on others bar being reminded to respect the basic manners of not barging into someone's office, to make the women of a religious minority feel more comfortable at work is a good thing. The alternative is to put them in offices with men where they'd have to keep their head scarves, and in several cases face veils, on at all times.

Oh silly me thinking them making an effort to integrate with the world around them might be a better thing.

It would be terrible if they were to learn the wrong thing from their work place like men and women can function together without anyone going off the deep end because they caught sight of a stray piece of hair.

Or that women don't have to cover themselves up in order to work, that women can face the world uncovered and still be unmolested at the end of the day.

We wouldn't want anyone to learn about the benefits of living in a tolerant, secular world we.

I'm sure Muslim women have eyes, and are capable of seeing the benefits of living in a tolerant, secular world. Or perhaps they think these 'benefits' are a tad over-stated? Anyway, it's often said that Muslim women are bullied by Muslim men? Should everyone else join in too?

I have a Cambridge degree and I know about the supervision system there. I had supervisions in college until the third year when my courses were too specialized and they were provided by another college. I also worked as a supervisor in my fourth year.

Lab courses and lectures are provided by the department. You might just about be able to get a degree in English Literature without ever sitting next to a man, but you won't in any science subject.

I know some sex realist university students, including at Cambridge, and they wouldn't dream of expressing those opinions to others at the university. You have to be extremely courageous to do so. That young woman who is one of the three who set up the women's single sex group in Cambridge had the word BIGOT literally carved onto her door, because she mentioned to a friend that she had read a gender critical book and her friend then immediately "outed" her. She lost all her friends overnight and is now publicly hated.

Out of interest, @oxfordfeminist , assuming you actually are a university academic, what would you do if one of your students spoke to you about her gender critical views and feelings? Attempt to re-educate her? Or worse?

So brave, those young women at Cambridge. It really is an appalling story, and shines a light on what's going on in our universities.

Yes, having supers at other Cambridge colleges is entirely normal for undergraduates. The idea that students at Murray Edwards and Newnham only have supers with other students of the same sex is, well, bonkers. Not only would the women students be going to other colleges, but male students would be coming to Murray Edwards and Newnham to be taught by the tutors there.

The college admissions offices would be happy to confirm that no, being accepted to a women's college does NOT mean you will never be sitting 'in a fairly small room' being taught along with male students.

Frankly my mind boggles sometimes.

There's very good reasons for accommodation spaces to be single-sex, which is why Newnham and ME were set up and is why US universities have sorority houses. Safeguarding, being able to relax without having to have one's guard up against male aggression, and being able to have a conversation without men dominating it are all great reasons.

I totally agree about accommodation spaces.

My inclusivity principles are challenged by teaching and workplaces that are sex-segregated. The concept of an office of Muslim women where men have to knock before entering does not accord with those principles.