Researching Women’s Rights in Policy and Law

Dear donor

It’s been a week since we launched our crowdfunder and we have been blown away by the response. We have already reached over 80% of our initial target.

Thank you so much for your donation and your kind comments.

Scottish Affairs article

As some of you may be aware, last August we published a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Scottish Affairs (‘Losing Sight of Women’s Rights: the unregulated introduction of gender self-identification as a case study of policy capture in Scotland’).

In July this year, the journal editor contacted us to say that he had accepted for publication a critique of our paper and invited us to write a response. The two papers will be published in the January 2021 edition of the journal. The editor also indicated that he would publish the full exchange – including our original article – outside the paywall on the journal’s website sometime this month.

On Friday afternoon the authors of the rejoinder article unilaterally decided to publish a pre-print version of their paper online. We therefore felt we had no choice but to publish our response. The version we have published on our website is a longer, annotated version of the paper that will appear in Scottish Affairs. We are delighted to say that our paper has been downloaded over 1,000 times in 48 hours.

Whilst we regret that Scottish Affairs was denied the opportunity to put all three papers in the public domain simultaneously, they have since issued a statement, which is unusual for an academic journal, and been courteous enough to link to all three pieces.

Evidence in Parliament

This week, Lucy Hunter Blackburn will be giving evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s Justice Committee on the Scottish Government’s Hate Crime and Public Order Bill. We submitted written evidence over the summer and MSPs are now midway through hearing oral evidence from a wide range of organisations. Our panel will also include representatives from dsdfamilies, Klinefelters Syndrome Association UK and the Scottish Trans Alliance.

You can watch the proceedings, which start at 9am, on the Scottish Parliament’s livestream. (Lucy is appearing on the third panel of the morning.)

In the past week, we have also written a short blog regarding developments on plans for the next UK census, which will take place in just over four months in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Thank you once again for your support of our work.

Kath, Lucy and Lisa