Feminist faces down student cancel mob
A LEADING women’s rights campaigner refused to stop giving a talk on free speech yesterday despite students attempting to drown her out with a counter demonstration.
Julie Bindel arrived at York University to be met by 120 protesters, mainly women, waving rainbow flags and carrying signs such as ‘no terfs [trans-exclusionary radical feminists] on our turf’.
Others read ‘trans lives matter’ and ‘not on our campus’.
Little over 30 tickets had been sold for the event, but Miss Bindel – who has written about feminism and free speech for the Daily Mail – was delighted it had gone ahead because university organisers ‘usually cave in and it is humiliating’.
She said: ‘It is awful, actually. They seem to have rewritten feminism as though it is anything that is bad for women. I always come to universities when I’m invited. Usually, the organisers back down because the bullies are relentless.’
She claimed university feminist societies were being run by ‘men, whether they identify as women, non-binary or just blokes’.
The writer, who has argued that sex work is not a job, continued to walk towards the lecture hall as the students chanted ‘fight poverty not prostitutes’. An unnamed protest leader said: ‘We are not deplatforming her. She does not have a platform here to start with. She directs hate speech.’ The talk was organised by the Free Speech Society, part of the students’ union.