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.

Thanks Mmmnotsure,

It was distressing and I appreciate your concern.

On this 'definition' I reckon I know 2 men, 2 women and everyone else is non-binary. So not a useful way of categorising people at all.

Anyway, I really popped back onto this thread to see if @oxfordfeminist had chosen to treat us to a display of the Oxford-level critical thinking that led her to be trans-inclusive. No joy yet. I'm sure she'll enlighten us soon though.

Whenever anyone asks awkward questions she is so terribly busy being Academic that she has to rush away. Except for coming back two or three times during the next hour to blether unconstructively a bit more.

Sometimes as a result of us recognising this socialisation imbalance, we have “stacked the scales” to encourage, eg, girls to get an education at Cambridge.

And that's what New Hall, Newnham, Lady Margaret Hall etc all used to do so well. There were very few women in the physical sciences at Cambridge by the final year, and for some subjects the all female colleges were that rare place where one wasn't the only female in the room.

The context being discussed was the validity of gender identity. That is, telling trans people their identity isn't legitimate & only a sexual one is.

What people often don't realise is that the choice between identifying with one's gender or sex is values based that relies on personal subjectivity. An example might be a butch natal female might consider her gender identification with the opposite sex a defining feature & be trans or birth sex & be cis.

Ultimately, it's up to the individual's foundational guiding principles and beliefs that serve as their moral compass influencing their identification not the fact that sex & gender exist.

In other words, you can't get an ought from an is.

and you can no more self-identify into the opposite sex than you can self-identify as a six-footer if you measure 5'4" [1m83/1m63].

Again, the context is gender identification. Tran's people aren't suggesting they are identical to the opposite sex rather they have a commonality at the group level of foundational gendered behaviours.

It's cute you think the human body evolved with distinguishing reproductive characteristics & the mind wouldn't be but that's what denial will do.

This is a false equivalence because there's different qualifying criteria to defining race as there is to gender. Race requires a genetic association while gender requires a behavioural one.

Tran's people aren't suggesting they are identical to the opposite sex rather they have a commonality at the group level of foundational gendered behaviours.

No, this is your suggestion @Baileyonice . You can't claim to speak for 'trans people', plenty of whom do indeed claim to be identical to the opposite sex.

That is, telling trans people their identity isn't legitimate

Well, yes. Identifying as female when you are not female, or identifying as male when you are not male, means that this is not a legitimate identity.

It's the same principle as how identifying as a child when you are an adult is not a legitimate identity.

The context being discussed was the validity of genderidentity. That is, telling trans people their identity isn't legitimate & only a sexual one is.

This is such a red herring. Nobody cares about gender identity except people who think they have one. Nobodty cares about your cat identity, or non-binary identity, or Martian identity or blancmange identity. All irrelevant. Fill your boots.

Gender identity isn’t the passport into women’s (or men’s) services. Nor does cat identity get you an appointment at the vet.

"Identifying" is simply synonymous with being more associated with a category than another or a sub category to it. It's not claiming to be indistinguishable from other sub categories.

That you don't consider gender a valid sub category is a value based opinion not a fact.

that women don't have to cover themselves up in order to work

You want to tell a Saudi PhD student's brother, who is in the UK with her as her chaperone, that she should uncover in an open-plan mixed-sex office? She'd be on a flight home within 24 hours.

In the real world, where plenty of Arabic and Persian women are only studying in the UK because their fathers allow them to and that permission comes with conditions attached surrounding her conduct, we do what we can to facilitate the education that is those women's best chance of being able to defy their families later in life whilst stopping them from passing out or getting heat-induced migraines in ancient university buildings that have no aircon. And that means quietly giving them a single-sex office in which to work unveiled.

Silly you indeed, thinking that the agency and freedom that you have is shared by every woman.

Gender is an entirely irrelevant category when discussing sex. The two are not correlated, so mentioning gender when discussing sex-related matters is absurd. Why do you insist on doing it?

The concept of knocking before entering someone's office strikes you as odd? You do realise that NHS consultants often change into their scrubs in their offices, as testified to in Peggie vs Fife?

It's not men who knocked, we all did if an office door was closed. That's normal civilised behaviour.

Specifically "it would be interesting to know how many young Muslim women don't attend university at all unless they are able to live at home, because they or their parents want them to avoid men."

I refer you to my last-but-one comment describing the chaperoned daughters of rich Saudis studying PhDs at the English university I was working at. There are a lot of women, particularly from the oil-bearing countries of the Middle East, who get to study in the UK because their dads are OK with them coming here chaperoned, basically to make sure that the women are sticking to the modesty and segregation expectations. Yes, it's shit that their dads act like this, but at least the Saudi govt lets girls go to school and will let them go abroad to be educated, unlike the Taliban's ideas on how to treat women. When these ladies get their PhD, they can use that to apply for jobs outside Saudi, and have potentially more autonomy from their dads when earning their own money under a more liberal legal system. They get dragged home for not veiling, that escape route is closed to them.

