by Freddie Attenborough, spiked
University officers have supported trans activists’ attempts to shut down lectures on sex and the law.
Oxford University appears to be modelling its approach to campus free speech on Nineteen Eighty-Four. Senior administrators seem particularly taken with Orwell’s depiction of the Two Minutes Hate, whereby citizens are encouraged to engage in a ritual public denunciation of wrongthinkers.
How else to explain the university’s response to censorial students attempting to cancel someone who dared to think differently? The latest campus hissy fit began in May when a lecture series by Dr Michael Foran, an associate professor of law at Keble College, was repeatedly disrupted by trans activists.
Foran’s crime? His work was cited in the UK Supreme Court’s ruling last year, which stated that, for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010, ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ refer to biological sex – a ruling, of course, that has enraged trans activists, including those at Oxford.
And so before the first of Foran’s four planned lectures, based on his recent book, Sex, Gender Identity and the Law, trans activists plonked themselves in front of Foran’s lectern. They then told the audience that he was a ‘bigot’ who ‘masks his transphobia behind a thin veneer of academia’, before urging them to walk out and refuse to platform him.