***12/12/2022: Please note this talk will now take place online. Zoom details below.***

Rethinking sex, brain, and gender: Beyond the binary

Prof. Daphna Joel

Are the brains of women and men the same or different? Or maybe it’s the wrong question? In the past decade we applied several analytical approaches to study the relations between sex and the brain. These analyses revealed that group-level differences between women and men in specific brain measures rarely add up consistently within individuals to form ‘male’ or ‘female’ brains. Instead, most brains are comprised of both features that are more common in women and features that are more common in men. This is also true of human psychological characteristics – humans possess unique mosaics of feminine (more common in women compared to men) and masculine characteristics. Further studies revealed that the brain architectures typical of women are also typical of men, and vice versa, and sex category provides very little information regarding how one brain will differ from or resemble another brain.

UCL Women’s Liberation are delighted to welcome Prof. Daphna Joel.

Prof. Daphna Joel is a professor of Neuroscience and Psychology, at the School of Psychological Sciences and the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel-Aviv University. In the past decade she has been studying questions related to brain, sex and gender, using various analytical methods to analyze diverse datasets, from large collections of brain scans to information obtained with self-report questionnaires. She is also the author of Gender Mosaic: Beyond the Myth of the Male and Female Brain (Octopus, London).

Mothers, Infants and Sexed Language: A Journey

Dr Karleen Gribble

Children’s Understanding of Sex and Gender

Dr Katie Alcock

‘Use the right words’: verbal hygiene and feminist politics

Professor Deborah Cameron

Sex or gender identity? Practical and ethical implications for medicine

Dr Sara Dahlen

‘Queer Theory and the transition from Sex to Gender in English Prisons’

Dr Michael Biggs

An intriguing property of social theory is its potential, when put into practice, to alter the world to resemble more closely the model posited by theory. This self-fulfilling character has been shown for theories in disciplines that emulate natural sciences, like economics and psychiatry. I argue that queer theory too has the power to remake the world in its own image, using the case of prison policy in England. The notion that sex is merely the performance of gender helped to shift the criteria for incarcerating males in women’s prisons: from genital surgery to legal status, and then to gender identity. The implementation of queer theory enables us to unpack two distinct meanings of gender performance: dramaturgical, where the individual gives off the appearance of femininity or masculinity through body modification, clothing, and gesture, and illocutionary, the individual’s verbal claim to be man or women. This case demonstrates the impact of queer theory on institutional policy and elite opinion, even under a Conservative government.

UCL Women’s Liberation are delighted to welcome Dr Michael Biggs.

Dr Michael Biggs was educated at Victoria University of Wellington (in New Zealand) and Harvard University, and is now Associate Professor of Sociology and Fellow of St Cross at the University of Oxford. His research concentrates on social movements and political protest, ranging from the labour movement in the 19th century to the London riots of 2011. He has recently become concerned with the transgender movement’s encroachment on academic freedom and undermining of evidence-based medicine. He is a director of Sex Matters and serves on the advisory board of the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine. 

Date: 7th December 2021, 14.00-15.00 GMT

A recording is now available via UCL Media Central ‘Queer Theory and the Transition from Sex to Gender in English Prisons’

‘Psychosocial Factors and Gender Dysphoria: Emerging Theories’

Dr Lisa Littman

Over the past 15 years, there have been striking changes in the numbers and characteristics of individuals seeking care for gender dysphoria. In this presentation, Dr. Lisa Littman will review the basics of gender dysphoria, describe recent trends in patient demographics and clinical approaches to gender dysphoria, and explore the potential role of psychosocial factors in the development of gender dysphoria through a series of three studies.

UCL Women’s Liberation are delighted to welcome Dr Lisa Littman.

Dr Lisa Littman is currently the President of the Institute for Comprehensive Gender Dysphoria Research (ICGDR) and has previously held academic positions at the Brown University School of Public Health and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Date: 7th October 2021, 2-3pm

A recording is now available via UCL Media Central ‘Psychosocial factors and gender dysphoria: emerging theories’

UPDATE (1/6/21): please note this talk has been rescheduled to Wednesday 30th June, 2pm

‘How prostitution myths are linked to all our lives as women’

Dr Helen Johnson, director of Stand Against Sexual Exploitation (SASE)

This talk not only unpicks some of the myths of prostitution but also uses this as a lens to understand the lies and myths we are peddled as women more generally – and how it speaks to our relationships, power, and sense of possibility. The talk suggests that accepting the reality of prostitution instead of these myths actually helps us to be more positive and hopeful about both men and women instead of the tired old accusations of being ‘prudish’ and ‘anti sex/men’.

UCL Women’s Liberation are delighted to welcome Dr Helen Johnson.

Dr Helen Johnson is a policy researcher working on issues related to women’s equality in law, policy, and the third sector. Her work has focused particularly on exiting and desistance within prostitution. Helen is a qualified barrister and holds a PhD in Criminology, for which she investigated the needs of service users and how institutions can provide emotionally intelligent services. 

‘Complicated Sisterhood: negotiating socialist feminism in the second wave periodicals Red Rag and Scarlet Women‘

Bec Wonders, doctoral researcher, Glasgow School of Art

The Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s and 1980s in the UK saw a surge in women’s publishing that generated a networked feminist communications circuit in the form of newsletters and magazines. These periodicals functioned as essential forums through which to develop and disagree on their political positions. The letters and editorials reveal that the internal debates and disagreements with which second wave feminists were grappling still remain contentious today.

One such site of contention was the attempt by socialist feminists to give both socialism and feminism equal concern, based on the broad conception that the oppression of women was situated within the struggle against capitalism, and therefore some argued that men could (and should) be included in the women’s movement. This was met with suspicion and hostility from radical and revolutionary feminists, who understood the specific nature of women’s oppression as being rooted in male domination and autonomous feminist organising as necessitating the exclusion of men.

However, not all women fell neatly into one camp or the other. Several periodicals created space for this tension to unravel, the most notable of which are Red Rag: A Magazine of Women’s Liberation (1972-1980) and Scarlet Women: Newsletter of the Socialist Feminist

Current (1976-1982). While significant differences exist between the two publications, both featured disagreements in the form of editorials and letters that demonstrate the existential workings-out of what each periodical should be and how it could act as a bridge between socialism, Marxism and feminism.

These examples may demonstrate to feminist scholars and activists today how print-based networks provided a necessary space for negotiating feminist conflicts about collective working, and how to bridge ideological positions and strategies. Moreover, these records facilitate the creation of intergenerational coalitions between women by placing our contemporary negotiations in a temporal continuum that follows on from the struggles of second wave feminists and resists the historiographical model of the repetitive jump-starting of feminist generations.

UCL Women’s Liberation are delighted to welcome Bec Wonders.

Bec Wonders is a feminist researcher in the field of feminist conflict, the Women’s Liberation Movement and feminist publishing networks at the Glasgow School of Art. She earned a Masters in Publishing at Simon Fraser University and co-founded the Vancouver Women’s Library. Currently, Bec runs Frauenkultur: an online archive of second wave feminist writing. Bec is also a freelance illustrator and printmaker. Her work can be found at www.becwonders.com.

A recording is now available via UCL Media Central ‘Complicated Sisterhood: negotiating socialist feminism in the second wave periodicals Red Rag and Scarlet Woman’

‘Scrutinizing the US Equality Act: Context, Conflict, and Consequences’

Callie H Burt, Associate Professor, Georgia State University

The U.S. Equality Act, which amends civil rights statutes to explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, passed the House in February 2020 with unanimous Democratic support. In current form, the bill would institute sweeping changes that would prioritize in-the-moment gender self-ID over sex for ‘sex-based provisions’, no exceptions. I situate the act in its sociopolitical and historical context, discussing the current status of LGBT+ protections in the USA as well as the historical development of the Equality Act, first proposed in 1974 (albeit in much different form). I describe the specifics of bill passed in the House, including the prior rejection of Republican amendments to the bill to allow some sex-based provisions, and the conflict between sex-based and gender-identity-based rights. I conclude by discussing alternatives to the act that would provide federal non-discrimination protections to LGBT people without undermining sex-based rights and the protected nature of women’s provisions.

UCL Women’s Liberation are delighted to welcome Professor Callie H Burt.

Callie H. Burt is an associate professor in the Andrew Young School of Public Policy at Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA. Much of her research focuses on the developmental effects of social inequalities, especially the effects of social risk and protective factors in adolescence, from a biopsychosocial perspective. She has a longstanding research interest in sex differences and how these differences are shaped by gender as a social force, and the ways in which law and social policies reflect, reinscribe, or challenge these differences. She published a recent article on the US Equality Act in Feminist Criminology. More on Callie and her work can be found here: www.callieburt.org.

Date: 18 March 2021, 15.30-16.30 GMT

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://ucl.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYsdO2hqjkjGdAM8ATxnZKFyyi5QYUMaaAY

A recording is now available via UCL Media Central ‘Scrutinizing the US Equality Act: Conflict, Context and Consequences’ – Callie H. Burt https://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Play/60775