Mick Hartley

Julie Bindel talks to the three women who’ve started a women-only society at Cambridge:

“University culture is obsessed with gender ideology,” says Halligan, 22, when I join the three women on a video call.

“All you can see are pronoun badges, rainbow flags, literature about transgender issues… ‘Are you feeling gender distress?’, and trans flags bearing slogans such as ‘My existence is not a threat’.”

As ever with trans ideology, there’s never room for debate. The answer is always ostracism and threats.

“At Cambridge, I built up lots of friendships, including with trans rights activists. I didn’t think it was going to be a problem. I thought if I could tolerate their views, then hopefully they could tolerate mine.”

But like Worley, she quickly felt “inundated” with trans ideology around campus.

Meanwhile, during her third term at Cambridge, Sewell, 20, showed a friend some newly acquired books, including Material Girls, a feminist work by Kathleen Stock, the academic hounded out of Sussex University by trans rights activists. The friend, she said, wasn’t a trans rights activist herself, “but she went out of her way to contact the biggest trans rights activists in my college because she thought they deserved to know what my views were”.

The incident led to “complete ostracism, pointedly hostile receptions in public spaces, ‘terf’ being scratched into my door. The few friends who did continue speaking to me refused to meet in public and said they were too scared to be seen with me.”…

On social media, the three students have been targeted with countless hateful messages. “Every other feminist society is denouncing us and mobilising against us,” adds Sewell. “The undergraduate population of Cambridge has turned against us, as we were expecting.

“They band together in group chats, parroting the usual slurs against us,” says Halligan. I’m shown one of the many Instagram posts: “Cambridge University joint statement from college Femsocs [feminist societies] and associated women’s societies: ‘Transgender and gender-queer individuals have been and will continue to be crucial to our cause as feminists.’”

That’s some feminism, when the promotion of men into women’s spaces and women’s sport is “crucial” to their cause.