Kerri Woods

US government orders states to destroy trans education materials The US government has ordered 46 states and territories to destroy education materials referencing trans people.

US government orders 46 states to destroy trans education materials
https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/08/27/trans-education-us-state-directive/?utm_content=1756312804&utm_medium=social&utm_source=bluesky

The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Human Rights The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Human Rights is an outstanding resource covering key questions, problems, and debates in scholarship on the nature, justification, authority and relevance o...

*Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Human Rights* - now published! Hurrah!

Very proud of this and immensely grateful to my co-editor, Jesse Tomalty, and to all the contributors.

www.routledge.com/The-Routledg...

Letter of the day (in the Times)

Abhorrent homophobia/transphobia. Says stickers aren't distributed to schools. FWS saying obvs marketed at children? Like adults don't buy stickers & stuff with cartoons? FWS says children being groomed to choose a gender identity? Like children aren't groomed into gender roles in our faces daily.

As early as 2018, 43% of UK employers were unsure they would be prepared to hire any trans person. And we’ve now reached the point where doing so is a borderline antifascist action.

Your trans friends and colleagues have to do the work of fighting fascism every day. Take something off their plates.

Over 1000 signatories in 36 hours!

Let's make it 2000 by the weekend 👇

Please sign 👇

Please circulate 👇

100 years ago today, Frantz Fanon was born.

Martiniquais by birth, Algerian by struggle #Fanon100 was not only a seminal thinker of anti-imperialist struggles in Africa and the Global South, but also a revolutionary activist.

"What matters is not to know the world but to change it"

How Do We See Gender and Trans People? a short essay and video

🧵 upon first glance, you likely “determined” the gender of most of the people in this photo immediately, even though many of them are partially blocked or out of focus. why did your brain do this? did you notice any trans ppl here?...
[no paywall on Medium: juliaserano.medium.com/how-do-we-se... ]

📣 We recently announced the 5 papers shortlisted for the John Peterson prize.

The prize will be judged independently by our International Advisory Board members.

⬇️ Discover the 5 shortlisted papers and the John Peterson prize for the best article published in BJPIR in 2024 here: buff.ly/wrAkdLA.

It's notable that the only student speech frequently shut down on university campuses is a) pro-Palestine b) pro-trans-rights. The OfS seems *deeply* unconcerned about that speech being limited. In fact, they want academics who oppose those positions to have the right to 'shock and offend' students.

“When Peterson was disinvited by Cambridge, Ahmed led the charge to reinvite him. This wasn’t a case of Ahmed disapproving of what Peterson says but defending his right to say it. Ahmed is clearly a fan. After Peterson’s lecture at Lady Mitchell Hall in 2021 – during which he quipped that ‘educated women’ were ‘very annoying’ – Ahmed described it as ‘a brilliant talk from which we’ve all learned so much’, and presented Peterson with a first edition of Darwin’s Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. (I wrote to Ahmed to ask who paid for the book, a similar copy of which was recently auctioned at Sotheby’s for £5670; he said he didn’t know, but that he believed it was the event’s hosts. I then wrote to Orr, who had extended the formal invitation to Peterson, but didn’t receive a reply.) In a piece for Spiked called ‘How we uncancelled Jordan Peterson’, Ahmed says that Peterson – who has linked feminism to school shootings, approvingly cited ‘The Bell Curve’ and been denounced by scientists for giving succour to climate deniers – espouses a ‘moderate conservativism’ and is ‘no right-wing firebrand’. Writing in 2021 on the proposed higher education bill, with its provision for a newly empowered Office for Students, Ahmed commented: ‘Of course in practice everything will depend on whether the regulator will use these powers impartially and with vigour.’ He is now the person on whom this ‘everything’ depends.”

Revisiting Amia Srinivasan on Arif Ahmed's appointment as ‘Free Speech Tsar’ at the Office for Students:

Exterior view of Armstrong Building, Newcastle University, red brick, neo-Gothic-ish architecture with many windows.

Newcastle University staff invited to a ‘Doodling for Wellbeing’ session (‘Let your pen dance across the page' in 'a perfect escape from the everyday hustle and bustle'. Invites sent on same day 153 academics were informed of their location in 'redundancy pools', with 38 redundancies planned. 1/2

‘The paper says higher education’s “unique selling point to students” in this new reality will be to shift the campus-based learning experience away from conveying academic content‘ - this is from a VC & incoming chair of the OfS. The people running the HE sector do not value university education.

Ten years ago nobody in their right mind gave a single crap where trans people went to the toilet and the only reason anyone does now is because they were radicalised by Facebook and a handful of insane newspaper columnists and that’s just embarrassing all round

At #UCU2025 we passed motions to reaffirm our commitment to trans rights.

We’ll keep fighting for inclusive spaces, supportive policies and real solidarity.

#TransRightsAreHumanRights #UCU2025 #UnionPower

Survey shows how the sector is cutting spending It's not encouraging reading

From a survey of 57 universities by Universities UK:
- 50% have cut courses
- 25% have made compulsory redundancies
- 20% have cut spending on research
- 18% have cut staff time on research
- 15% have cut student bursaries or hardship funds
Many more are considering these options

Britain's universities were pushed - forced, really - to make themselves completely dependent on international students. Now they are about to have the rug finally pulled from under them. There is not a single word British central government could say that I would ever trust again.

UK: Court Ruling Threatens Trans People (London, May 9, 2025) – A United Kingdom Supreme Court ruling on April 16, 2025 threatens the rights of trans people, Human Rights Watch said today. In in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers, ...

"Judgment Opens Door for Discrimination, Segregation, and Exclusion"
www.hrw.org/news/2025/05...

The Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought (BIAPT) Prizes are open for nominations! Please nominate yourselves (or someone else) for our early and mid-career prizes. The deadline for nominations is 23rd May.

Share widely!

www.associationforpoliticalthought.ac.uk/biapt-prizes...

UK will discriminate against would-be students who are from persecuted groups.
Palestinian? No visa.
Christian from Pakistan or Iran? No visa.
Woman from Afghanistan? No visa.
Lesbian from Uganda? No visa.

Happening this Thursday! Join us for the Narrating Defeat roundtable with Basma Abdelaziz and Dina Rezk! 8th May, 4-5.30pm, in-person and online.

Help us challenge the Supreme Court’s judgment on trans rights | Good Law Project We use cookies where necessary to allow us to understand how people interact with our website and content, so that we can continue to improve our service.

We believe the UK is now in breach of its obligations under the Human Rights Act and the European Convention of Human Rights and we plan to ask the High Court for a declaration of incompatibility.

We would be grateful for your help: