THE anonymous, but mega-corporately sponsored International Women’s Day website has announced that its innocuous campaign theme for 2021 is “Choose to Challenge,” with the explanation that “a challenged world is an alert world. And from challenge comes change.”
A bold, although somewhat meaningless statement, and, as expected, it makes an appeal to women as individuals, since as it says: “We’re all responsible for our own thoughts and actions all day, every day.
“We can all choose to challenge and call out gender bias and inequality. We can all choose to seek out and celebrate women’s achievements.”
True, but this is a banal reinforcement of corporately acceptable “choice feminism.”
The Oxford Pride parade 2019. Dozens of transgender people join the annual event. Picture: Richard Cave AN OXFORD historian is embarked on a project to prove it is ‘essential’ that ‘sex’ is protected as the only legal definition of a woman. Selina Todd is hoping to stop people from being allowed to choose their own gender under the Equality Act. She warns that if people can legally change their gender it will make it impossible to collect viable data about differences between men and women in society, such as salaries. Her precise aims have been revealed after a Freedom of Information request for her funding application to Oxford University for the project.
Oxford University biggest funder of anti-trans group
OXFORD University has paid a £20,000 consultancy fee to a women s rights group accused of being anti-transgender , making the university the biggest single financial supporter of the group. The money was paid to Woman s Place UK earlier this year for its support research into women’s sex based rights as part of a new research programme announced in September. The group has been the subject of much controversy over its views on transgender rights and was recently branded as a trans-exclusionary hate group by the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights. A statement on Woman s Place UK website read: We received a consultancy fee of £20,000 from Oxford University to support research into women’s sex based rights as part of the Women and Equalities Law: Historical Perspectives project which was funded by Strategic Priority QR funding allocated to Oxford University.