John Armstrong

The International Olympic Committee looks set to ban males who identify as trans from all female sports after a review of the scientific evidence. World Athletics announced a similar ban way back in March 2023, but athletics is only one of the constellation of sports that make up the summer and winter Olympics. To say we should not presume male advantage in a sport unless we have specific data for that sport is like arguing that just because most of the apples in a tree have fallen to the ground, we shouldn’t presume the remaining apples are also subject to gravity The news follows a presentation last week by Dr Jane Thornton, the IOC’s medical chief, which described the many physical advantages retained by males undergoing testosterone suppression.

Last month, in apparent defiance of the Supreme Court, the Council of the London Mathematical Society published a new Statement of Commitment to Trans Inclusion which states: ‘The LMS provides gender-neutral toilets and supports the use of facilities that align with a person’s affirmed identity.’ Many organisations have been slow to update their policies to reflect the Supreme Court’s April judgement that, for the purposes of the Equality Act, sex means biological sex. However, the LMS have gone one further. They have chosen to write their first ever trans policy after the judgement and this policy appears to openly flout the Court’s ruling.

According to research commissioned by Stonewall, clerics are conducting one LGBTQ+ exorcism for every two religious wedding ceremony they perform. This shocking finding is the logical conclusion of Stonewall’s ‘Culture Wars and Hate’ survey which found that 10 per cent of LGBTQ+ people in the UK have experienced an exorcism which aimed to change their gender or sexual orientation. At first glance, this may seem to contradict the government’s National LGBT Survey which found in 2017 that only 2 per cent of LGBT people had undergone conversion practices. Perhaps there has been a recent boom in exorcisms? Stonewall’s full data set finds that that 8.2 per cent of LGBTQ+ people in the UK have experienced an exorcism in the last five years alone. Given there are 1.

Dr Hilary Cass’s long-awaited review into healthcare for transgender children and young people was released this week. Her verdict was damning, and was delivered with Swiftian understatement: ‘The adoption of a medical treatment with uncertain risks, based on an unpublished trial that did not demonstrate clear benefit, is a departure from normal clinical practice.’ But perhaps even more shocking was this quote: ‘There is minimal research evidence to inform questions regarding likely trajectories and outcomes particularly in the context of: a) physical treatments (e.g. hormone blockers to suppress the onset of puberty); b) social transition (where a child presents to other people as their experienced gender e.g.

Last week the King’s College London LGBTQ staff network, called Proudly King’s, demonstrated its intellectual level and its view of women by tweeting a picture of a woman holding a banner saying ‘TERF FART (Feminist Appropriating Radical Transphobes)’.  If you thought that endorsing this kind of behaviour would make you less likely to be promoted to professor, you might be surprised to see the King’s academic promotion criteria.  To apply for promotion to Reader or Professor, academics at King’s must write five pages on research, teaching and administration and one further page devoted to ‘Inclusion and Support’.

In March, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) – an independent body which oversees standards and quality in UK universities – released new guidance on curriculum design in mathematics. This guidance states: ‘Values of EDI [Equality Diversity and Inclusion] should permeate the curriculum and every aspect of the learning experience.’ At least on the face of it, this guidance seems odd. University lecturers are not teaching racist courses on calculus or sexist proofs of the prime number theorem. There is, therefore, no need for the QAA to tell them that they shouldn’t do this. Can saying 2+2=4 be racist? Astonishingly, there is a hardcore of postmodernists who would say that it can.

Why has the Royal Society of Chemistry published a 37 page opinion piece entitled 'Academic free speech or right-wing grievance?' in their new journal Digital Discovery? Digital Discovery publishes 'theoretical and experimental research at the intersection of chemistry, materials science and biotechnology' focusing on 'the development and application of machine learning'. So it is a little surprising for them to publish a piece that 'argues that those who wish to have an honest debate about the limits around freedom of speech need to engage that conversation in a manner that avoids resonance with the language of White (heterosexual, cisgender male) supremacy, lest their arguments provide intellectual cover to those who would attack historically marginalised communities'.

This week it was revealed in the Telegraph that World Athletics is engaged in a confidential consultation with national governing bodies over the question of whether transwomen should be allowed to compete in the female category.   World Athletics’ current rules allow males to compete in the female category if their legal sex is female and they have held their serum testosterone levels below 5 nMol/l for 12 months. Their ‘preferred option’ in the consultation is to change the acceptable testosterone level to 2.5 nMol/l for 24 months.

The London School of Economics (LSE) shocked their student union this week by informing them that the university is disaffiliating from Stonewall. The union responded with horror, demanding a consultation before reversing ‘the decision to disaffiliate’. The SU has also demanded the establishment of a ‘gender expression fund to pay for items necessary to support transition’ (the equivalent fund at UCL helps transwomen purchase essentials such as makeup) and a ‘designated queer space on campus.

We have become used to the erosion of academic freedom in the humanities and social sciences. It is no longer surprising to find that a Gender Studies department holds the institutional view that it is racist and colonialist to say that sex is binary, or promotes a student essay which fantasises about holding a knife to the throat of gender-critical women.   But attacks on academic freedom are not restricted to gender studies and anthropology departments anymore. Academics in all fields are now under pressure to conform to fashionable theories on gender and race. Indeed, science-focused institutions can, paradoxically, be especially susceptible to this, because of their lack of expertise when it comes to social issues.