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Reubs Walsh
My interests are broad and interdisciplinary, but my approach to a question is usually informed by social neuroscience together with feminist epistemology, queer theoretical ontologies. I am particularly interested in the development of social behaviour and identity, especially gender identity. I am also very interested in the intersection between cultural/social oppressions and mental and/or neuropsychiatric health, including as a cause of problematic or criminal behaviour. Similarly the role that prejudice or biased paradigms or epistemes can play in enabling and enforcing oppressive behaviours in the clinic, such as early 'corrective' surgery on intersex infants or gate-keeping of transgender healthcare. I am also interested in the intersection between feminism, queer liberation, sexology, psychology and neuroscience.
Areas of particular focus:
-Development of social-cognitive systems and the role of social environment in determining these processes. This is the project I'm currently working on.
- Atypical manifestations of gender and sexual identity: how does it happen, what causes it, does it exist for evolutionary reasons. Rather, what causes gender and sexual identity to exist at all?
-Prejudice. What causes prejudice to develop, and why do cognitively dissonant constructs persist in its maintenance.
- Long-term medical intervention: how can we make it more patient- centered and less disempowering? Especially as it relates to psychiatric patients and patients whose condition and quality of life poses a threat to their mental health: how do we reconcile the ‘Social Model of Disability’ to standard practices of care? Patients’ experiences as a central form of evidence in designing treatment methods; patient-defined clinical goals.
- Criminality, with and without Psychopathic Personality Disorder (PPD): why it happens, and when and how it can and/or should be treated as a psychiatric problem.
- Different cognitive-behavioural models of social interaction and how the cognitive processes behind social interaction vary with autism spectrum conditions and how these might be related to other differences in the cognitive behaviour of these individuals.
-Feminist politics and the contributions science can make to helping us understand how best to achieve our aims, and in understanding and defining the problems we wish to address.
Supervisors: Lydia Krabbendam, Gillian Einstein, and Pam Heaton
Areas of particular focus:
-Development of social-cognitive systems and the role of social environment in determining these processes. This is the project I'm currently working on.
- Atypical manifestations of gender and sexual identity: how does it happen, what causes it, does it exist for evolutionary reasons. Rather, what causes gender and sexual identity to exist at all?
-Prejudice. What causes prejudice to develop, and why do cognitively dissonant constructs persist in its maintenance.
- Long-term medical intervention: how can we make it more patient- centered and less disempowering? Especially as it relates to psychiatric patients and patients whose condition and quality of life poses a threat to their mental health: how do we reconcile the ‘Social Model of Disability’ to standard practices of care? Patients’ experiences as a central form of evidence in designing treatment methods; patient-defined clinical goals.
- Criminality, with and without Psychopathic Personality Disorder (PPD): why it happens, and when and how it can and/or should be treated as a psychiatric problem.
- Different cognitive-behavioural models of social interaction and how the cognitive processes behind social interaction vary with autism spectrum conditions and how these might be related to other differences in the cognitive behaviour of these individuals.
-Feminist politics and the contributions science can make to helping us understand how best to achieve our aims, and in understanding and defining the problems we wish to address.
Supervisors: Lydia Krabbendam, Gillian Einstein, and Pam Heaton
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Contributions of Developmental Social Neuroscience to Understanding Trans*/Gender Healthcare (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320536100_Contributions_of_Developmental_Social_Neuroscience_to_Understanding_TransGender_Healthcare.
Please cite as: Walsh, R. and Einstein, G. (2016). (Trans)Feminism, Bodily Autonomy, and Situated Neuroscience: Separating Gender from Genitalia in Medicine and Feminism to Move Beyond the Binary. In Trans*Formations (pp. 16-18). 14-15 June 2016. Lisbon. Retrieved from https://transrightseurope.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/trans_formations-abstracts-and-bios3.pdf
Abstract:
A recurring problem for many marginalised groups is the ubiquitous trend to use sex and sexuality as a site for
sensationalism and moralisation. The barriers to equitable societal circumstance for stigmatized sexual expressions
- lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer (LGBQ) people and sex workers - centre on a social construction of a norm
defining the acceptable nature and context for sexual congress, the boundaries of which are policed by public and
private discourses. A similar and well documented issue exists for transgender people for whom a focus on their
genitals as the site of gender identification polices their gender. One outcome of this is that because genitals are
viewed as binary, sexual identifications are viewed as binary and trans individuals are expected to tell a story about
their ‘transness’ that is either male or female. This constrains gender and allows a very small box in which to fit one’s identity, and may lead to trans patients being indirectly pressured into a more binary gender and transition than best suits their identity. Another outcome is that the practice of transitional medicine becomes engulfed in a focus on genital binarism which then corrupts both research and clinical practice. For example, a majority of standardised diagnostic questionnaires for ascertaining gender identity are built on an assumption that desires for surgical and endocrinological transition will be central to the experiences that define a person as trans. These questionnaires may therefore fail to highlight other, perhaps more important, factors in the experience of gender identity such as social dysphoria (concerns with how one is perceived by self or others, in respect of one’s gender), or the surprisingly prevalent other forms of gender variance which do not conform to the dominant narrative of trans* genders, and in which gender identification contrary to assigned birth may not present dysphoria of the sort these surveys tend to anticipate. For