Paying Lip Service to Women While Undermining Women’s Rights

The LSE’s Love Affair with Gender

Image from LSE’s Transnational “Anti-Gender' Movements and Resistance: Narratives and Interventions” Image credit: LSE

I always knew that the tide would turn regarding the onslaught of gender identity pushed from every corner of our society when the proverbial “fluffy kitten” would be placed in its crosshairs. Gender ideology is not only widespread—it’s pervasive in media, public policy, educational institutions, professional organisations, policing, jurisprudence, law, social media, councils, private companies, and beyond—I can’t think of an arena where it is not omnipresent. If ever there were a hope for a public pushback to this ideology there are, in fact, two “fluffy kittens” within this debate that have driven its massive pushback: sports and children.

Intellectually, even the most stalwart supporter of sic “trans identity” recognises that a six-foot tall bloke playing against a 5-foot woman in rugby or cycling is unfair competition. Still, debates took place and are still ongoing as to why sex matters. From testosterone levels to time frames between sic “transition” and competition to sporting organisations that refuse to recognise the biological advantages of male athletes the facts are clear in this debate. Yet, today girls and women are discriminated against in their own sporting competitions. The science is unambiguous in this matter even if the plethora of bad studies have yet to make it to the bottom of Google’s search results and journals like Nature run opinion pieces by a PhD in government who postures gender identity as done and dusted science in an article whose sole aims attempts to derail scientific evidence through hokum.

The other category within the transgender debate that makes people stop and question gender identity, at least in part, is the subject of medicalising children’s “gender identity.” Many diehard trans “allies” baulk at the idea of teenage girls undergoing double mastectomies because these girls “feel like a boy,” dislike femininity, or, as in many cases, are young lesbians uncomfortable with the social discourse directed at lesbians. While there are a troubling number of people who support the sic transitioning of children despite the documented harms of hormone blockers, recent decisions speak to professional and public opinion shifting radically on this subject. This summer’s announcement that the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust is to be closed after the release of the Cass Review’s interim report submitted by Dr Hilary Cass. The report found the clinic overlooked various mental health issues in children distressed about their gender—autism, eating disorders or histories of trauma and abuse—while failing to collect data on the use or side effects of puberty blockers.

Between the closing of the Tavistock and last year’s report by the Care Quality Commission Inspection which gave the Tavistock an “inadequate” rating, we have been given a clear indication that the tide has not only turned, but we are already seeing signs there is a mounting tsunami on the horizon.

Tuesday, Dr Jacob Breslow, Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality at the London School of Economics’ Department of Gender Studies, resigned as a trustee of the charity Mermaids after The Times reported that Breslow spoke at a conference in 2011 organised by B4U-ACT, a group that promotes support for paedophiles. B4U-ACT calls for paedophiles to have the right to live "in truth and dignity" and avoids the term “paedophilia,” instead replacing it with a sanitised linguistic refashioning: “minor-attracted people.” Breslow’s presentation, entitled “Sexual Alignment: Critiquing Sexual Orientation, The Pedophile, and the DSM V,” promotes treating paedophilia as any other sexuality, writing: “Many tend to begin with the linkage of paedophilic desire to harmful and abusive relationships and acts, and end up proliferating, rather than questioning, normative gendered and sexual intelligibility.” Still, this week’s discovery about Breslow should have hardly come as a surprise to Mermaids or the LSE: His LSE profile details his 2021 monograph about “the queer life of children's desires.”

This revelation follows last week’s announcement that Mermaids is being investigated by the Charity Commission which has launched a regulatory compliance case after Mermaids reportedly offered chest binders to teenage girls against their parents' wishes and rushed some young patients into treatment, including the use of puberty-blocking drugs which Mermaids claims are safe and “totally reversible.” Needless to say, Mermaids is facing its imminent descent.

Call me crazy, but any organisation that engages a trustee who promotes narratives favouring “minor-attracted people” while secretly handing out devices to girls that the Cass interim report states are “painful, and potentially harmful” is bound to end up in a dumpster fire of its own creation.

