It is now a thoughtcrime to criticise transgenderism

Professors are being blacklisted for questioning the trans ideology.

Professors are facing calls to be sacked for holding impure thoughts. No, not in the long-forgotten past. Not in Saudi Arabia or some other fundamentalist state or totalitarian regime. Here, in the UK, in 2018. The accused – all of whom are women – would once have been burned for heresy. Now their names are added to secret lists. Universities are warned that they are harbouring dangerous blasphemers.

The crime of these modern-day heretics is defending women’s rights. One, Professor Rosa Freedman, an expert in human-rights law at the University of Reading, has argued that biological males should not have access to women’s refuges. Another, Professor Kathleen Stock, from the University of Sussex, has questioned – merely questioned – whether the category of woman should be expanded to include men who identify as women. For this, they have been accused of spreading ‘hate speech’ and have been branded a threat to the safety of students.

According to a report in The Times, trans-activist Natacha Kennedy is behind a blacklist of academics who challenge the view that biological men can be women. The now infamous list, gathered together on a closed Facebook group, provides targets for transgender activists. Activists can then attack these targets’ jobs by organising student boycotts or filing complaints and hate-crime reports.

All the targets of Kennedy’s campaign are women. It is hard to see the crusade against them as anything other than misogynistic.

The naming and shaming of heretical academics is designed to silence critics of transgender ideology by dragging them, in the words of one activist, ‘over the fucking coals’.

Forcing academics to remain silent or say things they don’t believe to be true on threat of losing their livelihoods is McCarthyism writ large. Today, defending academic freedom means wrestling universities back from a social-justice agenda and restating the importance of ideas. Universities should be home to intellectual conflict rather than ideological conformity.

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