Mick Hartley

Hadley Freeman in today's Sunday Times:

Over the past few years, so many women have been reprimanded and even pushed out of jobs for questioning gender ideology’s contention that being a woman has nothing to do with biology but is down to some undefinable inner feeling, that it’s easy to stop seeing how unbelievably weird this is. High-profile cases such as those of Maya Forstater and Allison Bailey, who successfully sued their employers for discriminating against them because of their belief that males and females are defined by biological sex, may have given some people the impression women are free to speak up again. This is very much not so, and few cases illustrate that more clearly than that of the Spanish academic Laura Favaro.

In September 2022, Favaro wrote an article for Times Higher Education about the vilification and ostracism of female academics who questioned gender ideology — and afterwards was herself, she alleges, vilified, ostracised and ultimately let go by City, University of London. (City told me it does not comment on incidents relating to individual members of staff but that it takes its legal obligation to protect freedom of expression very seriously.)

Of course it does. But it takes its determination to suppress any hint of deviation from trans ideology even more seriously.

One day Favaro may enjoy the irony of her thesis being proven so neatly by her own employer, but for now it still makes her cry. “It’s the sense of injustice. I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m a sociologist: it’s my job to look into social issues and to develop analyses about my findings, and I’m a feminist.

“I’m also half-Uruguayan, half-Spanish, so I know something about what it’s like to live in a dictatorship, and this is the stuff of stories I grew up with. This is far from the promises of a democracy,” she tells me. She is taking her case to an employment tribunal, and yesterday started a crowdfunding appeal for her costs.

Favaro has been aware since 2017 of the bullying of female academics who question gender ideology, and there is no shortage of examples: Jo Phoenix, Rosa Freedman and Kathleen Stock are just some from this country. During her three years at City, Favaro interviewed more academics who supported gender ideology than who questioned it, and yet her colleagues described her work as an “attack on trans people”. After Favaro’s article was published, she was told by City she was being investigated, although not for what, and she says she had to defend herself in two meetings without knowing the allegations. She was, she says, eventually cleared of any ethical wrongdoing, but nonetheless she was let go and denied access to her research and data.

Favaro was told that City “does not want to become involved in the sex and gender debate”. This is the common cop-out of bosses, institutions and politicians afraid to stand up to the ludicrous hyperbole of gender activists, who claim that any querying of their ideology causes trans children to kill themselves and casts trans people’s literal existence into doubt. Meanwhile, literal women are losing literal jobs just for describing their experiences, their observations, their lives. Somehow, allowing women to be bullied out of their jobs is seen by some as a position of neutrality.

The swift exit of Nicola Sturgeon seems to have woken up some politicians, such as Keir Starmer and Leo Varadkar, to the obvious truth that prioritising the whims and magical thinking of a loud but very niche minority over the rights of women is not a sustainable position. But industries such as academia and publishing that pride themselves on their progressive credentials, and tend to attract young, highly educated, highly online graduates, remain notably in thrall to the idea that the censorship of feminists is for the greater good.

Favaro says the online attacks she suffered after the publication of her article were “nothing” compared with what she endured from senior colleagues at City as she tried to conduct her research. “That’s what destroyed my career,” she says, adding she was told things would have been different if she had believed trans women are women. She had hoped to turn her extensive research on the gender war in academia into a book, but publishers have told her the subject makes them “nervous”.

Favaro is nervous too: she is “terrified” about her tribunal case, but also determined to see it through: “The time has come to speak up, because I don’t want other women to go through this. Silence will not protect us.”

Here's a link to Laura Favaro's crowdfunder.

I'm an academic who has been researching the silencing, discrimination and harassment of female academics who raise questions about gender identity theory, including those that are ‘gender critical’ such as myself. As a consequence, I have been ostracised, subjected to false complaints, had my research stopped, my research data taken away, and I have lost my job. I’m raising funds because I am having to take the case to an Employment Tribunal.

I have collected large amounts of data on the ‘gender wars’ in academia. You can read about some of the findings in my Times Higher Education article called Researchers are wounded in academia's gender wars. You can also watch a talk here, and another one here. There you will find harrowing testimonies by female academics across disciplines and careers stages: too afraid to voice their views, even to work in gender studies altogether; citing not just concerns about their jobs but fears over violence, putting their children at risk, and more. Some of them hold gender-critical views, others simply want to ask questions about aspects of the theory and movement of gender identity or transgender. You will also find the admissions of those who actively support the censoring, bullying and persecution of gender-critical academics in British universities and beyond.

One result of my Times Higher Education piece was that my university, City, received complaints alleging that I had somehow been unethical during my research. These complaints were baseless: City investigated and could find no ethical wrongdoing on my part. But despite this, I have been frozen out, and further such baseless accusations have been taken at face value, leading to the suspension of my research, and the withdrawal of access to my data.

I have been told at City that the university considers my research data to be dangerous, that it is frightened of having the findings made public, that it does not want to become involved in the sex and gender debate – and that things would have been different if I believed that ‘trans women are women’. Indeed, colleagues have described my Times Higher Education article publicly as an ‘attack piece on trans people’, and claimed that my research ‘clearly intended to cause harm’; while internally I have been described as an institutional risk, and even a risk to research participants, with calls to restrict my use of my research data to ensure it is ‘acceptable’….