📢 "Your voice is needed." UNISON general secretary @AndreaEganGS.bsky.social is calling on members and trans allies to oppose the EHRC guidance. MPs will decide on it in the next 30 days. Tell us why it's unworkable in your workplace. 📩 [email protected]

New in TIBG: 'The joy of pests: Camaraderie, wonder and dialectical autonomy in UK professional pest management' by Hannah Fair This paper draws together labour geography and more-than-human geography, proposing a novel mode of understanding multispecies relations. doi.org/10.1111/tran...

Cat-sitting and enjoying a friend’s excellent library is giving me a chance to read more around the question of Jewishness and whiteness. One hunch is that a somewhat uniquely North American version of assimilation has shaped how this question is viewed in quite different geographical contexts

One of the more misogynistic takes currently trending in the AI policy space is "women use less AI than men because they have less tech literacy" Ok but have you considered that women use less AI than men because we have more tech literacy?

With the new EHRC guidance doing the rounds and the UK media having a field day, it’s a good time to recirculate this from 2019:

En route to Birmingham for an exciting workshop and symposium on Black x trans geographies: 'Black and trans perspectives in the current conjuncture', which I've had the honour of co-convening with James Esson, Rita Gayle, AM Kanngieser, Ed Kiely, Pat Noxolo, Jay Todd, and Ezgi Yılmaz

"To some in this country, I am everything that the hateful despise, and I'm standing here as your MSP with care. They say politics is the art of the possible, a politics of care I would say expands what is possible for everyone left behind, pushed out or never invited in.”

A friend kindly pointed out to me today that ‘Not Just Gay Penguins’ is currently trending top of the list on the Gender Place & Culture website… www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Multiple UK universities took down their policies relating to trans inclusion after the OfS's unprecedented fine of Sussex over its wholly anodyne approach to discouraging transphobia. Today is a very good day to demand to know when those policies will be going back up.

According to official statistics, and of course this will be affected by people not declaring, there are 1,525 trans people working in UK higher education, in a total workforce of a little over half a million people. Using GP data to estimate the UK’s trans population, there should be about 4.5k.

Our last workshop together for Revolt in Bernicia’s Garden at The Newbridge Project… it’s been a fascinating journey and I’m curious to see what we’ll make of it, looking back thenewbridgeproject.com/events/revol...

There are 10 times more pages in the IOC’s ‘Policy on the Protection of the Female (Women’s) Category in Olympic Sport’ than there are trans women who have competed in the Olympics. There will also almost certainly be more cis women than trans women disqualified by chromosomal testing

Oh did you want 3300 words from me on today's IOC sex testing rules? An essay on the nature of evidence and why we can't seem to stop getting stuck in the same traps around sex and gender in sports? Wow lucky you!! www.coyotemedia.org/the-olympics...

On my way to St Andrews, working on an editorial for a themed issue on drawing, and looking forward to what should be a great seminar about storytelling, love, and ecology (among other things)

Today my students discussed whether and to what extent Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism play a similar structural role in Europe to the role antisemitism played in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Then the Israeli Foreign Ministry just goes and tweets out an Islamophobic octopus.

Yesterday the NHS banned all under 18 prescriptions of HRT for trans young people. This ban was justified by 10 new studies that largely stated NO EVIDENCE for under 18s HRT exists. The study underpinning this played one particular trick. Let's briefly look at how the NHS rigged the game 1/5

On International Women’s Day, we reflect on the importance of solidarity between women🩷 For over a decade, the conversation around trans rights has been used to divide women who would otherwise stand together. This weakens our ability to challenge the real sources of inequality, misogyny & violence

Dear Shabana, Let's clear some things up around migration and remember we're talking about people's lives.

They killed 180 children and their teachers in a double-tap strike on a school. The girls were 7 to 12 years old.

At least 1,097 civilians had been killed in Iran so far, including 181 children.

students literally tell me their parents tell them they can’t major in Black Studies but every year they have an option for an exam essay prompt where they can argue for or against universities having obligations to offer these classes and OVERWHELMINGLY they think universities should have to

As of tonight, licenses of trans people across Kansas are being invalidated en masse, enabling the overnight criminalization of an entire group of people for going about our lives. It’s often said you never know when you’re living through history, so let me assure you: that’s what’s happening now.

