Has the high tide of campus cancel culture finally receded for gender-critical academics? On paper, you might think so.
After all, a string of recent tribunal rulings — among them Forstater v CGD Europe — confirmed that belief in the immutable reality of biological sex is protected under the Equality Act 2010. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court likewise held in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers that under the same legislation the terms “sex”, “man” and “woman” refer to biology, not gender identity. That left universities little choice but to review their policies — many of which had, to the delight of trans activists, blurred the two — and bring them into line with this clarified legal reality. Most significantly, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act (HEFSA) came into force on 1 August, strengthening universities’ obligations and handing the Office for Students (OfS) new powers to enforce free speech and academic freedom duties.
And yet, the deeper problem lies not in statute but in culture. As was noted repeatedly during HEFSA’s passage through Parliament, the real measure of the problem has never been crude counts of cancelled events or sacked academics, but the lectures not given, projects never proposed, interventions never voiced. So while surveys have sketched the outlines of this problem, particularly around the clash between women’s sex-based rights and trans rights, the extent of the silence is unmeasurable, as are the rebukes never required once a culture of fear has taken hold. As Steven Lukes observed in his classic discussion of the “third face of power”, the most effective control is not coercion but the shaping of norms, so that people self-censor without needing to be told.
Formally, the OfS’s new guidance could scarcely be clearer. Academics must be free “to question and test received wisdom” and “to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions without placing themselves at risk of losing their jobs or privileges or of reducing their likelihood of promotion”. Paragraph 207 adds: “Academic staff should not be constrained or pressured in their teaching to endorse or reject particular value judgements.” On paper, then, the era of ritual obeisance to gender ideology should be over.
In practice, however, the picture is more complicated. Stonewall-influenced activists in universities, who for years have rolled out highly visible “performative EDI” initiatives — flying the Progress Pride flag, distributing rainbow lanyards, staging pronoun circles — are nothing if not persistent. The risk is that this culture will simply adapt, becoming softer, more carefully couched in the language of the law, while still making clear what staff are morally expected to do.
A case in point is University College London’s (UCL’s) Institute of Education, where the LGBTQ+ Advisory Group has circulated a Best Practices for Working with LGBTQ+ Students guide to all teaching staff. It speaks in the register of “we, the victims”, gently scolding “you, the staff” for the harm their everyday language supposedly inflicts. “Some of our common experiences can help you understand what it is like to live in our shoes and how you can help make the IOE a more welcoming place for us,” it quavers at one point, apparently forgetting the cardinal truth of identity politics: experience is intersectional and therefore never “common” or uniform.
Not that intellectual consistency is the point. To admit that would be to operate on the same terrain as social research, where claims can be challenged and evidence tested. All of that is overridden here by rhetorical appeals to the supposedly incontestable impulse to #BeKind whenever confronted with claims of vulnerability.
“To make us feel welcome and to make your classroom a place where we are truly included”, the guide proffers the type of mnemonic that wouldn’t look out of place in a primary school: ABC — A(sk yourself), B(e deliberately inclusive), C(heck constantly).
Under “Ask yourself”, lecturers are told to have students make badges with their pronouns and to rehearse explanations as to “why these matter”. This is particularly important, they are reminded, “to those who may be unfamiliar”.
The next step, “Be deliberately inclusive”, exhorts UCL’s community of scholars to add pronouns to email signatures, and to learn by rote conversational scripts such as “What are your pronouns?”, or, equally fatuous, “I use XXXXX pronouns, how about you?”
It’s difficult to imagine any of this going down particularly well with critically minded academics, since pronoun declaration is effectively a public endorsement of gender-identity theory, and the essentially contested claim that inner identity takes precedence over biological sex in policy and law. True, the guide stops just short of compulsion — which would be unlawful under the OfS framework — noting that sharing pronouns should be “encouraged, but always optional”. But tellingly, the rationale offered is not that the gender-critical objections are lawful and reasonable, but that “some students may not be comfortable coming out”. Acquiescence is always optional, in other words, but with approval only for those withholding out of concern for students still questioning their gender identity, not for those questioning gender ideology itself.
