Oxford students defy dons’ warning over trans row feminist speaker
OXFORD students yesterday stepped up their campaign to stop a talk by a visiting professor – despite being warned by 44 of the university’s dons that they are threatening free speech.
Hundreds of trans activists will protest against a debate at the Oxford Union featuring feminist professor of philosophy Kathleen Stock.
Claiming she is ‘transphobic and trans- exclusionary’ for opposing gender self-identification and saying biological sex is real, the Oxford University LGBTQ+ Society is arranging a day of talks and a protest march when Professor Stock visits on May 30.
The student group warned its members of ‘heated interactions’ during the day and told them to prepare facing a ‘transphobic counter protest’.
‘Heated interactions’
The society initiated the row by calling for the Oxford Union – the famous debating society that has been the breeding ground for countless British politicians – to rescind its invitation to Professor Stock.
Since then the university’s Student Union has barred the Oxford Union from having a recruiting stall at future freshers’ fairs – a decision criticised yesterday in a letter signed by 44 Oxford academics.
Condemning the replacement of ‘ reasoned argument’ with ‘coercion and threats’, they said ‘universities must remain places where contentious views can be openly discussed’.
Amiad Haran Diman, president of the university’s LGBTQ+ Society, told Radio 4’s World At One: ‘The youngest cohorts at uni are increasingly not cisgender and are super accepting. The Oxford Union is a private members’ club and it has no duty to platform these views when Kathleen Stock is not an expert on gender identity.
‘ I don’t think that it’s fair to debate the existence of trans people. And I don’t think it’s fair to debate basic human rights.’
The 44 Oxford dons include evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins and theologian Professor Nigel Biggar and their letter is one of the most significant interventions by academics in recent free speech controversies.
They condemned the Student Union’s decision to sever ties with the Oxford Union, and said they were united in their belief that ‘universities exist, among other things, to promote free inquiry and the disinterested pursuit of the truth by means of reasoned argument’.
The letter in The Daily Telegraph read: ‘Professor Stock believes that biological sex in humans is real and socially salient, a view which until recently would have been so commonplace as to hardly merit asserting. Whether or not one agrees with Professor Stock’s views, there is no plausible and attractive ideal of academic freedom, or of free speech more generally, which would condemn their expression as outside the bounds of permissible discourse.’ Professor Stock, left, was forced to resign from her philosophy professorship at Sussex University in 2021 after a campaign of harassment from gender activists. A hate mob plastered the campus with posters accusing her of ‘transphobia’.