ISBI: Is Human Sex Binary and Immutable?

The ISBI Initiative

On 18th Nov 2021, on Woman’s Hour on Radio 4, Nancy Kelley, the former CEO of Stonewall, admitted that it was not possible to change sex¹

On 8^th Dec 2021, Sussex University (where Professor Kathleen Stock had been persecuted for her ‘gender critical’ views) provided the statement that “it is not the university’s position that a male observed at birth can become a biological female”²

1. The Aim of Our Initiative

We are seeking positions from the university academic scientific community that aligns with the position stated by Sussex University or one that refutes it.

We are consulting 41 universities:

• The 23 Russell Group universities with a biology department

• Six leading universities in the USA

• Six leading universities in Canada

• Six leading universities in Australia

2. The Request to the University Vice-Chancellors and Presidents

Please can the university provide its position on whether it is possible to change sex by 28^th Jul 2024?

We would anticipate one of three responses:

1. It is not the university's position that a male observed at birth can become a female³.

2. It is the university's position that a male observed at birth can become a female.

3. The university declines to state its position on whether a human can change sex.

(We would prefer the wording “It is the university’s position that sex is binary and immutable, and that a male observed at birth cannot become a female, nor can a female observed at birth become a male”, but we have been advised that the abbreviated form is more likely to be an acceptable position for a university to provide.

We do not understand why a university cannot state the full wording. The abbreviated wording implies that sex is immutable and, the use of the terms “male” and “female, that it is binary. So why not state it?

We sought the advice of Professor Ruebain, who provided the Sussex University position in Dec’2021, but he/him refused to enlighten us, so we remain unenlightened.)

3. The Plan

1. Email a request for each of the 41 universities, asking them what their position is.

2. Wait two weeks for the university to provide its position.

3. For those universities that have not responded, or have sent a “The university declines to state its position on whether a human can change sex” response, we will enlist the help of alumni to email their university encouraging them to state its position.

4. If the university’s position is not provided by 25^th Aug 2024, the university’s position will default to: “The university declines to state its position on whether a human can change sex”. The public and politicians, prospective undergraduates and postgraduates, donors and investers in research can then make up their minds as to:

   1. whether the university is scientifically ignorant or has been ideologically captured by the ‘transgender’ lobbies and is fearful of offending the Gender Identity ideologues in its EDI (or DEI outside the UK) department, the Student Union and indoctrinated academic and administrative staff.

   2. whether a student’s or researcher’s knowledge will be increased by attending such a university, and that their considerable tuition fees will be well spent

   3. whether the money of donors and funders of research might consider their money better spent at a university that, like Sussex University, knows the answer and is not afraid to state it.

4. Background

Our proposal to Oxford University

We asked Oxford University, as the globally top ranked university for seven years, to host the consultancy project (as it was then termed). The advantages of the hosting approach were:

1. Oxford University would take the lead for the other universities to follow

2. The alumni encouragement phase, being performed by independent consultants (i.e. us) would keep the emails from the alumni to their alama mater confidential. Oxford University would have no sight of them, only statistics on:

   • The number of emails sent by alumni to their alma mater;

   • The number of responses (and non responses) by the universities to the alumni, and the response time;

   • The reasons, in summary form, for the university not providing a Position Statement

3. Oxford University would publish the 41 Position Statements as reference for academics, the legal profession, politicians and the general public.

We provided a detailed breakdown of the effort required by us and the university staff. Ours would be 19 days, at a cost of £6.5K. We used a day rate of £342, the same as the daily attendance remuneration for members of the House of Lords. This is the remuneration that Ruth Hunt, Baroness of Bethnal Green, receives. The same Ruth Hunt who, as former CEO of Stonewall, in 2015 created the mantra: Trans Women Are Women (TWAW), get over it. We felt it fitting and fair to receive the same remuneration in a project that seeks to correct this false mantra.

Oxford University declined:

Is this truly the case?
Oxford University produces a yearly statement on slavery and human trafficking⁴, which is a statement made by Oxford University as an institution.
There is a similar statement on Freedom of Speech⁵.

We can see no reason why Oxford University cannot, as an institution, issue a similar Position Statement to Sussex University on the binary and immutable nature of human sex. Would Oxford University take a similar position on issuing a Position Statement as an institution on whether the earth is spherical or flat?

Our proposal to Exeter University

We then approached Exeter University of which I am an alumnus. Over a two month period:

• Dr Victoria Alcock claimed the university was looking at ways to support our project

• Every week or so that we checked on the status it was a “we’re still deliberating” response

• We offered to crowdfund our costs, provided the university paid us 1 day’s fee each so that we were hired consultants, not activists

• We approached Sussex University, who in Dec'21 had provided me with a statement that it was not the university's position that a male observed at birth could become a biological female. We suggested a Joint Exeter/Sussex project, but Professor David Ruebain declined.

• On the 6th June Victoria sent this email

On the same day we a suggested a new approach where we will perform the initiative ourselves, but we would like to trial our process by sending a request for a Position Statement to the University of Exeter before the launch of the requests to the other 40 universities.

We asked Victoria if she could provide feedback to us on the progress of our request through the university so that we could understand the obstacles encountered in providing a Position Statement and seek ways to overcome them. We have had no response.

5. Our initiative

We agreed that rather than crowdfunding for this initiatiave we would give our time for free as a tribute to the work Kate Coleman and her team at Keep Prisons Single Sex⁶ (which will close on 30th June) have done for some of the most vulnerable women in society.

