Academic law person at Kent Law School. Working on feminist, disability & gender things. Part of the
@FutureGender
team! All views my own & not peer reviewed.
Having to tell students they still need to submit their essay on time or apply for a formal extension even while whole countries are declaring state of emergencies and a pandemic is happening around us somehow isn’t what I think academia should be all about...
My university is proposing that from now on research should only form 10% of our workload. So glad to know that senior management think doing research is some kind of optional extra for academics, bet that will really pay off in the next REF
My university is making staff redundant and the consultants senior management have hired couldn’t even manage to remove our letterhead before doing exactly the same thing at Goldsmiths. Really says it all about the competency of the people tasked with destroying universities.
@TeemuTaira
Oh god this is horrific. Did you know at Goldsmiths our management gave us documents for our redundancy process that had left in “University of Kent” by accident??? 🤦🏾♀️ Cut & paste job being done to follow your suit. Solidarity ❤️✊🏿🔥
I should be teaching students about the gender pay gap today but instead I’m on strike with
@ucu
because the gender pay gap in universities is 18.9%, the race pay gap is 17% and the disability pay gap is 9%. We deserve better than that!
#ucuRISING
Please enjoy this example of good goal setting from the NHS Pain Management programme: Just throw away your mobility aids and get on your bike!
#NEISvoid
I find it incredible that people can relentlessly abuse a woman of colour for the terrible crime of being good at sports in a context where this might put her in actual physical danger in her home country and not have at least a brief “are we the baddies” moment
I should be delighted to announce that I’m officially a senior lecturer, but mostly I’m just utterly exhausted? The last 18 months have been so relentless for anyone in academia, which makes it hard to get excited even when things do go well.
Got on a
@Se_Railway
train just now and the guard immediately came to ask me if I need any help getting off the train or if I need any other assistance when arriving in London. I would love to hear from
@Mark_J_Harper
how a ticket machine will help disabled travellers like that.
🚨 BREAKING: Sources confirm that
@Mark_J_Harper
has just "pressed go" on the plans. Train operators will announce consultations tomorrow on 1,000 ticket offices up for closure. We understand that: "Ministers want ticket offices closed by Christmas."
My university is officially planning to switch our workload to 70% teaching and 20% research, which their own EDI impact assessment says is bad for minoritised staff. So that’s lovely news in the middle of marking! Why do we want to do all that pesky research anyway?
Funding awarded by
@BritishAcademy_
for a project to examine structural gender norms and how they affect the lives of women and LGBTQ+ people.
Project leads
@FloraRenz
& postdoc, Lila Braunschweig, will begin work at the beginning of July.
Really excited to have a new piece out in
@Law_Critique
! The article tries to think through how law could better recognise the way human bodies can be extended by mobility aids like wheelchairs and how inadequate our current model of legal personhood is in this regard. 1/n
There seems to be an increasing trend where commentary pieces even in serious newspapers simply don’t get fact-checked. Consequently this is filled with inaccuracies about what the Gender Recognition Act currently does & what the change could mean. So let’s start from the top 1/n
"Opponents believe vulnerable women will be placed at risk, with trans people with male anatomy gaining access to women-only spaces including changing rooms, public toilets, prisons and refuges."
All of these can currently be accessed without a GRC.
It’s raining outside and I have a tonne of work to do, but I made
@Nigella_Lawson
Lemon Tendercake with a whipped oat/coconut topping (it’s vegan!!!) so things are looking up
I was today years old when I found out that BSL does not have gendered pronouns, but has the much more useful option of indicating how many people you are talking about when saying ‘we’ or ‘you’
Beagle is coping with the one warm week we seem to be getting this year in the traditional manner of her people: lying unconscious and snoring on the sofa with one treat ear up in case I might suddenly open the fridge
@beaglefacts
In case any students are wondering what academics do during reading week: I have just resubmitted an article I've been working on for over a year so now I'm eating leftover chocolate ganache straight out of the bowl using a banana as a utensil.
It really shouldn’t need saying at this point but sex testing in elite sport has been solely weaponised against women who aren’t white and are predominantly from the global south. These gender panics are very clearly about who fails to live up to an ideal of dainty white feminity
@maireadenright
The OU needs 3 years and teams of about 6 academics to produce one new module. And that’s just for the academic content, the actual online components are put together by dedicated support staff, there is no way the rest of us can replicate this.
Very excited to be publishing an interim report from our project Imagining Inclusive Workspaces for Disabled People. The report is available to download on our website:
What I really love about academia is the long, relaxing summer breaks where I can kick back and enjoy the sunny weather...by sitting indoors and alternating between writing about domestic abuse and marking exams on manslaughter and robbery.
I would have preferred being in the guardian for my research, but they did let me talk about the particularly brutal impact of NHS waiting times on disabled people - ‘Huge human and economic toll’: one in seven people in England waiting for NHS treatment
I wrote a thing on living under capitalism, disability and the idea of pushing yourself. Also about how much I really hate motivational slogans (and PE).
