Is this what ‘Open’ means?
By: S J Tamsett
Tags: Gender Critical, LGBTQ, Open University, Gender Identity, Transgender Rights

I didn’t have a fun time last year. I ended up staying nearly a month in hospital and came out with my mobility and my balance seriously curtailed, along with much of the rest of my life. It took a lot of adjusting to, both for me and for Laurie, who suddenly became a full-time carer. We did get some great support though, and got through it all as best we could. I can mostly get upstairs now without help, and my bath lift is a game changer — when it will stay charged. I feel the commode has brought us closer together, as a couple…

But all this aside, I was determined that I was still going to go ahead and make this the year I started studying. I’d let myself be too easily put off by various unimportant things before, so there was no way actual Important Things would stop me now. I could still sit and read, just about, although my focus and concentration were not what they had been, and I was struggling with screen use. Yes, this definitely was the right time to start studying at degree level!

But I did it, anyway, and with (eventual, invaluable) support from the DSA, I started studying for a Combined STEM BSc. It was new, and exciting, and intimidating at times, and boy, did I NOT know how to write academically. Or use references. I had a wonderful tutor and a great tutor group, and that meant I got to chat about what we were learning, too, and discuss books we had read, or documentaries we had seen that we felt were relevant to our course. I had constructive, honest feedback on my essays that I could feel proud of, and build on — and I started to realise the change it was making to my life, to me, and how I felt about myself. I could do this. I could do this for myself, and do it well. I could achieve. I could grow. I could be more than I had been. Nearly 40 years after I last did any studying, I still was atrocious at timekeeping.

The Open University has changed my life, and how I look at myself and my future. It’s started me on an amazing journey that I can’t wait to continue. But all this build up has been so that you will understand what a profound thing it is for me to say that I cannot possibly go on being part of a university that gives its approval to and provides a home for the Gender Critical Research Network.

‘What’s wrong with a Gender Critical Research Network then?’ I know some of you will ask. ‘Did you get up on the wrong side of your feminism bed, and end up in the seventh wave again?’

Don’t be cheeky, because whilst this is in many ways about feminism, it is actually about Trans Rights.

Once, in simpler times, those who cared about keeping trans women out of feminism were referred to as TERFs, or Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, because that’s who they were, and we all knew where we stood. Then, as trans people gained more support and more rights, transphobes began to object to being called out for their outmoded beliefs, and TERF was declared a slur, rather than an acronym that fulfilled a need. Cis, the simple opposite of trans was also declared a slur. Discussion became a lot harder. A new term arose, to stop people getting instantly blocked and banned: ‘gender critical’, or people who are often so critical of gender that they are not quite sure what it means anymore, so NO ONE gets to have any!

In Kathleen Stock’s article ushering in the newly launched network, it is possible to tease out some interesting facts. The GCRN wants to study “how human sex interacts with social conditions to be a predictor of certain outcomes”. Or, if you’re a boy, doing x leads to y, and if you’re a girl, z leads to…? But sex and gender are social constructs. You can’t make rules around things that change as our attitudes towards them change. Boys will simply not be boys, and girls steadfastly continue not to be made of sugar and spice.

Feminism, I have to reveal, IS open to everyone, and has been for quite some time. Considerations of intersectionality are vital to making feminism stronger, more impactful and wider-reaching, and that means no one gets to play gatekeeper. We need to consider the needs and struggles of BAME feminists, disabled and queer feminists, bisexual feminists, working class feminists and feminists from Roma and traveling communities. We have to include feminists of all faiths and creeds, all ages, neurodiversities, genders and sexes. People who are transphobic and out of touch are not going to find much to welcome them, and having “a biology GCSE” isn’t really good enough if your whole argument about trans rights reduces to ‘sex is binary because there’s only XX and XY’. I think you can manage to read a Scientific American article, however, and should give it a try.

“Instead of talking about sex, academics now talk about “gender”, a dazzlingly polysemous concept which apparently means whatever you want it to at the time of discussion. Occasionally “gender” means sex, but in a helpfully obscure way designed to stop you being denounced by your colleagues; at other times, it designates the social meanings attached to masculinity or femininity. Most often these days, though, it means gender identity: an inner feeling of being male, female, or neither, potentially detached from the material facts about your body.”

I’m delighted to discover that gender remains, as do so many words in the English language, polysemous, or has more than one meaning. But gender identity is separate from biological sex, and I’m glad that’s been cleared up. If this is the level of research from the GCRN, I’m not really sure what to make of it.