example, upwards of 35% of presumed-cisgender individuals questioned with a non-dichotomous gender identity questionnaire identify to some extent as the ‘other’ gender, both or neither (Joel et al., 2013). Thus, the assumption that needs to be challenged is that identification with a gender (in terms of group identity or perceived traits) is the same as identification as a gender (personal identity), and that either of these implies a particular sex-identity, or even a particular body map. These assumptions are born of the three cornerstone misconceptions of cisgenderism: (i) that in a state of natural good health the human body is sexed in a dichotomous way that has only two forms; (ii) that the sex of the body is directly equivalent to the gender of the person; and (iii) that the external characteristics of sex (especially the genitals) are the sole signifiers of sex and gender, and are themselves therefore binary. Surprisingly, important theoretical parallels and contrasts may be drawn between trans people who seek or have undergone surgical changes to their bodies that reflect their sex- identity and women with female genital circumcision/mutilation/cutting (FGC) showing that the focus on genitalia as determining gender creates categorical binaries that haunt other groups as well. In fact, on some accounts and cultures, FGC is carried out in order to instantiate a gender binary where one was not thought to exist prior; establishing gender by modifying the genitalia is one important reason that cultures practice FGC. (One might say that this is also why cis women undergo ‘cosmetic’ surgery.) In turn, women with FGC face similar issues as trans people vis à vis researchers' and clinicians' preoccupation with their genitals in almost every aspect of research about them. FGC intervenes upon their genitalia, as the presumed location of gender. An interesting overlap between the group of women with FGC and male trans individuals is their very literal meeting in Trinidad, Colorado where both go to modify their genitalia to match their gender; women with FGC go for clitoral ‘restoration’ and trans men go to receive phalloplasty or similar ‘masculinising’ gender-reaffirming surgeries – all undergone because gender is linked in the collective social consciousness to genitalia. How do we move beyond this binary? Using feminist principles such as a mixture of approaches which blended reflexive awareness of the personal narratives of participants (first person), and the interpersonal spaces in which interviews and physiological examinations took place (second person), with the impersonal, traditionally "objective" measures of physiological states and changes (third person) Einstein (2012) examined the neuroplastic changes beyond the genitalia that followed FGC in a group of Somali-Canadian women living in Toronto. She called this ‘situated neuroscience’ and through this mixture of methods she was able to bring the subjective under scientific scrutiny - a platform previously reserved for 'objective' observations - or rather, observations made through the hegemonic and consequently hidden subjectivity of white, cis-het, male privilege. As the nervous system may become a locus of change by FGC, some trans individuals identify an aspect of their brain (somewhat or sometimes in its relation to their society) that requires them to modify their bodies, thus involving the brain and nervous systems in both these performances of gender. the phenomenon of phantom genitals in pre- and post-surgery trans persons as compared to cisgender persons with similar modifications to their body for other medical reasons (e.g. penectomy for the treatment of cancer), wherein the presence of such a phantom is positively correlated with the extent to which the individual identifies with those genitals and their functions as social signifiers of gender (Ramachandran and McGeogh 2007). We believe that feminist approaches may be helpful in eliminating the focus on genitals and the accompanying sensationalism and moralization and as a corollary, a reification of gender binaries. For example, if we move beyond the genitals alone, to their connection with the nervous system, we see the reciprocal relationship of the nervous system and the rest of the body expanding to omnidirectional influences of brain, body and society upon each other and thus, opening pathways for imbrigation of every body system with each other and with the world. As an occasion for demonstrating their utility, this paper aims to use feminist approaches to address the methodological and ethical implications of the reciprocity between body, brain and society that these similarities and differences between the corporeal interplay experienced by both Somali-Canadian women with FGC and transsexual persons, and develop an understanding of the role of feminist science in the pursuit of social connectedness and bodily autonomy for both these groups. In this way we hope to move beyond the simplistic binary account of genitalia equals a binary notion of gender to one which is properly situated (as in Haraway 1988) in the intersecting systems of the corporeal body (includes the brain, Grosz) and society, and so to enhance bodily autonomy.
I: I think your lecture title, “Jesus – the 4th wave feminist of the year 25AD” is one of the best at the Festival! Could you give us a sneak peek into what you are going to discuss?
RW: The short version is that the Bible is much queerer than people think; and that this is no more apparent anywhere than in the Life of Jesus and the people he associated with. I’m not one of those who are of the opinion that Jesus and John were in a sexual relationship, but Jesus, it seems to me, was not so much celibate, as asexual, and his intense and close relationship with genderqueer St John sheds some light on just how clearly Jesus fits the admittedly modern concept of a queer ally. A pointed allyship to queer people, and a marked emphasis on socialist intersectionalist feminism, can only add up to one thing: that the person who millions of Christians around the globe believe was a flesh-and-blood incarnation of our creator God, was also the first ever feminist; and he was a 4th-waver.
Content note: references to transphobia, murder, child murder, sexual assault, domestic abuse, imprisonment, misgendering.
This article is not primarily intended to be read by trans people, which represent the group most likely to experience distress from reading the content. The intention of the article is to educate would-be cis allies.
https://freshfruitmag.com/the-miseducation-and-misinformation-of-j-k-rowling/
Half of all trans students seriously consider dropping out of their course. Many say universities need to do more to support them