The decision in Forstater v CGD seems in line with existing case law on what amounts to a protected belief. But, it does seem striking that the EAT immediately and explicitly felt the need to state that this does not give permission to discriminate or misgender trans people
Many athletes competing in a specific sport do so bc they got a genetic advantage in that sport, most people aren’t hypermobile but many gymnasts are, the average person isn’t 7 ft but many basketball players are. Do we really need to recap what faster, higher, stronger means?
“It is dangerous to assert that any category of people deserves a blanket presumption of innocence”. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the very foundation of our criminal system is very much to assume that everyone is innocent unless proven otherwise. 8/n
Just two more weeks to go until the
@SLSA_UK
one day conference Doing Socio-Legal Research in a Pandemic! For the full schedule and to register see eventbrite:
As my university has decided to bless us with both a pay freeze and a promotion freeze this coming year, maybe my job for the year could just be Beach? At least I got my work outfit ready.
A student in a seminar referred to a ‘91 case as being from the 1900s and I immediately crumbled into a pile of ancient dust in front of the entire class.
I'm on BBC News at 15:06 explaining why I think Kemi Badenoch & the government are using their announcement on the Equality Act and trans people as yet more cheap culture war point scoring and of course their proposal is utterly unworkable. Happy Pride!
If you are doing work around gender, feminism, sexuality and law please do think about submitting an abstract to the GSL stream of this years virtual
#SLSA2021
A woman at the traffic light asked if I had pressed the button and when I confirmed she responded with “what a good job, well done darling”. And on the one hand this is extremely patronising, but on the other hand I want this level of praise for everything I do?
There is nothing quite like being woken up at 2am by the beagle realising that eating everything lying on the ground in the park may have been a mistake after all
#beaglefacts
Guess nobody at
@Se_Railway
stations like Canterbury West this morning needs to use the ticket office anymore. You know, except for all the people in the very long queue
@RMTunion
#SaveTicketOffices
Gardening is great for your mental health if you’re an academic. Now instead of worrying about how my writing isn’t good enough and how this will ruin my life I can worry about my raised beds not being good enough and how this will ruin my raspberries. 10/10 would recommend!
My amazing Gender, Sexuality and Law students put together a full playlist to illustrate different types of feminism and covered a Marxist critique of the Gillette advert. Fantastic start to the new term
@KentLawSchool
!
Today is
#UniMentalHealthDay
.
A whole university approach is key to creating mentally healthy universities. Our
#Stepchange
programme aims to support this.
Find out more 👉
‘I would be really grateful for your thoughts and comments on this!’ But also if you say anything even mildly critical about my writing I will quit academia and become a hermit in the parking lot behind my house.
Had a wonderful time celebrating our
@KentLawSchool
@UniKent
students graduating at the cathedral yesterday. Always the best part of the academic year!
Please enjoy this delightful German legal dispute in which the MoJ has drafted a law using female terms which has been rejected by the ministry for the interior because then the law would only apply to women while male terms apply to everyone
There is no university funding crisis, says Michelle Donelan.
“Do we think it’s a crisis? No, we do not. Are we working closely with the DfE to make sure that we’re across the financial health of universities that are leading on research? Absolutely.”
Extremely looking forward to
#SLSA2022
starting tomorrow. Day 1 of the Gender, Sexuality and Law stream is going to be brilliant with papers covering carceral politics, conversion therapy, trans rights, period poverty, anti-trafficking and much more… Find us in LMB/002A!
Super excited that mine and
@DavinaCooper5
article 'Reimagining Gender Through Equality Law: What Legal Thoughtways Do Religion and Disability Offer?' is now out and open access with
@FLS_journal
Very excited to be talking about my work on disability and gender for the Law/Gender/Body/Texts series. It's an online event open to all, Friday 27th November 4-5pm. Come listen to me ramble and watch slides of weird jellyfish!
Delighted to discover that we have returned to normal at work post-Covid! By which I mean for the first lecture of the term the air con was set to "arctic" and the projector didn't work so had to do the whole thing without slides while gradually loosing feeling in my hands & feet
Ready for the
#SLSA2022
Apologies in advance for any awkward behaviour, I have simply lost all social skills over the last two years and turned slightly feral
Sincere apologies to my anaesthetist who just wanted some lighthearted “isn’t it funny that we now also ask men if they’re pregnant” banter & was not prepared to be subjected to a full intro to sex & gender lecture by a patient. Assume this is why I was suddenly very unconscious
Big fan of the university not releasing our timetable until a week before teaching starts, I obviously plan my year no more than a week in advance. Also very excited about being in inaccessible rooms the second year in a row!
“individuals will assert more strongly a right to be in women’s spaces” Having a GRC is irrelevant to accessing single-sex spaces. Those are governed by the Equality Act 2010 which both protects trans people from discrimination & allows exclusion in some circumstances 7/n
Really excited to be the conference speaker at today's
@UCUequality
LGBT+ Annual Members Conference 2023 this afternoon speaking about LGBT rights in the UK and looking forward to listening to some fascinating papers
@bphillipsonMP
@DrJoGrady
@ucu
60 universities are currently making redundancies due to serious financial concerns (). Each university contributes millions of pounds to the local economy. The sector is in crisis and needs urgent government intervention!
