Mick Hartley

Much discussion still on the Kathleen Stock/Oxford Union affair, and the importance of free speech. Oxford vice-chancellor Irene Tracey is interviewed in the Times today, and insists that Stock's talk will go ahead despite student concerns:

“Our job is to help equip them because they’re going to go into the workplace. You’ve got to get used to views that are going to be absolutely aligned with your own, and ones that you’ll find distasteful.” She believes that conflict over freedom of speech is “turbocharged” by social media. “Most students actually get it and are quite impassioned about the fact that people should have a range of views.”

I'm sure that's true. I'm sure the overwhelming majority of Oxford students – of all UK students – believe in the idea of free speech. If this was your stndard Union debate, on the lines of allowing more immigration vs. trying to stop it, or "the crisis of liberalism" or some such, no one would think about raising objections to speakers on whatever side. But this is different:

A student told me she wanted to attend the Stock event but was worried about protesters. She added that students who quietly agreed that Stock should have a right to speak “are scared to express an opinion”. I suggest to Tracey that this sounds a depressing state of affairs.

“It is a shame. It is a pity. She should go if she wants to go."

Well yes, that's part of it: people are scared to speak out because of the danger of being ostracised. Which suggests that these views are more than one side of a debate to be had…

From the early days of the gender movement, when Stonewall and Mermaids set the tone, it was always "no debate". "Trans lives are not up for debate". No one was suggesting that trans lives were up for debate, but that was the line. It was a meaningless slogan, but somehow very effective alongside claims that trans people were somehow uniquely suffering, uniquely oppressed…that rates of suicide were sky-high…that using incorrect pronouns was actual violence…that instant affirmation was needed if a veritable tsunami of suicides was to be avoided…all the way up to "trans genocide".

It's all ridiculous, of course. An actual adult debate would be hopelessly one-sided. The biology is settled: everyone of any intelligence knows that sex isn't assigned at birth but observed, that you can't be born in the wrong body or change sex, that the medical mutilation of troubled dysphoric teens is a scandal, that women's safe spaces – in prisons, in sport, in rape centres – must remain women-only. The problem is that somehow the debate has switched from the rational to the irrational: trans women, for example, are presented as doe-eyed baby bunnies in need of love and protection – the latest in the line of oppressed minorities in need of rescuing – when in fact they're mostly disturbed men with a fetish, or autogynephiles, or indeed simply chancers trying to exploit vulnerable women in a legal sysem full of gender-friendly loopholes.

In other words it's not so much an intellectual position to be debated as a cult. Discuss it seriously and it melts away like the morning mist. Like religion – think of atheist Shelley thrown out of Oxford 200 years ago – debate, for believers, is not an option .