This research study of 2021 makes sobering reading and is one of the reasons Kate and co have striven so hard to keep men (including men pretending to be women) out of the female prison estate.

See link⁷

6. Who we are:

• Myself, a retired IT Consultant and Project Manager, who became involved in the sex/’gender’ debate in support of Professor Kathleen Stock who was being persecuted at the University of Sussex for her ‘Gender Critical’ views.
  

• Dr Louise Moody. who was, until 2019, an academic philosopher specialising in the perception (esp. the nature of non-veridical experiences and what they might, if anything, reveal about veridical ones). Since then, she has been engaged in the "Sex and Gender" debate publicly defending the, arguably commonsense, view that biological sex is a sufficient criterion for being a woman and that self-identification as a particular sex undermines the safety of single-sex spaces and fair competition in sport. She brings her analytical expertise to setting out, and defending arguments, and is excited to participate in an initiative that will, she hopes, further clarify the role of leading universities in the debate

• Alessandra Asteriti is a former professor of international law. She holds degrees from Italy (Ancient History of the Near East) and the UK (an MA in Human Rights and LLM and a PhD in International Law). In the last five years she has focused on the issue of gender identity in international law, sharing her expertise in US, UK and German universities. Her book “Gender Identity in International Law - A Certain Inconvenience” is to be published in July. She is keen to participate in an initiative whereby leading universities, as seats of learning, will provide academic clarity on the binary and immutable nature of human sex and steer the sex versus gender/gender identity debate in a direction informed on science and not belief.

You will find us on the X/Twitter account “@ISBI3” where you can reply and comment. This Substack post is a reference document that will be included in our emails to universities.

7. The List of Universities

UK (The Russell Group)

[1]  The University of Birmingham
[2]  University of Bristol
[3]  University of Cambridge
[4]  Cardiff University
[5]  Durham University
[6]  The University of Edinburgh
[7]  University of Exeter
[8]  University of Glasgow
[9]  Imperial College London
[10]  Kings College London
[11]  University of Leeds
[12]  University of Liverpool
[13]  The Universityof Manchester
[14]  Newcastle University
[15]  University of Nottingham
[16]  University of Oxford
[17] Queen Mary University of London
[18]  Queen's University Belfast
[19]  The University of Sheffield
[20]  University College London
[21]  University of Southampton
[22]  University of Warwick
[23]  University of York

United States

[24]  University of California, Berkeley
[25]  Massachusetts Institute of Technology
[26]  Harvard University
[27]  Princeton University
[28]  Stanford University
[29]  Yale University

Canada

[30]  University of Alberta
[31]  University of British Columbia
[32]  McGill University 
[33]  University of Toronto
[34]  University of Waterloo
[35]  Western University 

Australia

[36]  The University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney)
[37]  The University of Sydney
[38]  Australian National University (ANU)
[39]  Monash University
[40]  The University of Queensland
[41]  The University of Western Australia

8. Interview with Nancy Kelley, former CEO of Stonewall

Below is a transcript of the conversation between Nancy Kelley of Stonewall and Emma Barnett of the BBC regarding whether it is possible to change sex

16:07 minutes into the programme.

Emma: Do you believe a person can change their biological sex?

Nancy: I definitely believe they can change their sex characteristics, some but not all of them. That's, that's what the purpose of people going through a medical transition, for those that go through medical transition, is.

Emma: That again wasn't my question. Yes, you can of course have surgery and hormones, but do you believe a person can change their biological sex?

Nancy: So, I don't believe, and I don't think anybody believes that Trans people's bodies are identical to Cis people's bodies. No.

­­Emma: When you say Cis, for our audience you mean?

Nancy: People like me that, when I was born, they said that’s a girl, and I’ve remained a girl for the rest of my life and haven’t transitioned.Emma: Because, again, we are talking about language. That’s not language that lots of people will be familiar with, others will be.

Nancy: That’s right and mostly we don’t need to use it, right. I think we only use the kind of Cis Trans language when we’re talking about differences between Cis and Trans people. The rest of the time we just get on with people and men and women.

Emma: So when I ask you do you believe a person can change their biological sex, your answer is?

Nancy: If that is everything that goes into making a sexed body, no

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Version History

Version 2: 23 Jun 2024

• Changed to reflect the revised position wording we will be requesting from universities

Version 1.1: 13 Jun 2024

1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0011lrs (Radio 4 18th Nov 2021)
(accessed 5 Jul 2022)

2. Email of 8th December 2021 from Professor David Ruebain, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Culture, Equality & Inclusion), Sussex University

3. We have removed the “biological” adjective as being superfluous. The dictionary definition of a female is a female person, the adjective female "denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes" (Kindle Oxford English Dictionary 2009)

4. https://compliance.admin.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/compliance/documents/media/modern_slavery_act_statement_2021-22.pdf
(Accessed 27 Feb 2024)

5. https://compliance.admin.ox.ac.uk/freedom-of-speech
(Accessed 27 Feb 2024)

6. Website kpssinfo.org
X/Twitter “at”NoXYinXXprisons

7. https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/archiveofnews/2021/may/headline_792437_en.html#:~:text=December-,New%20research%20has%20found%20that%2078%25%20of%20women%20prisoners%20in,over%20periods%20of%20several%20years
(Accessed 12 Jun 2024)