Academics have begun boycotting a popular gender-studies online discussion group after some professors objected to a conversation about “pregnancy without women,” saying it was biased against transgender people.
Things got nasty when the Listserv published an announcement that the National Women’s Studies Association was looking for panelists to discuss “pregnancy without women from feminist and/or queer perspectives.” It was an apparent allusion to a two-decades-old discussion of “masculinity without men.”
That topic upset some feminists, who continue to view pregnancy as a female-only function, reported Inside Higher Ed.
“We don’t need supposedly progressive folks downplaying the importance of women’s reproductive functions at this time,” wrote one University of Melbourne professor. “Let us stop this game now. Only women get pregnant, and it serves women not at all to pretend this is not true.”
That comment and others like it prompted backlash, with transgender academics calling for the Listserv’s moderators to censor “these kinds of oppressive, exclusionary assertions,” wrote Grand Valley State University professor Cael Keegan.
Launching a boycott of the Listserv, Keegan wrote: “The persistent stated beliefs that speaking about trans bodies or trans oppression is a ‘distraction’ and that acknowledging non-transgender (cis) privilege exists and needs to be interrogated is ‘insulting’ are retrograde and anti-feminist. … I no longer have the patience to deal with this this kind of ‘feminism’ or this debate over my own worthiness or materiality as a human being.”
Moderators of the Listserv, which has been around since 1991 and says it has 5,000 members in 47 countries, eventually closed discussion about the “pregnancy without women” panel, but not before dozens of academics had left, Inside Higher Ed reported. Many of them are now carrying on their conversations on the Facebook page for the Trans/Gender-Variant Caucus, where Keegan is co-chair.
Such controversy has become increasingly common. This week, the British Medical Association advised doctors to use the term “pregnant people” instead of “expectant mothers,” saying that using more gender-neutral language helps “celebrate diversity.”
