Weekly Roundup

Abstract: We are writing to express concerns regarding the recent paper “A unique pseudo-eligibility analysis of longitudinal laboratory performance data from a transgender female competitive cyclist” by Hamilton et al. [1]. The authors assert that a sub-elite trans woman athlete can compete equitably in elite women’s cycling events after one year of gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT). However, this conclusion is not supported by the data presented. Furthermore, the authors’ presentation of data from a single athlete as a basis for inferring the effects of testosterone suppression is fundamentally flawed. The extension of these inferences to suggest case-by-case assessments as a solution for trans women inclusion in women’s sports is equally problematic. In addition, the paper raises several concerns regarding the study design, outcome measures, data interpretation, and the use of correct and consistent terminology when describing transgender individuals. In this letter, we aim to clarify these issues to help your readers better understand what constitutes fair competition in women’s sport.

HISTORICAL ARTICLES AND ESSAYS

‘What women want’—the UK's largest cosmetic surgery survey

European Journal of Plastic Surgery, 2021

Abstract: The cosmetic surgery market is rapidly expanding and changing. This survey is the largest of its kind in the UK and aims to study the motivation and attitudes of UK women towards aesthetic surgery. Five thousand women completed an online cosmetic surgery survey undertaken by an independent polling company. Respondents’ ages ranged from 16 to over 56 years old and they were recruited from all over the UK. A further survey of 57 plastic surgeons was undertaken to establish surgeons' attitudes and practices. Of the patient respondents, 6.5% had already had aesthetic surgery but over 45% would want to undergo a cosmetic operation if funds allowed. Over half of these women would choose either breast or abdominal surgery. Ninety-two percent said the surgeon should provide the initial consultation. Seventy-five percent believed their surgeon should have a recognised qualification or membership of a recognised organisation. Sixty-six percent claimed they would never consider surgery abroad. The UK cosmetic surgery market is large and is likely to continue to grow. Despite the rise of nurse-led cosmetic surgery companies, the public appear to want consultations and surgery to be performed by accredited surgeons. We discuss our findings from this large-scale survey in the context of the changing UK cosmetic surgery market.

RUBBISH BIN

Queering the Physical Therapy Curriculum: Suggested Competency Standards to Eliminate LGBTQIA+ Health Disparities

Physical Therapy, 2024

A Call to Action: Develop Physical Therapist Practice Guidelines to Affirm People Who Identify as LGBTQIA+

Physical Therapy, 2024

Feminism Is for Everyone: Scientists, Too

OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology, 2023

Abstract: Critically informed engagement in politics and the knowledge of social theory help democratize knowledge production, and redress power asymmetries in science and society. A feminist lens is one of the many ways in which power asymmetries in science can be critically unpacked and interrupted. There are many strands of feminism and feminist theory that differ in their approaches to resist patriarchy and injustices in science and society. As an example, I adopt here the definition of feminism of the late cultural critic bell hooks because her works underscore that feminism is an intersectional liberatory methodology for everyone to resist multiple forms of oppression simultaneously. Queer theory is a strand of social theory that came to prominence since the 1990s in particular. Queer feminism continues to shape feminist writing on science cultures and the knowledge-based innovations contemporary science strives to accomplish. Systems science brings about systems thinking, and that includes rethinking science as culture beyond a narrow realm of technology, and being cognizant of the broader social, feminist, queer, and political contexts of science around the world.