The dynamic is depressingly familiar. In evidence to the recent Sullivan Review — the government inquiry into academic freedom in the field of sex and gender — many staff described being “encouraged” by senior managers to declare pronouns as “political pressure”. One academic reported mandatory training that told staff “the importance of respecting everyone’s pronouns, believing people when they tell you who they are” as “a clear signal from the university that this is the only acceptable approach”. Others noted the same message being delivered through all-staff emails from senior management, making clear what positions were institutionally sanctioned. Another said that refusing to declare pronouns in meetings would have jeopardised her job.
All very troubling, of course. And yet, on paper, what does UCL’s guide amount to other than an invitation to “do the right thing”?
From etiquette the guide drifts into epistemology, directing staff to “question” any study in which sex is recorded as male or female: “This binary category does not acknowledge the existence of gender nonconforming, gender queer and agender students, as well as others who do not identify as either male or female. Such situations, if left unquestioned, contribute to the nonbinary community’s sense of identity erasure, and can harm trans students by not acknowledging their lived experiences and identities beyond a biological category.”
To be sure, “questioning” academic work is precisely in the spirit of the academy. But note the rhetorical register. Having spoken throughout in the confessional register of “we, the victims”, the guide presents harm as established fact. Against that backdrop, the injunction merely to “question” looks curiously weak — after all, what sort of depraved monster coolly weighs the evidence while surrounded by the wreckage of other people’s lives. Here “questioning” can only be read in its hardest sense: not an invitation to inquiry but a demand for repudiation, with silence itself construed as complicity in harm.
Far-fetched? Unfortunately not. Self-censorship was the single most common theme in the Sullivan Review, reinforced by examples of overt suppression. Academics recounted vexatious complaints that attributed words to them they had never used, dragging them through months-long investigations. Even where no sanction was imposed, the process became the punishment. Others described pressure from colleagues to sanitise reading lists or add trigger warnings, with one noting: “Trying to teach students about sex-differences is difficult when you cannot define sex accurately without complaint.” Research proposals were blocked by ethics panels for using the concept of sex at all. Beyond formal processes, there were accounts of bullying and ostracism: one academic was denounced on social media by an EDI officer, another frozen out of doctoral supervision, others targeted by student networks seeking their dismissal.
So what is to be done for lecturers who “opt” not to display their pronouns, or who see their work “questioned” and then suffer detriment? According to OfS guidance on its soon-to-be-implemented complaints scheme, staff must first exhaust their university’s own procedures before escalating to the regulator. No doubt this framework may help with some of the clearest incidents noted in the Sullivan Review — cancelled seminars, vexatious complaints, blocked research projects. But the deeper enabler of harassment, bullying and ostracism, and the self-censorship they produce, is the steady drip of documents like UCL’s.
By signalling what the morally “right” and “kind” answers are without ever breaching the letter of the law, it achieves the same chilling effect
Indeed, if this guide is anything to go by, the authors are already alert to what the new law demands, tailoring their language accordingly. It never issues a ban, never sets out sanctions, and so keeps to the right side of the OfS. That is precisely the point: by signalling what the morally “right” and “kind” answers are without ever breaching the letter of the law, it achieves the same chilling effect. No regulator can investigate lectures not given, projects never proposed, questions never asked by employees unwilling to risk being stigmatised as “unkind”.
In this sense, the legislation and its attendant regulatory architecture, while welcome, are only part of the battle. The next challenge is to confront the cultural practices that slip between the gaps. Academic freedom worthy of the name requires not just better complaints systems, but an environment in which competing views can be aired without fear or compulsion — and in which universities stop facilitating the promotion of any agenda that treats as “black-boxed” issues still unsettled and contested.
With this in mind, perhaps vice-chancellors could use a guide of their own, phrased in the same condescendingly earnest style as UCL’s: “To make us, the dissenters from prevailing orthodoxy, feel welcome, and to make your campuses places where we are truly included, here is an initial ABC: A(cademic freedom) B(eats) Self-(C)ensorship.”
