Mick Hartley

The case of the Adult Human Female film-makers against the UCU, as reported in the Guardian:

Two academics behind a gender-critical film have taken legal action against their union, accusing it of discrimination and harassment after it campaigned on social media to stop the documentary being screened.

Deirdre O’Neill, a senior lecturer in film studies at the University of Hertfordshire, and Michael Wayne, a professor of media and film studies at Brunel University, describe Adult Human Female as the first UK documentary to look at the “clash between women’s rights and gender ideology/trans rights”.

When a screening was arranged at the University of Edinburgh in 2022, documents before the tribunal said the local branch of the University and College Union (UCU) wrote to the university calling on it to cancel the event, describing it as a “clear attack on trans people’s identities” and denouncing it as “transphobic” on Twitter….

O’Neill and Wayne, who describe themselves as gender critical, believe sex is a matter of biology, that it is impossible for a human to change sex, and that sex is important in a range of different political and social contexts.

They also do not subscribe to gender identity theory, “namely the belief that people are born with an internal sense of gender which may or may not correspond to their biological sex”, the documents state.

Can you believe it? Guardian readers must have been spluttering over their cornflakes reading this. But yes, there are people out there who believe that sex is a matter of biology, that it's important, and that gender identity is not a thing. There are also people out there who believe that 2 plus 2 equals 4, despite the repeated testimony of leading academics and Queer Mathematics theorists that this is a gross simplification based on outdated neocolonialist thinking, and that with a deeper understanding we can see that 2 plus 2 may often, in fact, equal 5.