I was literally teaching Sara Ahmed’s work on how the whiteness of institutions is a result of a series of decisions about the allocation of resources, who to recruit, what to prioritize. The values of an institution are most clearly indicated in their budgets.

Really enjoyed reading this non-fiction graphic book on queer/trans ecologies by @sagebrice.bsky.social! Definitely recommend! 🐧

This was a lot of fun! Thanks @mingcan-rong.bsky.social, @samlebutt.bsky.social and colleagues for an enjoyable evening

VERY excited to be speaking at the Nature Bites Back ecohorror symposium tomorrow at Bristol! Among v esteemed panelists and multiple mushroom talks! What more could an ecoGoth dream of... 🍄 @uobrisceh.bsky.social @sagebrice.bsky.social

Flipping through th entries in this new volume, it looks to be not only a fantastic teaching resource but an orientating force for the future of feminist political geography, carefully edited by Sydney Calkin and @cordyf.bsky.social

Many others will understand themselves as trans, & never speak a word. Too afraid. The category of 'gender questioning children', as though this is a group we can identify in a trans hostile society, is a transphobic false category. Please use the term with extreme caution.

We also know, as academics & researchers, that the period in which any child is 'gender questioning' is very often on their own, in silence, months or even years before they speak the words to a single other person. We do not know which children around us are 'questioning' their gender.

There is a wholescale concerted effort to rebrand trans children as gender questioning children. If the whole group are re-labelled, then they cannot claim rights as a minority group. If they are all re-labelled, then conversion efforts can just about helping them 'explore their gender'.

Okay but Zack Polanski has been coming out with bangers

Once again: if these LLMs could actually do all the things their owners claim, they wouldn’t be selling access. They would be building and selling all the things they claim their software can do.

Our study of three of the 2024 anti-asylum-seeker riots now accepted for publication at J of Community & Applied Social Psych. Link to pre-print below. www.qeios.com/read/17ASAP

Rereading @susanstryker.bsky.social ‘s Words to Victor Frankenstein and this excerpt of a letter in a 1986 Gay/Lesbian rag, I’m struck by how unchanged the emotional bedrock of gender critical ‘feminism’ remains. The rhetoric of threat (to women; to lesbians) is a thin pretext for disgusted affront

This is a welcome move from Sussex University. OfS massively overstepped its role here; what’s more, the 3-year ‘enquiry’ spoke to no students, staff, or management at Sussex. Clearly, it was the OfS fine that was designed to have the chilling effect www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This piece has been covered in the Times Higher Education - read more here below ⬇️ www.timeshighereducation.com/news/trans-r...

New Intervention in TIBG: 'A critical response to the UK's "Sullivan Review" into sex and gender in research and data' by @jaytoddgla.bsky.social & @felicitycallard.bsky.social doi.org/10.1111/tran...

📣 Today @felicitycallard.bsky.social and I have published the first peer-reviewed response to the 'Sullivan Review' of research and data on sex and gender. doi.org/10.1111/tran... The Review could threaten trans rights and inclusion, erode academic freedom, and undermine research quality.

Pleased to see our response to the Sullivan Review covered in @scotnational.bsky.social. Important to build awareness of the review’s potential harms.

Strange to speaking of those times as the good old days…

Reflecting back on research trip with Holly Argent to Blast Beach. We listened to fulmars and with scores inspired by Pauline Oliveros. Later I recalled this poem, by Kathleen Jamie (full text in alt)

It’s always a joy to see my art being a part of people’s homes and lives. With international wetland day just round the corner, this photo of ‘Wild narcissi’ from Annie Lee is timely If you have my artwork on your walls, do send me a photo to brighten my day!

Monday and the start of a second week of being prevented from working by my employer, the University of Sheffield. Management has decided that massive damage to staff morale, student experience and the university’s reputation is worth it in a futile attempt to break the union. Shame on them.

Our kids nymag.com/intelligence...

It sucks how the world generally forces unwaged disabled people into the shittiest and oldest available houses. It *literally* needs to be the other way around, lol. Even something as basic as cleaning a counter becomes so much easier when you live in a newly built, moderately resourced apartment...

How about immersing yourself in this truly remarkable, clever & visually stunning piece of work by @sagebrice.bsky.social? She has crafted a superb call for the liberatory promise of queer/trans ecological sensibilities for critical social science, using comics. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....