sex work

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Fantastic “TERF Wars” and where to find them

Are you trying to understand anti-trans debates within and beyond feminism? Wanting to get to grips with the relationship between “gender critical” advocacy, medicalisation, and traditional conservative ideologies?

Cover of the book TERF Wars: An Introduction.

Our Sociological Review edited collection TERF Wars: Feminism and the Fight for Transgender Futures is now more widely available than ever. Challenging the framing of ‘transgender activists versus feminists’, it features a range of peer-reviewed essays from expert writers such as Jay Bernard, Florence Ashley, Julia Serano, and Emi Koyama, on hot-topic issues including gender ideology, autogynephilia, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, detransition, migration, sex work, and public toilets.

None of the authors or editors receive royalties for this work – we simply want to share our knowledge with others.

You can download digital copies of the collection from the Sociological Review website or for free from the Open University.

Hard copies of the book are also available from just £10, e.g. from Foyles (UK), AbeBooks (USA), and (sigh) Amazon. If you can though, please support a local independent bookseller! I am most excited that TERF Wars is available from the amazing Leeds-based queer bookshop The Bookish Type.

Finally, I am deeply honoured to announce that the opening essay of the collection, “TERF Wars: An Introduction” (by myself and co-editors Sonja Erikainen and Ben Vincent) is now also available in Turkish. We are honoured that this version has been published in the latest issue of the journal Kaos Q+. I was so excited to recieve my copy in the post!

Photo of a parcel with a copy of the journal Kaos Q+ sitting on top. The journal cover features a person with blond hair and make-up lying on a table, looking blankly towards two spoons and a knife, their face reflected in a place mat.

If you find this work useful, please do tell other people about it, and feel free to share download links or hard copies with others. We have felt very supported by The Sociological Review, but the publishers SAGE have been absolutely awful at distribution and publicity (if you are an academic, I would definitely recommend against working with them on a book if at all possible). It’s up to use to make this work a success!

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Trans Community Conference report published

I just picked this up through Gendered Intelligence.

Download the report here.

I attended the conference last year, taking part in the “youth and families” strand. It was an event that clearly needed a bit more of a defined direction, but hopefully the substantial feedback will mean that’s the case for this year’s conference.  I didn’t learn as much as I hoped, but it was a great chance to meet others and have a better idea of what’s going on, as well as to help educate representatives from various charities and government bodies.

Something that struck me as particularly interesting in the report – as well as the expected feedback from the workshops – were some of the statistics gathered. It’s impressive to see such a wide range of people were involved, and there’s some tasty statistics revealing the variations in gender identity, sexuality and ethnic background. I feel the open field approach that allowed people to define themselves rather than refer to tickboxes gave some particularly revealing answers. I hope they stick to this approach next year, and maybe introduce some more fields as well, maybe relating to things such as disabilities (including mental health) and economic background. There’s a lot to learn from such information about diversity in trans spaces.

The asylum strand struck me as particularly powerful. I didn’t manage to attend it on the day, but have learned a lot of (pretty shocking) facts from the summary. I suppose it’s one of these “I knew it was bad, but not that bad” situations.

I was also interested to read that representatives of a sex-worker rights group were present, although it strikes me that we should be working with women’s groups as well as those who are there for “male and transgender sex workers”.

Anyways, the details on this year’s event are as follows:

This year’s

Trans Community Conference 2009

will be held at

Central School of Speech and Drama

Embassy Theatre

Eton Avenue, London NW3 3HY

on

Friday 11th September 2009

Call for papers, workshops and presentations, artworks and stalls
To find out more click here