Edinburgh University gender row proves dangerous ideologues face a reckoning

For stating that biological sex is immutable and pointing out the importance of preserving women-only spaces, the Aberdeen-born academic became the target of a brutal campaign of misogynistic abuse.

Stock received anonymous death threats (which were taken seriously by police) but many of her tormenters were perfectly happy to act – while masked, of course – in public. She was harried and cat-called on a campus littered with posters and flyers demanding her dismissal.

Because she refused to accept the activists’ mantra that “trans women are women”, Stock was denounced as a dangerous transphobe whose very presence at the university posed a risk to the safety of students.

Eventually, Stock - now a successful writer – quit her job but if those who hounded her out thought they’d secured a great victory, they’re no longer celebrating it.

Last month, higher education regulator the Office for Students (OfS) issued a record-breaking £585,000 fine against the University of Sussex for its abject failure to protect Stock’s right to free speech.

Predictably, the Uni plans a legal challenge against this ruling. Good, for they will surely lose and, in the process, will further expose their inadequacy.

The OfS has no authority in Scotland. Should a Scottish university fail an academic in the way the University of Sussex failed Kathleen Stock, there is no statutory body with the power to issue any meaningful sanction.

For this fact, the management team at the University of Edinburgh should be profoundly grateful.

Over recent years, Edinburgh Uni has been the location for a series of disgraceful, violent protests against women who refuse to accept that anybody can change their sex.

Back in 2019, the feminist writer and activist Julie Bindel was physically attacked by a trans-identifying male as she left an event on campus.

Read more here: Supreme Court gender verdict on definition of a woman due - here’s what it will mean

More recently, attempts to screen a film – Adult Human Female – were repeatedly blocked by students and activist staff.

Last week, we learned more about the aggressively censorious culture that has been allowed to flourish at what has long been considered one of Scotland’s finest universities.

The makers of Adult Human Female – 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 – have launched a legal action against the University and College Union, accusing it of discrimination and harassment after office-bearers campaigned on social media to stop the documentary being screened.

The first two days of legal hearings were quite extraordinary. Two senior UCU figures – Dr Lena Wånggren, President of UCU Scotland between May 2021-May 2023, and Grant Buttars, branch president and communications officer of the union’s Edinburgh branch – defended their opposition to the film’s screening while conceding that neither had seen it.

Buttars is a default-setting crank, a self-styled “revolutionary” with authoritarian instincts. Usually, men like him may be ignored but his position within the UCU makes him a danger to academic freedom.

For example – last week, Buttars told the filmmakers’ lawyer, Naomi Cunningham, that nobody should be permitted in the workplace to say that trans women are not women. This is dystopian stuff.

But anyone who has paid attention to the erosion of free speech at Edinburgh University will not have been surprised to hear Buttars’ views.

Indeed, he has quite the track record when it comes to the issues of women’s rights and academic freedom.

When Kathleen Stock was hounded out of her job at the University of Sussex, Buttars – a trade unionist with responsibility for defending the interests of academic staff, remember – wrote a most extraordinary essay titled “When is it right for a union to support dismissal?”.

Buttars’s argument – published on the website of the hard-left group Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (rs21) – was that Stock, had she been a member of the UCU at the time she left Sussex Uni, would have deserved no support because of her views on sex and gender.

Friends who work at Edinburgh University tell me of a culture of fear among staff when it comes to discussing matters of biological reality. None of what I’ve heard surprises me.

Managers at the uni have, at best, turned a blind eye to deeply disturbing attacks on the integrity of staff who decline to sign up to the ever-shifting tenets of gender ideology. At worst, senior academics have been complicit in campaigns against so called “gender critical” feminists. The masked students who screamed abuse and threats in the faces of women attending attempted showings of Adult Human Female at Edinburgh University did so with the tacit approval of a number of lecturers and research staff, all of whom should be ashamed.

The tide is turning on the issue of gender identity. The years of “no debate” – as demanded by activists groups such as Stonewall – are over, brought to an end by the emergence of real world consequences for organisations that punished workers who refused to accept people could magically change their biological sex.

A number of people – predominantly women because it is women who are harmed by the misogyny that saturates gender ideology – have won high-profile tribunal cases against employers who sacked or disciplined them for their insistence that biological sex is real and important.

It will be some time until a decision in the case of the makers of Adult Human Female against the University and College Union is made. I hope to see common sense and fairness prevail.

For years, now, activists have bullied and abused women who dare speak up about the harms caused by gender ideology. Now, these dangerous ideologues face a reckoning. They deserve nothing but the same level of support they offered to the women whose lives they tried so hard to destroy.