I will always remember the Iranian student who, whilst writing up her PhD, was applying for all sorts of jobs, including as a nursery governess, something she was wildly overqualified for, because she was so desperate not to have to go back to Iran.

Aww, I haven't been called cute since I was a kitten. Which is as likely as someone born male being female.

A woman would be able to recognise the significance of the PP's experience and that of her mother. The fact that you seem unable to do so does mark you out.

The premise of feminism is that women are oppressed as a sex class because of men's desire to control our reproductive capabilities, and that this is unjust because it denies us the rights due to us as humans. The "commonalities" between us and men, such our creativity and ability to reason, are why we deserve human rights.

To redefine women as "people of either sex who have the typical behaviours more common to the female sex" is to deny our oppression as a sex class, deny men's desire to control our reproductive capabilities, and water down the commonalities-based argument for us having human rights by pretending that the mental commonalities are less present than they really are.

It also denies the observable reality that trans-identifying men share with other men the typically male traits of social dominance, violence, and entitlement towards women.

To redefine women as "people of either sex who have the typical behaviours more common to the female sex" is to deny our oppression as a sex class, deny men's desire to control our reproductive capabilities, and water down the commonalities-based argument for us having human rights by pretending that the mental commonalities are less present than they really are.

There's no 'redefining' of what is & always has been which is gendered behaviours exist at the group level. This is a fact as sure as reproductive differences. And accepting this fact & that of female oppression isn't mutually exclusive nor does it water down the fact that individuals aren’t necessarily reflective of the group. You act as if humans don't have the capacity to hold two different facts in their head at once without cancelling the other one out (well perhaps some of us can't).

It also denies the observable reality that trans-identifying men share with other men the typically male traits of social dominance, violence, and entitlement towards women.

Again, this is missing the point of self identification here. Its upto an individual's own beliefs & values how they assess on balance their associations to the sex they identify with.

But the organic inclinations towards these particular behaviours aren't superficial commonalities is the point. The behaviours are simply an expression of deeper biologically influenced underlying similarities.

Until about one hundred years ago, pink was for boys as being a sort of "red-lite" suitable for easing the boys into manly red. Pale blue was the girls' colour, as a "blue-lite", a toned-down version of the Virgin Mary's blue cloak.

Please explain what biological change caused men and boys to start swerving pink whilst women and girls took up wearing it?

The first six computer programmers, of the ENIAC, were all women. Women dominated computing until the late-seventies.

Please explain the biological change that brought about the rise of the brogrammer?

For hundreds of years, men worked as weavers, stocking frame knitters, and tailors. Women often worked as beer brewers.

Please explain the biological change that led to fibre crafts and textile crafts becoming female-coded, and craft brewing becoming a mostly-male preserve?

During WW2, women welded ships, built and flew aircraft, drove buses and lorries, delivered the post, and farmed.

Please explain the biological changes that allowed women to only excel at these skills during WW2 and suddenly lose those abilities (particularly driving, there's a huge negative stereotype now about women's parking) after VE Day?

I'll grant that child-rearing instincts will be sex-linked, after all it's the mother who gestates and births the baby so she will be strongly bonded to it in a way that the father won't be, but the other stuff is culturally-bound. We know this because, whilst the Western powers were only allowing men to fight, some of the top Russian snipers and pilots were women, despite fighting allegedly being a "men" thing that women supposedly suck at.

Its upto an individual's own beliefs & values how they assess on balance their associations to the sex they identify with.

That self-perception ends where women's rights to single-sex spaces, sports, and services begins, otherwise the individual is violating the rights of the female sex class.

being submissive or emotional or sensitive

Emotional: yes. I have cried daily for CatOfHate for two weeks.

Sensitive: in what sense of the word?

Submissive: everyone who has ever had the misfortune to work with me thinks you are off your rocker.

"Jeans" comes from "Gênes", the French word for Genoa (It: Genova) in Italy.

Well yes, we tend to like clothes that fit us properly.

I am child-free, so I find "mum chat" to be hellishly boring. This doesn't make me not a woman.

Measuring organic (biologically motivated) gendered behaviours more accurately requires removing variables that might confound results like environmental pressures from Patriarchal, fashion, necessity & other extraneous influences. That's why when assessing gendered differences researchers tend to look at trends in more egalitarian countries like Sweden for example which interestingly show even more gendered behavioural differences.

Not when it comes to consumerist, employment, special interest & life choices where vast differences are measured in what is fundamentally the biggest parts of peoples lives.

If you take out all the stuff that relates to having kids, what's left? I bet folding money that the answer is "bugger all". These aren't male versus female differences, they are child-bearer versus not-child-bearer differences. Even the "special interests", because the child-free woman and the typical "leaves it all to the missus" father get to carry on having time for special interests, which mothers don't get. It's not women who go part-time at work, but mothers. The child-free woman stays full-time.

These differences aren't biologically programmed tendencies by sex, they are behaviours that are forced by motherhood.