Mick Hartley

Simon Fanshawe is something of a gay legend, having co-founded Stonwall as a gay campaigning group and then, when he saw the direction the charity was taking with its new focus on pushing trans ideology, speaking out against it and helping to found the LGB Alliance. Naturally, then, he's not going to be welcome in Cambridge:

An address from Stonewall founder Simon Fanshawe on Friday evening is the latest in a series of contested free speech talks hosted by Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge. In October, college fellow Prof. Arif Ahmed hosted feminist writer Helen Joyce to discuss gender ideology and free speech; the event met with significant backlash and protest.

Friday night’s event opened with an introduction from presiding chair Prof. David Runciman, who encouraged those with opposing perspectives to make themselves heard, extolling the virtues of “the expression of divergent points of view”. Then, as Fanshawe took the floor, a significant number of audience members walked out, each draped in a transgender flag and waving a sign. They joined the large crowd of students protesting outside, who were rattling the doors to the auditorium, banging drums, and shouting “No TERFs on Our Turf”. Their walkout prevented many students on the event’s waiting list from attending.

Having founded Stonewall in 1989, Fanshawe is no stranger to criticism, opposition and abuse. Though he marched against the infamous Section 28, his fiercest opponents now come from within the LGBT community that he has spent much of his life advocating for. In 2019, Fanshawe was one of 20 activists who co-signed an open letter expressing concern over Stonewall’s transgender policies, alarmed by the charity’s encouragement of primary school children to “review their gender identity”.

Since speaking out, Fanshawe has been largely unable to attend events like this without experiencing extremely threatening, sometimes dangerous, backlash. On Friday, he told the audience about a young woman he had encountered outside the auditorium. When he gestured to the protest and asked her, “What’s this all about?”, she responded, “Apparently, they’ve invited some awful transphobe to come and speak.”…

In his address Fanshawe argued that the development of LGBT ideology over the last decade represents a completely “narcissistic” worldview. Central to the beliefs of certain activists, he observed, is the “idea of the individual as indomitable”. As such, Fanshawe suggested, we live in a world where demands have become rights: phrases like “Trans Rights are Human Rights” are used with little regard for their actual implications. Do these chants represent the simple idea that trans people deserve basic human rights, or do they, in fact, form part of an argument for a “right” to transition, or maybe even to self-identify to enter women’s spaces or compete in their sports? Representatives of this perspective refused, however, to engage constructively with the event, preferring to disrupt than debate.  

Unfornuately the students seem to prefer no argument and cheap slogans rather than argument by debate.

Previously – Helen Joyce at Gonville and Caius.