Mick Hartley

After that OfS fine, Kathleen Stock at UnHerd looks back with little regret to her time at Sussex:

The most egregious bit of the Sussex policy, in my eyes, was a clause which required that “any materials within relevant courses and modules will positively represent trans people and trans lives”. This seemed to me more like an instruction from a client to an advertising agency than a serious pedagogical commitment. Certainly, nothing like it existed for any other protected group, either at the time or since. This clause made it practically impossible to discuss with students what I saw as the severe detriments of defining “woman” in terms of inner feelings of gender identity, not biological sex: cases such as the trans-identified male prisoner Karen White, sexually assaulting female fellow prisoners in 2018, while “her penis was erect and sticking out of her trousers”, as was reported in a court trial shortly afterwards.

I tried to raise the matter with superiors but to no avail. Once, in a fraught meeting with a member of the senior management team, I was asked with some anxiety if my focus on male sexual assault statistics in relation to single-sex facilities implied I actually wanted to represent trans people negatively. Staggered at the stupidly Manichean terms being offered, I protested it did not, but did not feel believed. Over time, my teaching about sex and gender in feminist philosophy grew increasingly cautious, and most of my criticism of the sudden sanctification of gender identity took place elsewhere.

Still, in other ways I tried hard to raise the alarm to colleagues about the effects of trans policies on free expression, long before large fines on offending institutions were ever in the offing. I published letters in national newspapers, and gathered anonymous testimonies from colleagues across the country about how, in practice, academic freedom on sex and gender was being chilled. For a while, I was possibly the UK’s leading expert/biggest pub bore on the subject, collating a huge list of the most ludicrous clauses in university trans policies, circulating them to journalists, and writing about them in the press myself.

There was UCL’s policy, for instance, still online as I write this, which effectively turns lecturers into deferential intellectual lackeys, insisting that “If a trans person informs a staff member that a word or phrasing is inappropriate or offensive, then that staff member should take their word for it, and adjust their phraseology accordingly”. Or how about the University of Leeds’ version, also still up, which amalgamates two of the clauses found in breach at Sussex: “The University will strive to ensure that its curriculum does not rely on or reinforce stereotypical assumptions about trans people and that it contains material that positively represents trans people and trans lives.”

Academics who supported the introduction of these policies liked to pretend they only outlawed the truly “bad” sort of speech — you know, where bigoted, transphobic things were really being said — and not innocently meant or harmless statements. But how anyone was supposed to know the difference remained unclear; and especially not where Stonewall had taken the HR reins and was decreeing that “transphobia” now included “denying” someone’s gender identity “or refusing to accept it”. I have written or spoken variations upon that last sentence literally hundreds of times in the last five years, and so have lots of other people. I can’t tell you how bored I am of making such remedial points, obvious to anyone not educated into this level of stupidity. Yet many of these dim-witted, claustrophobic policies are still in place in universities across the land, right now.

As we know, Sussex vice-chancellor Sasha Roseneil – "originally trained as a sociologist, and later as a group analyst and psychotherapist, she has played a leading role in establishing the interdisciplinary fields of Gender Studies and Psychosocial Studies" – is not happy about the OfS fine.

Aside from her complaints about process, Roseneil also argues that the OFS’s ruling now makes it “virtually impossible for universities to prevent abuse, harassment or bullying, to protect groups subject to harmful propaganda, or to determine that stereotyped assumptions should not be relied upon in the university curriculum”. Leaving aside the daft idea that “stereotyped assumptions” can never be true — just think of the stereotypes about academics, for a start — I also think this complaint isn’t right. All university managers need to do is stop defining concepts such as “abuse”, “harassment”, or indeed “harmful propaganda” absurdly loosely, in order to pander to rapidly expanding notions of student victimhood and the crazed demands of moronic campaigners. This is not cold fusion or Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Or indeed rocket science, or brain surgery. 

In any case, while I’ll never back down on saying sex matters more than gender identity, I’m mostly out of the gender wars now. I certainly did my time in the trenches. And I also gladly renounce the title “Professor”; I’m a former professor at most. In truth, no academic title means much to me anymore, such is my disgust for my former profession. Really, I’m a civilian now, with nobody looking over my shoulder. “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight”, is another Sun Tzu aphorism. And I really hope my former employer gets the hint.

Also, "revenge is a dish best served cold".