My aim here, however, is not to focus solely on Mermaids, for this charity is just one of many actors in the steaming pile of hokum called “gender identity.” It is imperative that we begin to discuss that machinery that empowered Mermaids in the first place given that the architects of gender identity are firmly rooted within academic institutions such as Breslow’s home, the London School of Economics. Last year, Breslow co-taught a course with Professor Clare Hemmings called “Transnational Sexual Politics.” This course was a session entitled, “No Time, No TERFs, No Norms” where four papers were presented. Here are their titles:

“Vomit and Time”

“Trans* Endemics: Embodying Viral and Monstrous Threat in Times of Pandemic”

“Nationalism’s Cannon Fodder: The Birth of Transpatriots”

“Is Letting Trans Children Die ‘Common Sense’?”

No, these are not upcoming publications by Verso (but they might as well be)—these are what passes for academic “scholarship” these days. Matt Thompson presented his paper from the course, “Trans* Endemics,” at a conference in the Department of Gender Studies in April 2021, reading:

“If TERFs think trans* is an endemic threat to feminism, let us be the threat to feminism…

Picture this: I hold a knife to your throat and spit my transness into your ear. Does that turn you on? Are you scared? I sure fucking hope so.”

Breslow’s student is not an anomaly in the academic gender industry: violent fantasies with sexual malice are part of this movement’s modus operandi even within university walls where there is an institutional embrace of the threats made to those who question or debate this ideology. The LSE is no exception to churning out gender hocus-pocus with its offering of thirty gender-focussed courses wherein the word “woman” appears thrice in course descriptions eclipsed by the dozens of references to “gender,” its publication of the gender pay gap where women are still underrepresented in the upper quartile, and its promotion of “Transnational ‘Anti-Gender’ Movements and Resistance: Narratives and Interventions” where gender here clearly means sic trans-identified people.

This institution can’t seem to square its alleged commitment to inclusion, compliance with its gender equality plan, and equal pay for women as evidenced throughout its website. The LSE conflates gender and sex, seamlessly representing its aims for “gender inclusion” as somehow about women when it’s anything but. At times the LSE presents “gender” as connoting “women” but the LSE largely uses this term as a thinly-veiled mechanism to refer to everyone but women. Why else invite some of the most vociferous anti-women’s rights scholars on the planet to “witch hunt” these “anti-gender” movements: Jules Gill-Peterson, Sally Hines, Jacob Breslow, Alyosxa Tudor, Tshepo Ricki Kgositau, and Judith Butler? When you can cast gender critical as “anti-gender” and “right-wing” for its “Transnational ‘Anti-Gender’ Movements and Resistance: Narratives and Interventions”? It’s a small leap from the classroom of an instructor who lectures on “minor-attracted people” to his male student who “spits” his “transness” into our ears.

The LSE website has also published various articles by staff that employ derogatory terms to refer to gender-critical women and many more that contain outright misrepresentations of gender criticism and gender critics. Is it any surprise that the sexualised threats of violence such as those made by Breslow’s student are not anomalous to the gender identity movement? To quote JK Rowling, “Violence is not a bug, but a feature of this authoritarian movement.”

In June 2021 the LSE Gender Studies department took aim at scholars from the Open University who had established a Gender Critical Research Network, alleging in its “Statement of Solidarity with Open University Staff and Postgraduate Research Students” that “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.” This statement, of course, was defamatory in that it attempted indirectly of linking these scholars in the Gender Critical Research Network with discrimination. While this was later removed from the LSE website, the university did little in the way of apologising for the misrepresentations.

Conversely, the LSE has carefully detailed its many policies for sic transgender persons and has hosted numerous conferences on gender. Yet, for all this institution’s espoused “gender equality” (where women are supposed to understand “gender” as a linguistic replacement for “sex”), the LSE can’t seem to understand how its purported commitment to women is at odds with its overzealous and far more vocal stance towards gender identity in all its various flavours and hyphens. The LSE website proudly displays its Athena SWAN gender equality award which, according to the LSE website, is given:

to institutions advancing gender equality in higher education, through representation, progression and success for all. It shows LSE has a solid foundation and strong evidence-based plans in place to eliminate gender bias and develop an inclusive culture.

These plans include objectives on increasing the recruitment of women and promoting the career development of female staff.

However, lower down on its page it explains how this award has changed:

It was later expanded to recognise work undertaken in the arts, humanities, social sciences, business and law, in professional and support roles, and for trans staff and students. It now recognises work undertaken to address gender equality more broadly.

