This week it became clear that almost none of the adults whose job it is to teach students the truth are much inclined to do it. Even the doziest vice-chancellor must by now have twigged that gender ideology is dangerous bunk and that it lures in the most vulnerable – yet still they can’t bring themselves to speak out. This goes not just for academics, but for politicians in the education business too.
For anyone minded to understand how poisonous the atmosphere in universities is, the story of poor Professor David Gordon is horribly instructive. His ordeal began more than a year ago when he invited another professor, Alice Sullivan, to give a talk to his students at the University of Bristol. Sullivan is a professor of sociology and a quantitative data scientist at University College London, and the author of an excellent review, commissioned by the last government, into the damage done when official bodies misreport data and conflate gender with biological sex. Sullivan’s just the sort of woman you’d want your daft teens to learn from, to dent their certainties, to make them think.
Research is being skewed, students are being misled, staff are self-censoring and scared
This is not how Bristol University’s LGBTQI+ staff network saw it, though. It reacted to the news of Sullivan’s talk in very much the same way Shelley Duvall reacted to the sight of Jack Nicholson with an axe in The Shining. Allowing Sullivan to speak to students about gender would, it said, cause ‘real and enduring harm’.
Professor Gordon composed a polite reply to the BU LGBTQI+ network explaining why he believed that students would benefit from the talk, but his manager (enter the villain) intervened. ‘Leave further communications on this with me,’ she said. Professor Gordon sent his reply anyway – ‘because academic freedom and freedom of speech are written into the university’s charter, because I’d organised the event and because my LGBTQ+ colleagues expected an answer,’ he told the Telegraph. And this was his apparent crime, for which he’s been suspended since 2024, unable to teach or to talk to students: he disagreed with management.
If only there was some official body academics could turn to when the brainwashed Stepford students start to circle or when management goes rogue. But hot on the heels of the sorry tale of Professor Gordon came news that the long-promised complaints system for academics anxious about being hounded or cancelled has itself been cancelled – or at least put on hold. The government wants more time to mull over the wisdom of the scheme, it says.
Some 370 academics have this week written to the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson explaining how urgently the scheme is needed. For all that people like to think that woke is over, or that the trans madness is dying down in the wake of the Scottish nurse Sandie Peggie’s victory, it’s still the case that a quarter of British academics say they fear they could be physically attacked for addressing subjects such as trans ideology. Research is being skewed, students are being misled, staff are self-censoring and scared.
And look at Professor Gordon: they’re right to be scared. It’s not like university management has anyone’s back. Quite the opposite. In the countryside where I grew up, gamekeepers would sometimes hang the corpses of foxes and crows along the top of a barbed-wire fence as a warning to other predators: don’t mess with the boss. A ‘game-keeper’s gibbet’, it was called. ‘Management’s gibbet’, we could call the line of academics strung up like Professor Gordon, twisting in the wind. Beware oh students, this is what awaits you in just a short while in the world of work: Karen-like line managers; HR women with that haunted turncoat look. Think: who here is really on your side?
‘The complaint system has been kicked into the long grass,’ a source told the Daily Telegraph. Well, it’s getting pretty crowded in Phillipson’s long grass. Also slowly decaying in the weeds is the guidance so many desperate teachers, doctors and academics have been waiting for, which will finally make it clear to businesses and all public bodies that as a result of last year’s excellent Supreme Court ruling, sex under the Equality Act means biological sex. Once the guidance is published, schools, hospitals and universities will be able to go about their normal business teaching pupils actual reality about biological sex and keeping men in dresses from barging into the single-sex places designed to keep women safe. Management will no longer feel free to use such tactics to out their enemies. Once the guidance is published…
Not at all in the long grass, but on the nicely paved path to quick implementation, is the government’s plan to employ a senior civil servant to ‘lead on trans equality’, with a special remit to look at the implications of the Supreme Court judgment, and to ‘ensure that we are able to take steps to improve outcomes for trans people in the UK’. The job advertisement posted by the Cabinet Office said the successful applicant would earn between £57,204 and £68,558 and lead on some of the government’s ‘top priorities’, which clearly don’t include any return to reality on the subject of sex, or the saving of young minds from gender madness.
The only glow I can see on the dark horizon is that there are a few excellent students who have managed to see though the ideological fog for themselves. Thea Sewell, a 20-year-old at Christ’s College, Cambridge, was ostracised by her peers just for owning and reading a gender critical book, Helen Joyce’s Trans. She has now set up the Cambridge Women’s Society so that like-minded young women can think and speak freely. My great hope – and it’s a long shot – is that a student or two at Bristol University might see the light too, and set up something similar. Perhaps they could even champion the cause of poor Professor Gordon, who has lost so much trying to help them.
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