“Women are discriminated against on the basis of sex”: anti-trans epistemologies in Australian universities

This article offers an analysis of qualitative data from a multi-phased project entitled Understanding and Addressing Everyday Sexisms in Australian Universities. The project’s key aim was to improve the ways in which gender-based discrimination is understood and addressed in Australian universities. It achieved this aim through adopting a situated, intersectional, and creative approach to data generation and analysis. The authors examine data from phase three of the project, a large-scale survey that was distributed across 12 of Australia’s 39 public universities, yielding 1257 responses. The survey was designed to encourage academic staff of all genders to participate and aimed to understand experiences of and attunement to everyday sexisms across gender and disciplinary lines. Analysis of open-ended survey responses showed that anti-trans and trans-exclusive feminist epistemologies were present in the data; therefore, in this paper the authors grapple with how these sentiments were articulated and with what this reveals about the rise of anti-trans ideologies within Australian universities.