More It Must Not Be Allowed, this time from LSE staff in solidarity with Open University staff and students.

We, the LSE Department of Gender Studies, write this letter in solidarity with the scholars, researchers, members of staff, and students at the Open University who are facing an unwelcoming and antagonistic environment because of the newly created Gender Critical Research Network. We support and wholly endorse the Open Letter from OU Staff and Postgraduate Research Students, written in response to the launch of the Network. Reiterating the demands of our colleagues at the Open University, we ask that the Open University urgently rescind its support for this network, and that it actively re-commit to supporting trans rights and the field of Gender Studies.  

The Gender Critical Research Network is an explicitly anti-intellectual attack on Gender Studies, trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people, and inclusive, intersectional feminist politics. Proponents of the “gender critical” perspective, including the Members and Affiliated Members of the Network, are adamantly and openly opposed to recognising trans people’s rightful and valid claims to their gender and their rights. Their efforts to undermine trans rights are particularly concerning now, at a time when trans, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people in the UK and elsewhere are already experiencing such immense restrictions on their social, medical, interpersonal, and political livelihoods.

What is meant by “trans people’s rightful and valid claims to their gender and their rights”? If by “gender” they mean clothes and haircuts, then no gender critical people oppose such claims. If they mean “sex” then of course we do, just as people of color object if white people pretend to be people of color. That’s the usefulness of “gender” in this conflict: it’s never clear exactly what they’re claiming.

As numerous scholars and activists have documented, those espousing gender critical perspectives routinely make transphobic, discriminatory, inaccurate, and harmful claims about trans people specifically, and gender more broadly, that have profoundly negative effects on social and political life. Their unfounded viewpoints are inimical to intersectional feminisms and scholarly debate, and they contribute to the ongoing “anti-gender” attacks on the field. In refusing the concept of gender, and in framing “sex” as immutable, binary, and essentialist, the gender critical perspective runs counter to decades of scholarship from across the social sciences, humanities, and medical fields, and it relies on and invests in racist, colonial understandings of sex/gender.  

Nah, what’s racist is claiming that it’s only white people who know who is which sex.

They end with a list of demands.