To say that gender identities are “hot right now” and “fuelled by trend-gripped students” plays into the myth that transgender identities are some newfangled thing that’s only come along in the last 30 years or so, and only affects white, middle class families. This is patently untrue, as trans identities have existed throughout history, and within almost every culture on earth. Those crazy kids and their madcap, self aware, pronoun-led lives. In my day, we were all clones of the man-mother, and we never complained…

“Retaining academic focus in the wake of such intense hostility will be an understandable challenge for the new network…” I imagine it’s not going to be a picnic for trans students and staff who felt previously that the Open University was a safe and welcoming place for them to work and study, if the GCRN continues to be hosted here. These academics are choosing their field of research, and it is their decision to court what hostility they may get by how they go about that, unlike the trans, non binary and gender non-conforming students and staff who have just found out this network exists. Who they are is what is being ‘researched’, who they are, their lives and their rights to exist. Trans rights are a matter of law. Trans rights are not a topic for ‘lively debate’. Trans people do not have to start each day justifying their right to be here. I’m sorry if all this makes it difficult for me to feel sympathy for how hard it’s going to be getting all that lovely grant money when all your peers have rejected you.

“There is now space, for the first time in many years, for unashamedly radical feminist ideas to be brought into the academy on equal terms with other theories of social justice — and for them to be critiqued where necessary on genuinely intellectual grounds, rather than quasi-moralistic ones.”

I do always worry when people start to put the intellectual above the moral. It’s rarely a good sign. But here’s a radical feminist idea. You don’t get to gatekeep feminism. Neither do I, for that matter. But trans women are women, and they can be feminists too. Radical ones, even. This can only make feminism and lively debate richer.

The timing of the launch of the GCRN is also worth noting, coming as it does, immediately in the wake of the Maya Forstater ruling. It needs to be made clear that this ruling said, in regards to gender critical views, that there was nothing illegal in what an individual believes. Like the White Queen in Through The Looking Glass, you may believe six impossible things before breakfast if you like. But that’s a very different thing to setting up a research project, acquiring funding, and encouraging learning and debate about them — never mind the simple legitimacy given by being hosted by a respected UK university. It should, however, be noted that no brick and mortar university would have them, hence the air of celebration in the Gender Critical community that the network had launched — neatly at the end of term when OU students will either just have finished or be finishing exams and final papers. There is no campus to leave here, no final social events to keep people talking and gathering. There are small interlinked networks of communication, but many OU students study alone. Most don’t hear anything about what goes on in other areas of study. Many will never hear about this.

So why does it matter, then? No harm, no foul, right? Because I believe, as I think many people do, that if you come for any one of us, you come for us all. This doesn’t just apply to the LGBTQ+ community either, although of course it does most profoundly there. Gender Critical beliefs — or as they are more commonly known, transphobia — are based in misogyny. They’re being used as a tool not just to divide and destroy the LGBTQ+ community, but to bring down feminism too. They prey on old fears and bogeymen, resurrecting the moral panics of the past and planting seeds of distrust in every crack and cranny. Trans women are all predatory men! Trans men are just confused lesbians! These confused kids and their new fads for gender fluid, demi boi, non binary whatever, it’s all about how toxic gender stereotypes have become! Why do they need to be equal, why can’t they just have their own category, and be happy where we can keep an eye on them? Oh, and Pride is becoming too sexualised, don’t you think? What’s all that about, then? And lesbians? Guess what? No one respects you. You should break away from these other guys. You don’t need them! Oh my god, did you hear they want to teach our children at infant school about GAY SEX…

Every single point I’ve made above I’ve argued with transphobes about. Every one. This is the sort of thinking that Gender Critical adherents encourage, and how we will end up returning to a world with another Section 28. I’ve lived through that and I’m not prepared to go back. We’ve reached a point where all of us, no matter who we are or what we believe, are protected equally in law. We have robust laws about hate speech and freedom of speech, that allow people to speak freely, but not without consequence. And we have the Equality Act 2010, which means you can fuck right off with all this transphobic bullshit. Transgender identities are a protected characteristic, and if you are contributing to an environment where my trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming siblings no longer feel safe, supported or welcome, you can get the hell out of my university, because it’s Open to everything but bigotry, no matter how you try and disguise it.