The LGBT charity Stonewall has a Diversity Champions programme, which UK universities are rushing to associate themselves with, thereby demonstrating their commitment to inclusivity and the battle against transphobia. Hidden away near the bottom of the Sunday Times letters page today, a large number of academics - mostly women - express their concerns:
As academics we are writing to register our disquiet over the inappropriately close relationship between the LGBT charity Stonewall and UK universities, via the Stonewall Diversity Champions programme.
The membership requirements of this programme are in tension with academic freedom. For instance, university members must instigate specialist trans policies, in addition to general equality policies, which outlaw “transphobic” teaching and research material but offer no clear definition of what would count as such.
Alongside Stonewall’s definition of transphobia as including any “denial/refusal to accept . . . gender identity”, this leaves academics unable to question the contested notion of “gender identity” without fear of sanction.
Equally, Stonewall’s guidance advises against inviting any speaker to a university who would deny “that trans people are the gender they say they are”. This is a further unacceptable restriction upon free academic debate.
The programme requires staff to undergo “trans awareness training”, during which tendentious and anti-scientific claims are presented to academics as objective fact, without the opportunity for scrutiny: for instance, that “gender is how people interpret and view themselves” and that “1 in 100 are born with an intersex trait”. In our teaching, we’re exhorted to “ask the pronouns” of students. Yet many of us would deny that pronouns refer to an inner feeling of gender identity, and wish to say so.
There are other areas that some of us wish to explore and question, such as the ramifications of Stonewall’s new doctrine that female-attracted trans women, with penises, are “lesbians”; an “affirmation model” for gender-questioning children; and the social changes caused by opening up women-only spaces to self-identified women. It is imperative to interrogate the radical shifts in thinking that all this implies, but we feel inhibited from doing so in the intimidating atmosphere produced by Stonewall’s influence.
We therefore urge Stonewall to clarify that it fully supports academic freedom of thought. Failing this, we ask universities to sever their links with this organisation altogether.
Female-attracted trans women, with penises, are “lesbians”?? Nice work if you can get it.
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