This is my best most fun FoI ever. It started with me requesting information on their EDI form, as usual. The usual cowardly reply.

Reading the news, it would seem only the University of Edinburgh is breaking the law with regards to its trans policy. So I took a look at the other Russell Group members. The @unibirmingham does not seem to have a specific policy. The @BristolUni has a remarkably fair policy and mentions the Workplace Regs specifically.

On interpretation, again. This is s9 of the GRA. There are three important interpretative issues arising from this frankly badly drafted section. The first, the "all purposes" proviso. I have said for years clearly this means "legal" purposes and this has now been confirmed in the EAT Forstater v CGD. It certainly could not mean social, or cultural, or political purposes but we had to argue with LAWYERS this point .Sigh.

I thought the accusation by JR that to use female pronouns in public but then "misgendering" in private is classic bully behaviour was a good argument. Of course misgendering is bullshit, but Sex Matters advises to do that, selecting when to use preferred pronouns. It is an irrational compromise that exposes you precisely to the sort of charge that JR leveled at Sandie Peggie. As for the upcoming disciplinary hearing, it was the judge in Forstater to say we cannot misgender with impunity? What did people think that meant?

I often thought most lawyers, and especially male lawyers, are not bothered with the arguments about repeal of the GRA because only women are directly affected. The same human rights arguments used to advance the rights of "transwomen" are discounted when used for women. And in fact there are valid human rights arguments for repeal. I have made them repeatedly and also argued the ECHR does not prevent repeal as a matter of law. But there is another, and in my view more disturbing, dimension.

If people who disagree with me on the repeal of the GRA were actually on top of the law they would be able to see the same aporias I can see.
For example, s9 GRA says that the GRC serves for all purposes. Surely this must include obtaining IDs in the acquired gender, right? But no, if you are a man you can get an ID with a female sex marker without a GRC. So I deduce two things:
1. The all purposes proviso is clearly qualified, because it does not even include all legal purposes.

The last year has taught me one thing. There is a very powerful group of influential men and women who describe themselves loosely as gender critical who are obsessed with preserving the GRA, in a manner that finds no parallel amongst "trans people" and their allies. I am trying to be generous and presume maybe they are so afraid of a potential amendment of the GRA in the direction of self-ID that they are intent in preserving it in its current form. But this does not explain their concerted attack against me. I am a foreigner with no job.

Sulla GPA/utero in affitto. Le persone che dichiarano di essere a favore, mostrano di non avere la minima idea di cosa comportino i contratti per GPA, persino in paesi con un sistema legale sofisticato come gli USA. Quindi un elenco dei problemi gravissimi nei contratti 1. La donna deve avere già avuto un figlio ed essere sposata in un matrimonio etero. Per il rodaggio si capisce. Bisogna ridurre il rischio di problemi legati a gravidanza e parto. Le gravidanze per GPA sono ad alto rischio comunque.

The right wing man wants women to be empowered by being a homemaker.
The left wing man wants women to be empowered by being a sex worker.
The right wing man wants women to make babies for him.
The left wing man wants women to make babies to sell. The right wing man says only women have a vagina.
The left wing man says men decide what women have.

There is one basic intellectual mistake many legal commentators are making trying to find a compromise whereby sometimes transwomen can be considered as women by the law. Thanks to the work of feminists (NOT of male legal commentators) the law has already been neutralised. Sex does not matter in many circumstances where it used to matter, such as voting rights and property rights.

How could I forget @SpringerLaw. In February 2023 I contacted them to ask if they were interested in a monography on gender identity in international law. They were very keen on it. As I said, very keen

Thread of all the questions and comments I had on the EA amendment. None of them was addressed. On the other hand, now almost everyone at Sex Matters ignores me or has blocked me. No debate.

I am reflecting this morning on how we put down women's achievements unless they are in traditionally male fields. So this is a thanks to my grandmother, Carmela (Italians will now know she was Sicilian) who only had 5 years of schooling. Here she is (right) with her sister. Young and seemingly carefree. She lost her mother at 5. Her father remarried a woman who hated her. Her stepbrother later told her she had saved his life, taking care of him, as his mother was not capable of it.. She was 10 when he was born.

🧵on the Variations in Sex Characteristics. The Hate Crime and Public Order Act in Scotland creates a new offence of stirring up hatred against the VSC category. I have argued repeatedly this is unnecessary and designed to introduce this Yogyakarta derived concept in the law. The only definition adopted in UK policy derives from a paper published by the Government Equalities Office in 2019, which adopts also all the usual gender ideology language (sex assigned at birth). This definition is not used in the Scottish Act.

Thread on interpreting the GRA 2004 and the EA 2010. It is commonly held that the GRA modifies the meaning of sex in law, extending it to include people of the opposite sex with a GRC, and that this modification applies to the EA 2010 as well. See Lady Haldane in [2022] CSOH 90. There are two erroneous application of the rules on interpretation here. The first, text needs to be interpreted in the context of the whole Act unless otherwise provided. So s9 GRA has to be interpreted in the context of the whole act. S9 is the 'all purposes' provision.

If you want to know how you effectively silence an academic, here is a little story.
In April 2019 I had written the first thread on Twitter about women's rights and gender identity theory. I had received plenty of hatred online. I wa not afraid of that. At the time, I was Junior Professor at Leuphana University, in Germany.
In October 2019, I met the head of my department on the stairs. He told me he had received an email, he mentioned Mermaids. And he told me never to write about this stuff again.

By writing about how @CambPressAssess ignored my inquiry about a book on gender identity in international law I seemingly broke one of the unspoken rules of academia. Never publicise your failures. Never talk about the posts you did not get. The funding bids rejected (the majority are!). The articles the journals refused to publish, except by making some lame joke about reviewer no. 2. So your career will seem an upwards trajectory towards greatness.

Reflecting on my academic experience I feel I should add that an important part of it is the way students are turning against their lecturers and professors, as little soldiers of the gender cult. It is scary and also very upsetting. My academic colleagues showed me how little they value academic freedom in research. The students proved how little they understand about academic freedom. Since I started to write about gender, this happened:

I spent 10 years in Scottish academia. Immediately told off for this tweet by people telling me I should read Foran. So a little lesson on how academia works.

https://twitter.com/AlessandraAster/status/1748630190496927860

When a new topic arises in an academic field, academics start researching it. They write blogs, articles, books. They organise colloquia, seminars, conferences. A group of 'experts' soon emerges. From that group, then it branches out to specialists in cognate areas.

Short thread because the misinformation about what a GRC does never stops. A GRC is a legal document with legal effects. According to s9 GRA, a person with a GRC is to be considered of the opposite sex 'for all purposes'. This clearly means all LEGAL purposes. Because that is the function of certificates. At the time, people thought, or deluded themselves into thinking, that people seeking a GRC would be passing in their 'acquired sex' even if the law specifically did not require that.

Happy New Year to my passport policy FoIs!

https://x.com/AlessandraAster/status/1636011542050230272?s=20

https://x.com/AlessandraAster/status/1638251377976569885?s=20