Let’s be clear here: in the context of “gender equality” where women are the ostensible sex class in need of measures of equality, addressing “gender equality more broadly” simply means men. Just as in most academic institutions around the country, gender at the LSE is a free-for-all where female students and women employed by this university are, on the one hand, told that their rights are being protected, that efforts are being made to close pay gaps and ensure that promotions are made fairly despite the reality that women often need to take maternity leave, while on the other hand, women are lobbed in the same category as any man who lays claim to being a woman.

While the LSE touts this award proudly on its website as a badge of acting in the best interest of its female staff and students, this is far from the reality I experienced with the LSE in the summer of 2015, when I went for an interview for a teaching position in the Department of Media and Communications. I found myself seated across from a hiring committee of three lecturers from the department. It was a wildly fun interview and I seemed to hit all the right notes with their needs, my qualifications, knowledge, and capacities. They said that I was the “most qualified candidate for the job” and asked me if I could start the position on 1 September. I responded, “Absolutely, but around the 26th of September I will need to take a couple days off.” They asked why. That day I was wearing a black shirt and I can only imagine the colour hid the fact that I was 7 months pregnant while I sat for this interview. I pointed to my enormous belly and said smiling, “I will need to give birth.”

The committee members, all women, suddenly became quite uneasy. Their facial expressions shifted from that of exuberance to that of having found that their dog shat the carpet. One woman asked me nervously, “But don’t you want to be with your baby?” I mentioned that I would engage a childminder. Then another interjected and queried, “Are you sure you can keep up with the teaching and research?” to which I pointed out that I already had a daughter whose existence did not hamper my prodigious publication record and excellence in teaching as demonstrated by myriad evaluations. And the third committee member repeated that having a child and working at the LSE would be difficult. I wanted to check the calendar at that very moment.

I’ll cut to the chase here: I didn’t get the position despite being the “most qualified candidate for the job.” This incident threw me a curveball that I would have never expected from an institution for which I had so much respect throughout my academic career. Worse, in trying to take up this issue within the university administration, I was sent an email that did not at all address the issue of sex-based discrimination. When I was later directed to Acas, Great Britain’s independent public body that precedes an employment tribunal, I was asked, “What would you like from the LSE?” I said, “I would like the job for which the hiring committee claimed I was the ‘most qualified’.” The woman on the other end of the telephone said, “We can’t do that as they have offered the job to someone else.” Uh, that’s the obvious outcome of this form of discrimination, I thought. She added, “What else would you like?” I explained, “I would like that the LSE make a clear commitment to train all their staff in sex-based discrimination and that they make a written commitment to me and within its policy not to discriminate against any candidate simply because she is pregnant.” The response from Acas: “We can’t ask them to do this.” I asked, “So why are you asking me what I want if nothing related to sex-based discrimination or advocating for the position is possible to address here?” The Acas staff member told me that they could seek monetary compensation. “Great!” I exclaimed, “I’d like the salary I would have been paid for the entire contract term.” Her reply: “We can’t do that. You can ask for a few thousand pounds at best.”

And there I was left to sign a non-disclosure agreement (which this article is clearly breaking) in exchange for less than what would have been a month’s salary. I am in a good position to testify to the fact that the London School of Economics knows precisely what a woman—not gender—is and behaves towards women with this knowledge.

We must be wary of academic institutions that obfuscate and erase the language of sex that directly and uniquely pertains to the sex class of women through shapeshifting linguistic policies, course offerings, and the ostensible “inclusion” policies writ large through gender identity bolloxology while giving the royal shaft to women. These institutions ought to hold on tightly to their “gender equality” awards because we see that when push comes to shove, the LSE and many other universities know precisely which “gender” against which to discriminate.

My experience with the LSE opened my eyes to the practical and very real abuses of “gender equality” rife within most every public and private body in the UK. If you can turn a woman away from a job because of her reproductive “attachments,” then obviously men who identify as women are the obvious go-to. After all, what could be more perfect than an all-male staff of professors, unhampered by childcare, messy bodily fluids, and menopause, many of whom can and will simply tick the “gender” box “woman”? It’s a win-win for the LSE who will continue to receive their awards for “gender equality” and the academics who create the misogynist theories driving these policies.