Hating Women: A Constitution of Hate in Plain Sight

Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2024

Abstract: In April 2023, the U.K. government announced that misogyny would not be categorized as a hate crime stating that this "may prove more harmful than helpful." This article argues that before and beyond hate crime, misogyny, understood as the hatred of women (from the Greek misein [hate] gynae [women]), is the foundational logic of our legal, social, and political order in the west. This constitution of hate relies on the active dehumanization, exploitation, and ownership of women's bodies by the institution of white men through making women the object of the "colonization of the everyday." This exhausting hatred is enacted through repetitive, unceasing, and everyday violence toward women. Simply put, patriarchal, colonial, capitalist democracy is only sustained through violence against women. Hating women is, therefore, not a pathology of society but rather is the necessary existence condition of our legal-political constitution, clear to see yet hiding in plain sight. Misogyny ensures the precarity of women's bodies and women's status as trespassers in everyday spaces that are deliberately always already misogynistic. Given the foundational nature of misogyny, did the government have a point in excluding endemic violence against women from hate crime as "more harmful than helpful?" Is hate crime merely constitutive of a cultural matrix of misogyny? This paper enacts a decolonial feminist prism to disrupt the cultural condition of misogyny by thinking hate crime together with legal-political constitutional and cultural change. The paper explores violence against women set against the historical emergence of misogyny from Greek dehumanization, to medieval persecution of "witches," the muzzling and banning of women from public spaces, Shakespeare's "Taming," to contemporary femicide rates. Interrogating hate crime through this prism offers nuanced routes for how to disrupt the legal-political constitution of misogyny that is neither hidden nor new. Misogyny is enduring.

Uncorking the ‘wine mum’: Exploring the complexity of Australian women’s everyday lives and drinking practices

International Journal of Drug Policy, 2024

Abstract: Background: With greater attention given to midlife women's drinking in research and in media representations of 'wine mums', we suggest that focusing on static gender roles (e.g., women as mothers) risks overlooking complex and dynamic features of women's lives. We draw on the concept of thick intersectionality to explore how everyday experiences of women's lives and multiple identities shape their drinking practices. Methods: This study draws on interviews with Australian women in their forties and fifties who were employed, had school-aged children and drank alcohol. We present four detailed accounts as interpreted narratives. Results: Close analysis of the stories of four women highlights important features of women's lives. Drinking practices were often intertwined with gendered labour, power inequalities and managing stresses borne from these. Gender, class, relationality, life course transitions, affect and various aspects of labour dynamics (temporality, autonomy and unseen labour) were prominent in the accounts. Alongside this health, geography, life histories and culture interacted in women's narratives and the various identities and roles they moved between, co-producing drinking practices in different ways. Conclusion: By juxtaposing women's stories with 'wine mum' stereotypes, and the broader feminisation of drinking, we highlight how women's drinking practices are influenced not only by static identities, but the complex interplay between gender, a myriad of fluid social categories, and day-to-day life. We suggest that attending to context and women's everyday experiences is crucial for generating a nuanced understanding of drinking beyond women's traditional gender roles.

Heteroprofessionalism in the Academy: The Surveillance and Regulation of Queer Faculty in Higher Education

Journal of Homosexuality, 2023

Abstract: This article engages with Robert Mizzi’s theorization of heteroprofessionalism to describe the experiences of two queer professors in the fields of Education and Psychology. We explore how heteronormative and cisnormative expectations of post-secondary professors impact professional practices and increase the regulation and surveillance of queer professors in academia. We methodologically employ Grace and Benson’s queer life narratives approach to retell and ground our personal stories of being queer higher education faculty. To do this, we analyze our experiences teaching and working in higher education through a queer poststructural theoretical lens. We then deconstruct how normative ideas regarding professionalism in higher education have regulated our professional practices as professors, particularly pertaining to our respective embodiments, genders, and sexualities. We focus on two nexuses of heteroprofessionalism: paradoxical (in)visibility and queer relationality. These nexuses are used to illuminate heteroprofessionalism as a neoliberal mechanism in higher education that regulates gender and sexual diversity by promoting respectability politics.

