Gender-critical academics demand apology from LSE

ACADEMICS have demanded an apology from the London School of Economics (LSE) over what they claim is a “hostile environment” for students and staff with gender-critical views.

The Open University Gender Critical Research Network (OUGCRN) – a group of academics who share a common interest “in exploring how sexed bodies come to matter in their respective research fields” – has written an open letter condemning an “ideological cabal” at LSE’s gender studies department.

A row flared after OUGCRN launched last year, when a letter purporting to be from LSE’s entire gender studies department appeared on LSE’s website. It said it was a “statement of solidarity” with Open University staff and students who had campaigned against the network.

The public “denunciation” accused the network of being “an explicitly antiintellectual attack on gender studies, trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people” and claimed gendercritical views – that biological sex cannot be changed – “undermine trans rights”.

It was deleted following a backlash and LSE bosses launched a review into how it came to be published.

But the dispute deepened last month, when it emerged that a senior member of the faculty had spoken at a conference organised by a group that promotes support for paedophiles.

Dr Jacob Breslow – an associate professor of gender and sexuality who, emails show, coordinated the antiOUGCRN statement – is under investigation by LSE after he allegedly gave a presentation to US group B4U-ACT in 2011 when he was a PhD student at LSE. The group calls for paedophiles to have the right to live “in truth and dignity”.

It prompted the OUGCRN to write last week to Baroness Minouche Shafik, director of LSE, describing the department as a “hostile environment” for those espousing gender-critical views, saying LSE staff who dissented from their department’s public letter “were too intimidated to say so in public”.

The network claims it has received “no apology” for the “defamatory” statement and called for LSE to outline measures to protect scholars who believe biological sex matters for research.

OUGCRN member Prof Alice Sullivan, a sociology lecturer at University College London, told The Sunday Telegraph the statement “leads to the impression that the department is dominated by a narrowly ideological cabal who will not permit dissent”.

An LSE spokesman said the statement “did not reflect the views or the position of the school... it was removed after complaints were received”.