(Update: this is from my old blog site. I wondered what Hinesy was up to. Is she easing into retirement on a full professorial pension? And who could blame her, after all these decades in the ABLOOBLABLABLA mine?)
The usual suspects fall into several categories. Sally Hines (@sally_hines) is a very vocal supporter of trans ideology on Twitter but she isn’t a blue tick and has less than 3,000 followers (Update: she now has a blue tick and 13.3k followers). Her real influence is via her day job; Hines is Professor of Sociology and Gender Identities in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds.
Her pinned tweet is about her new book “Is Gender Fluid; A Primer For the 21st Century“. Rather worrying, the first line of the publisher’s blurb gives the distinct impression that Hines doesn’t know the difference between the concepts of “sex” and “gender”, or what actually happens when a baby is born and someone present at the birth announces what sex the new arrival is.
(Update: pinned tweet now about Chinese translation of Is Gender Fluid?)
Hines has been at Leeds for quite some time; she got her PhD in 2004 at Leeds, in the department where she’s now a professor, for a thesis entitled “Transgender Identities, Intimate Relationships and Practices of Care“. Her PhD was supervised by Fiona Williams and Sasha Roseneil (Roseneil is now Dean of the Faculty of Social & Historical Sciences (SHS) at UCL. (Update: Roseneil is now Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Sussex. Interestingly, she authored the paper about whether or not UCL should continue to be a Stonewall member that went to UCL’s Academic Board and led to the members of the Board voting to leave.) “Sasha’s background also includes 16 years at the University of Leeds where she established and directed the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, now considered a world leading centre in the field.”)
Hines’s PhD was supported by an ESRC scholarship. The ESRC is the Economic and Social Research Council, one of the UK’s government-funded Research Councils which support academic research (mostly conducted by universities) in Britain.
The ESRC has continued to be very good to Hines. Not only did it fund her PhD, she’s been awarded just under £1.3m of ESRC research funding over the last ten years. Google “esrc sally hines” and up pops the following table.
Two of these projects are currently active, Living Gender in Diverse Times and Pregnant Men.
(Just a thought … I wonder how much the Living Gender project’s branding cost?)
Pregnant Men: An International Exploration of Trans Male Experiences and Practices of Reproduction “represents the first study to address the sociological and health care implications of the reproductive practices of people who become pregnant and/or give birth after transitioning from female to male.” Again, I get a definite sense that Hines doesn’t really understand the difference between sex and gender, because any mammal who’s ever been pregnant is female.
Pregnant Men employs in the role of project consultants two organisations whose names may be familiar, ‘Gendered Intelligence‘ and ‘Trans Bare All‘. Their function will be to “represent major international stakeholders. They will organise and run focus groups with the PI and UK Co-I to ensure that stakeholder impact is built into the project’s methods of data collection.” Wouldn’t it be interesting to know how much Gendered Intelligence and Trans Bare All are being paid by the British taxpayer, via the ESRC and University of Leeds, for their roles in this project? Especially given how closely linked the two organisations are, with the founder of TBA Lee Gale (@BonsaiLee) working as an “activist and trainer” for GI.
Obviously, the ESRC expect considerable “output” and “impact” for their investment, and Hines is dutifully prolific in academic publishing.
“I have published widely in the areas of transgender, gender, sexuality, intimacy, the body and feminist politics and theory. Book publications include ‘TransForming Gender: Transgender Practices of Identity, Intimacy and Care’ … I am co-editor of the Routledge Book Series ‘Advances in Critical Diversities’ … Between 2008 – 2010 I was PI on the ESRC grant ‘Gender Diversity, Recognition and Citizenship’, the findings of which are explored in my book ‘Gender Diversity, Recognition and Citizenship: Towards a Politics of Difference (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). The project led to an ESRC funded Knowledge Exchange Project ‘Recognizing Diversity?: Equalities in Principle and Practice (2009-2010). Between 2011 – 2013 I was co- grant holder of the ESRC Seminar Series ‘Critical Diversities’.”
Hines is also a prolific supervisor of PhD students, and each of her newly minted PhDs is likely to go into an academic job where they will dutifully reproduce the trans orthodoxy to undergraduate students and, in turn, to their own doctoral students.
Update on 19 Nov 2018: after her appearance on Woman’s Hour in a conversation with Dr Kathleen Stock (very ably moderated by Jane Garvie) it became painfully obvious that Hines doesn’t understand the difference between “sex” and “gender”; that she hasn’t heeded the pleas of intersex people not to be used as debating points by trans activists; and most tragically, given that she has a professorial position in a Russell Group university, that she believes that “trans women are women” is a magical incantation. Sorry, Professor Hines, my abra remains resolutely un-cadabra’d.
Update on 06 March 2023: Has the ESRC teat dried up? Sally’s only new grant is a measly PhD studentship, paying for a project called “Exploring transgender women's access to sexual violence support services”.
The lucky recipient of Sally’s supervision is one Holly Jade McSpadden, whose LinkedIn profile suggests is a die-hard fan of the Sally School of Sociology.
Is Sally slowing down? Who is the heir apparent to the Gender Realm, where everything the light touches is transphobic?