My views on gender identity are well known. I believe that biology, rather than a person’s feelings, determines whether they count as a man or woman. My arguments support what many instinctively believe to be true. However, in academic circles, the idea that biology informs gender is far more contentious. So contentious that respected academics have denounced me as ‘offensive, insulting and hateful’.
I am due to speak at an event next week. The philosophy professor Arif Ahmed invited me to talk about my work on gender identity. The discussion is due to be held at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, although it is not an official event put on by the college authorities. This has clearly upset senior members of the college. The idea of a writer discussing her work is, it seems, too dreadful a possibility for these academics. The master of the college, along with a senior tutor, have written the following email to graduates and undergraduates:
Subject: A message regarding Criticising gender-identity ideology: what happens when speech is silenced, 25 OctoberWe are responding to concerns raised with us by members of Caius about the 25 October event here featuring Helen Joyce. We are writing in our personal capacities, not as Master and Senior Tutor but as Pippa and Andrew.Freedom of expression is a fundamental principle which we wholeheartedly support. Individuals should be able to speak freely, within the law. Views should then be challenged by debate, key in academic freedom. This is the case no matter the subject or topic.However, on some issues which affect our community we cannot stay neutral. The event featuring Helen Joyce is not a College event, although it is taking place at Caius. We do not condone or endorse views that Helen Joyce has expressed on transgender people, which we consider offensive, insulting and hateful to members of our community who live and work here.Caius should be a place for the highest quality of research to be produced and discussed, rather than polemics.We will not be attending the event. The College has already made a statement to the media.We have worked hard and we will continue to strive to make Caius an inclusive, diverse and welcoming home for our students, staff and Fellows. We feel events such as this do not contribute to this aim.Best wishes,Pippa [Rogerson] and Andrew [Spencer]
This is what those who go against the new orthodoxies face; the idea that we should be able to discuss and challenge each other’s arguments is gone. The academic commitment to fair-minded debate is over. Instead, Caius residents have been presented with an ignorant and insulting characterisation of me. My work is dismissed as ‘polemics’ and the authors of this message insist that they ‘will not be attending the event’ in an email that they must have known would go public.
I am used to people who should know better – people with high-profile posts in great academic institutions – making a show of defending free speech, open debate and academic standards out of one side of their mouths even as they say ‘however’ out of the other. This is the fate of everyone who, like me, refuses to be frightened off discussing the baleful impacts of gender-identity ideology on vulnerable groups, including women, children and same-sex attracted people.
The reason that ordinary people like me have had to stick their necks out and force proper consideration of changes in the law and institutional rules is because of the utter failure of people like this. It’s because the very people who should be brave – the people whose job it is to hold space for free speech, and to ensure that their students are inculcated in the culture of academic freedom – have turned out to be cowards.
They say that they work hard to make Caius an ‘inclusive, diverse and welcoming home for our students, staff and Fellows’, and that my event ‘will not contribute to this aim’. How inclusive and welcoming do they think this sort of shunning makes their college feel to students, staff and fellows who care about sex-based rights? To those who want to attend my talk, but are frightened that there will be protests, enabled by their unwillingness to give unqualified support for free speech? To women who understand their identities are based on biology, not tired sexist stereotypes? To the people – and some do still exist in Cambridge; even if these two don’t hear from them, I do – who still care about the highest ideals of academia, and watch despairingly as it is shredded?
If they truly think that I, and what I say, is so awful, surely they should come along and point out my errors? Why not tell me to my face that I’m offensive, insulting and hateful? Why not critique my book and tell the world what I have got wrong? Instead, they have given license to the little totalitarians who wish to see me silenced rather than debated.
I’m sure they have read 1984. I often think about the moment when Winston, while being tortured, cries out: ‘Do it to Julia!’ They know that if they do not kowtow to the new identitarian orthodoxy, their students might turn on them. They would rather see anger taken out on me because, I think, they are afraid of their own students.
This is a version of an open letter to Pippa Rogerson and Andrew Spencer at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
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