Cambridge University is blind to reality in the gender debate

Newnham College, Cambridge, was once a bastion of feminist activism. No longer. This summer my curiosity was drawn to two women whispering to one another in the college cafe. They were, as it happened, a senior fellow and doctoral student; leaning over their table, they spoke furtively for fear that someone might overhear their conversation about gender politics. At Cambridge, professors and students alike are afraid to speak critically, or at all, on the subject of gender. 

Believing that biological sex is binary and unchangeable – and that gender is culturally constructed – may not seem controversial. Yet gender-critical feminists who hold such mainstream views are often slapped with a derogatory label: Terf, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist. Their beliefs, let's remember, are far from radical: they think that conflating gender with sex leads to violations of the rights of women, children and gay and lesbian people.

Women, faced with censorship and discrimination, have had to fight for the right to assert this basic truth. Last year, finally, a judge-led panel ruled that gender-critical views are a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act and should be considered ‘worthy of respect in a democratic society’. Yet still, Cambridge University does not do enough to protect those with gender-critical views.

Cambridge Students’ Union recently published a guide titled 'How to spot Terf ideology'. It suggests that sex is neither natural nor binary, but rather a social construct and a ‘colonial fiction created to oppress trans people’. The guide goes on to claim, falsely, that ‘Terfs spend a lot of time working with the far-right.’  The Union’s Women’s Officer proudly announces in her manifesto that ‘Terfs aren’t welcome here’.

As president of the Cambridge Radical Feminist Network, I’ve seen the ostracism students can face for holding gender-critical views. It is not uncommon for students to comb through a classmate’s social media and bully them in private messages. This can progress to more threatening behaviour. 

A gender-critical student at Cambridge was traumatised after her peers discovered an online article in which she expressed her views on sex. It cited her sexual assault as a reason for her reservations about allowing males into women’s spaces. For holding these views, she was publicly shamed and harassed. In the first year of what should have been a rewarding university experience, she became a pariah within her college. I have also been targeted unfairly for my views.

One of the earliest and most influential texts in defence of free expression, Areopagitica, was written by John Milton, the celebrated poet, polemical author and a former student of Christ’s College Cambridge. ‘Censorship’, he argued, leads to ‘the discouragement of all learning’.

Is this censorship happening today? Consider the fact that, in a Cambridge seminar on the subject of ‘Women in Philosophy’, the speaker, a senior academic at the university, steered clear of the shocking case of analytic philosopher Kathleen Stock, who resigned from a professorship at the University of Sussex following protests over her ‘transphobic’ views. There was no mention that the very meaning of the word ‘woman’ has become a divisive philosophical issue. But unless academics are willing to face up to how gender-critical concerns are being sidelined in the trans debate, scholarship at Cambridge suffers. Stock spoke last night at the Cambridge union; her presence was enough to bring demonstrators on to the street.

This wasn't the first time that the presence in Cambridge of a writer who refuses to follow the emerging gender orthodoxy was greeted by protesters. Helen Joyce, author of the best-selling book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, was recently invited to speak at Gonville and Caius College by Professor Arif Ahmed. This event sparked a furore. In an email to Caius students, the college's Master and another academic described Joyce’s views as ‘hateful’ and wrote that: ‘Individuals should be able to speak freely within the law...However, on some issues which affect our community we cannot stay neutral’. Ahmed was blocked from using the college’s intranet to publicise the event.

Hundreds of students vehemently protested Joyce’s speech. Yet, in their report of the event, the student newspaper, Varsity muddled up what Joyce actually stood for. The paper suggested Joyce believes that 'gender is not a social construct and is immutably linked to sex’, the very opposite of her thesis. Because disagreement within the trans debate is silenced, students don’t understand what they’re fighting against, only that they must. It's no wonder mistakes like this are made.

At one of this country’s most prestigious universities, women who hold perfectly reasonable views are terrorised into silence. Gender-critical students and academics are ostracised. A university that prides itself on academic rigour is letting down its students.

Dozens of blue and gold banners now hang from the ceiling of Newnham’s dining hall, commissioned by the college in celebration of its 150th year. In richly-embroidered slogans they exhort the importance of ‘privileging queerness’, ‘experimenting with gender’ and ‘trans liberation’; they reassure students we can ‘be who we say we are’. Among these, one sobering message stands out: ‘Appreciate reality.’ I had lunch at the college recently with a fellow PhD student whose research also relates to gender, when my opinion became clear. She paused, looking bemused, and asked: ‘So, you think there are only two sexes?’.