STATEMENT OF SUPPORT

We, members of the NeuroGenderings Network, stand in solidarity with people who are trans, nonbinary, intersex, and otherwise minoritized with respect to their gender and/or sex, against a wave of rhetoric, policies, and laws across the globe that marginalize, dehumanize, and promote discrimination. The origins of this wave are fascistic, and its effects are genocidal (for more info on the use of genocide in this context, see here and here). As an interdisciplinary network of feminist scientists, scholars, and thinkers who conduct feminist neuroscience, critically examine the production of neuroscientific knowledge, and develop better approaches to the scientific study of human gender/sex, we reject – both as unscientific, and as incompatible with basic human rights – biological essentialism and other abuses of science against trans, nonbinary, and intersex people and other gender/sex minorities, just as we reject the same rhetoric when it is deployed against (assumed -cisgender and -endosex) women and girls. We affirm the right of all people to self-determination and freedom of expression regarding their own gender/sex. We recognize the intersections between oppressive ideologies and practices that target gender/sex minorities’ existences, and other such ideologies and practices, such as racism, colonialism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and more. We aim to uphold the expertise of gender/sex minorities and all oppressed or minoritized people – including our trans, nonbinary, and intersex members and colleagues – about their lives and about gender/sex. We aim to hold ourselves accountable to these values, working toward a scientific culture, and indeed a world, conducive to the ability of trans, nonbinary, and intersex people, and other gender/sex minorities, to thrive. We unreservedly oppose uses of scientific and scholarly platforms to lend credibility to rhetoric and ideologies that promote the systematic marginalization, exclusion and violent treatment of these (and any) groups.

We continue to promote feminist (neuro-)science and scholarship, which, at its best, can guide us toward policies that enable the thriving of trans, nonbinary, and intersex people, and all people oppressed by anti-gender ideologies worldwide. We are committed to a feminism that is intersectional and inclusive, shifts power from dominant voices even in progressive spaces, speaks up to intolerance, does not put trans people’s or other minoritized existences up for debate, and rejects the voices of division that pit the liberation of cisgender women against that of gender/sex minorities including trans women, intersex people, and/or nonbinary people.   The NeuroGenderings Network