I submitted a paper in April and it has gone from initial submission to review to copyediting in 8 weeks. This is so far outside the academic journal norm that I worry I've fallen for some kind of scam? Expecting someone to demand my kidney any minute now.
Come join us for the Gender, Sexuality and Law stream. We have brilliant papers on wages for housework, carceral feminism, sexual violence in sports, trans narratives, consent, gendered hate speech and much more...
It’s
#SLSA2021
conference week! Looking forward to welcoming delegates to the
@SLSA_UK
virtual conference hosted by wonderful colleagues from the School of Law & Politics
@cardiffuni
. Can’t wait to connect with the social-legal community!
@ProfDaveAndress
Just intensely staring at people’s elbows while silently doing a lot of complicated mental math…but in a totally normal non-creepy way!
I’m not saying that having more than 250 pieces of marking to do is affecting my sanity but I just woke up and immediately ordered a shirt printed with small dogs wearing bows so there is that...
#AcademicTwitter
Today is International Day of Disabled People & day 3 of our
@ucu
strike. I really want to say something deep or funny but being disabled in academia is just bloody hard a lot of the time and having my pension cut strangely doesn’t make me feel particularly valued by my employer!
Went to the local Timpsons to get a key cut. Couldn't get in as there was no ramp. Sales person apologised, cut my key for free to compensate for inconvenience and said he would request a ramp asap. This is how all businesses should handle accessibility issues!
@JamesTCobbler
On being haunted by your body: As some states restrict access to life saving medical treatment for
#COVID19
in ways that exclude many people with disabilities,
@FloraRenz
questions our notions of health & disability and invites us to re-imagine society...
(Paraphrasing) “not undergoing gender reassignment surgery will entitle one to the full range of legal rights”. That is already the case, in fact that was one of the reasons the then government argued the GRA was so progressive compared to other countries. However in practice 4/n
“Soon it may be easier to change the sex on your birth certificate than it is to change it on your passport”. No, it’s much easier to change your passport. It also isn’t quite clear why this would be a problem unless one wants to argue the passport process should be easier too3/n
Was in Cardiff for exactly 1 hour before I bumped into Andrew from the Traitors and he was exactly as lovely and nice as he is on tv. Hope the Welsh tourism board is paying him for his service to the country!
I think it’s generally good if people are becoming more interested in law and law reform in all kinds of areas, but discussion about law is pretty pointless if it is based on misunderstandings.
Why does no video calling platform allow you to hide your own video from the screen? What sociopath wants to spend a two hour meeting looking at their own face?
Really thoughtful piece that sets out clearly why disabled people in particular are concerned about assisted dying because what applies to palliative care also applies to many other parts of the NHS right now
Are vulnerable patients destined to “choose” to die because we’re not willing to fund the care that might make their lives worth living?
It's not a future dystopia - it's happening now. Do we care?
My piece for
@guardianopinion
on assisted dying.
German universities have recommended giving female academics extra research funding to compensate them for the disproportionate administrative burden that they face
Oh and an extra fun fact is that this compounds the impact of the 35% pension cut because your salary determines your pension contributions. So women, disabled people and anyone from an ethnic minority has a good chance of getting a lower salary AND decimated pension!
This feels like an intentional distraction from the mess the Tory government is in right now given that all the claims they make about the GRA here are inaccurate. The Scottish government carried out an equality impact assessment of the bill addressing exactly those issues. 1/2
gender recognition panels seem to have often operated on the assumption that applicants should have surgery or at least should want surgery, even if this was never an explicit legal requirement. Importantly this raises significant concerns about genuine consent for 5/n
I will never reveal how many treats it took to get the dog to look at the camera for this picture but it would be great to see some more beagle representation in this important research project
@beaglefacts
Ah freshers flu as an academic: all the misery of having been exposed to other people’s germs without the benefit of being able to skip all your lectures and having a Netflix marathon... 🤒
#AcademicTwitter
Really enjoying reviewing presentations for the
#SLSA2021
Gender, Sexuality and Law stream, but I also feel deeply sad that we won’t all get to meet in person in Cardiff this year. Will have to provide my own horrible lukewarm coffee & try to recreate the conference experience
It’s important not to overstate the importance of this statement given that there is unlikely to be enough time before the next election for any of this to be implemented. However it’s quite concerning just how unworkable most of these suggestions are. 🧵
We have provided advice to the Minister for Women and Equalities on the definition of the protected characteristic of 'sex' in the Equality Act 2010.
Find out more:
Very excited about our
@FutureGender
event "What if state law no longer sexed us?" as part of the
@ESRC
Festival of Social Science. Come join us on Nov 8!
Really excited about the new special section in
@feministsatlaw
organised by Donatella Alessandrini, Enrica Rigo and
@pkotiswaran
on Social Reproduction with a huge selection of must read papers and lectures.
The most important part about working from home as an academic is rearranging your bookshelf so all the nice books are visible behind you in video calls...