Examining Scientific Inquiry of Queerness in Medical Education: A Queer Reading

Teaching and Learning in Medicine, 2024

Abstract: Phenomenon. The language of medicine (i.e., biomedical discourse) represents queerness as pathological, yet it is this same discourse medical education researchers use to resist that narrative. To be truly inclusive, we must examine and disrupt the biomedical discourse we use. The purpose of this study is to disrupt oppressive biomedical discourses by examining the language and structures medical educators use in their publications about queerness in relation to physicians and physician trainees. Approach. We searched PubMed, Web of Science, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and ERIC in October 2021 and again in June 2023 using a combination of controlled vocabulary (select terms designated by a database to enhance and reduce ambiguity in search) and keywords to identify articles related to sexuality, gender, identity, diversity and medical professionals. Searches were limited to articles published from 2013 to the present to align with the passage of The Respect for Marriage Act. Articles were included if they focused on the experiences and paths of physicians and physician trainees identifying with or embodying queerness, were authored by individuals based in the United States, and presented empirical studies. We excluded articles only discussing attitudes of cisgender heterosexual individuals about queerness. Two authors independently screened all articles for inclusion. We then used narrative techniques to "re-story" included articles into summaries, which we analyzed with four guiding questions, using queer theory as a sensitizing concept. Finally, we sought recurrent patterns in these summaries. Findings. We identified 2206 articles of which 23 were included. We found that biomedical discourse often: characterized individuals associated with queerness as a single homogenous group rather than as individuals with a breadth of identities and experiences; implied queer vulnerability without naming-and making responsible-the causes or agents of this vulnerability; and relied minimally on actual intervention, instead speculating on potential changes without attempting to enact them. Reflections. Authors each reflect on these findings from their positionalities, discussing: disrupting essentializing categories like "LGBT"; addressing harm through allyship around queerness; editorial responsibility to disrupt structures supporting oppressive biomedical discourse; the importance of program evaluation and interventions; and shifting the focus of medical education research toward queerness using QuantCrit theory.

Queering babies: (Auto)ethnographic reflections from a gay parent through surrogacy

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2024

Abstract: This essay focuses on the figure of the surrogate baby and explores how encounters with this figure disrupt or confirm normative expectations about the ‘babyness’ of babies, the ‘parentness’ of parents, and the interactions between these two. Given their prenatal history, surrogate babies are queer creatures by default: their becoming and existence have to be negotiated through a set of institutionally defined normativities. But can this queerness—whether imagined, experienced, or discursively produced—serve as a window to the queerness of all babies and how standards of normalcy are formed in the world they are born into? In this essay, I construct an autoethnographic account in dialogue with a collection of personal narratives from same-sex and different-sex parents to address the performative and relational aspects of this queerness—something that is not fixed but produced and attributed according to one’s horizon of expectations. I consider three domains where this process most evocatively comes to the fore: the nature-affect-technology nexus in conception stories, the exoticization of the newly formed families by bystanders and acquaintances, and the parental anxieties that emerge in envisioning the children’s preferred futures. Snapshots from these domains, complemented with stories of different-sex parents, will reveal how dialectics of absence and abundance are always at work in the hierarchies that produce babies—queer or unqueer. Alluding to the notion of double-liminality, I conclude with the epistemological challenges involved in this informal project and the ontological paradoxes of coexisting in time as babies and parents.

Navigating Queer Narratives: Student Teachers’ Perspectives on LGBT+ Picture Books

Journal of Homosexuality, 2024

Abstract: This study employs a queer theoretical framework to explore three student teachers’ interpretations and perceptions of two LGBT+ picture books, including their considerations on integrating these texts into classroom pedagogy. The participants are nearing completion of their initial teacher training at a university in the northern part of England. The picture books that are the focus of the study were purposefully selected owing to their exploration of varied queer themes. Discussion is anchored in metaphor of picture books functioning as either “window” or “mirror,” depending on children’s individual experiences or identities, therefore necessitating acknowledgment of children’s potential future queerness. Through semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis, the study uncovers multifaceted perspectives. Participants respond positively to both texts and express interest in incorporating these into their teaching practices. However, they additionally demonstrate awareness of potential limitations and complexities, including negative reactions from stakeholders and promoting heteronormativity. Uncertainty is expressed around navigating these issues within existing curriculum and policy frameworks. The study concludes by advocating for enhanced exploration of these difficulties in initial teacher training and early career stages, if aiming to adequately support these emerging educators in effectively promoting LGBT+ inclusivity in their future classrooms.

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Announcing a funding drive for research into childhood sex differences in muscle strength

James L. Nuzzo

June 17, 2024

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Announcing a funding drive for research into childhood sex differences in muscle strength

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