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Transgender Awareness Week
Transgender Awareness Week is typically in the second week of November where transgender people and their allies take action to bring attention to the community by educating the public about who transgender people are, sharing stories and experiences, and advancing advocacy around the issues of prejudice, discrimination, and violence that affect the transgender community.
Transgender Day of Remembrance is on the 20th November 2020 and in light of this we would like to share a Commentary piece from Reader in the Carnegie School of Education, Dr Shona Hunter.
Dr Hunter comments on cisgenderism, gender defensiveness and the attitudes to Legal Gender reform. The piece is a response to the experiences of Professor Liz Peel and Dr Han Newman in conducting the ‘Attitudes to Gender’ survey which explores public attitudes to sex and gender, their thoughts on legal gender and on the potential for reform. The survey tells us about the contested nature of trans and the way that cisgenderism frames public debate around gender identification and how this works to disempower trans and non-binary identified people.
Dr Hunter conducts research into the intersecting relations of power and domination in the state. Her Commentary piece reflects her views on the connections between these intersecting systems of domination and in particular the ways in which cisgenderism intersects with the politics of white supremacy. She also considers the potential for coalition politics to challenge intersecting trans, gender and race discrimination.
To read the piece click here.
The piece forms part of the Feminists@Law Special Issue (10:2) on The Future of Legal Gender: Exploring the Feminist politics of Decertification issue. To read the full issue click here. To read Professor Peel and Dr Newman’s piece click here.
To find out more about the Future of Legal Gender project click here.
The Carnegie School of Education has a centre for LGBTQ+ Inclusion in the School and lots of interesting work going on in the area of non-binary identification on our Doctoral programmes, including our EdD Programme. Dr Hunter is Research Degrees Director in the School and welcomes applications from people working in this area of LGBTQ+ Inclusion.
Dr Shona Hunter
Shona is a Reader in the Carnegie School of Education.
Her work is interdisciplinary and intersectional in its approach. She has been writing, teaching and researching into the social, cultural and emotional politics of the state for nearly thirty years, holding academic posts at the Universities of Birmingham, Lancaster and latterly Leeds along with visiting positions at the Universities of Sydney Australia, Mannheim Germany, Cape Town, Rhodes and Johannesburg South Africa. Her scholarly interests are framed through an engagement with feminist anti-racist decolonial critique and include all aspects of welfare politics and governance, state practices, identities and the broader material-cultural-affective politics through which 'the' state(s) is enacted nationally and globally as a global colonial formation. This interest in the state brings her to consider questions of whiteness and masculinity as they relate to national ideals and expressions of state power as this gets lived in the everyday through informal cultural practices as well as formal state bureaucratic practice.
In 2009 she established the 'White Spaces' research collaboration, now the broader public intellectual project WhiteSpaces.
