What does free speech mean for women?

Are free speech absolutists ever on the side of feminists challenging sexism and misogyny? Or have they recently jumped on the anti-gender bandwagon purely for their own benefit?

When I think about ‘free speech’ I consider three things: who has it, who benefits most from it, and who are silenced.

Despite being a feminist and human rights campaigner for all my adult life, this past 20 years I have been targeted by baying mobs both in the UK and elsewhere, who accuse me of being a ‘bigot, ‘fascist’, ‘Hitler’, and various other outrageous slurs. Why? Because in 2004 I dared to write an article in a liberal newspaper in which I supported a rape crisis centre in its legal case against a trans identified male who was demanding the right to counsel the victims of sexual assault. I have been invited and then cancelled from speaking at events at which I was due to speak about rape and child sexual abuse, and prevented from lecturing students on violence against women. Feminist friends along with other progressives, such as the redoubtable Maryam Namazi, a brave activist who campaigns against religious fundamentalism and the effects of sharia law on women and girls, have also been cancelled and labeled as right wing.

The pernicious view that certain words and ideas are now considered ‘literal violence’ by those who should be invested in preventing actual violence is deeply troubling, particularly at a time when violence towards women is everywhere.

But when free speech absolutists are some of the most vocal in countering those that seek to shutdown words of dissent on issues such as transgender ideology, I am minded to make a distinction between feminists being silenced by so-called progressives, and the free speech warriors that can all too often ignore harm to women caused by misogyny that is openly and proudly promoted.

Me at York University being protested by a load of blue-fringed wazzocks, March 2022

The reason I am regularly de-platformed (invited, advertised, and then, humiliatingly, disinvited after a kerfuffle caused by Queer Isis) is extremely well documented. But for those not in the know, I am one of those feminists that do not think it is possible for a woman to have a penis, or a man to give birth to a baby. My extreme ‘transphobia’ is apparently responsible for thousands of suicides across campuses.

My (unpaid) work in universities is very important to me, because talking to students about my activism means they get insight into a very different version of feminism than the faux version currently peddled in elite institutions today. Since 2012 I have held honorary positions at universities: I was Visiting Journalist at Brunel University, Visiting Researcher at Lincoln, and since 2022, Visiting Research Fellow to the University of Reading’s School of Law.

In 2022 I felt compelled to lodge a formal complaint against the History Faculty at Oxford University when it came to my attention that a member of its academic staff decided that my work should contain content warnings. Two of my books, Straight Expectations: What Does It Mean to Be Gay Today? And Feminism For Women: the Real Route to Liberation, had been included in the reading list of a paper on the history of feminism in Britain. A subject access request confirmed that at least one academic teaching this paper was advised by the Faculty that my views are considered 'transphobic' and that a warning should therefore appear on my work - regardless of the content.

I was shocked that a leading university should treat a published author in this manner. Had the academic concerned agreed to this request, it would have been injurious to my global reputation as a researcher on issues relating to feminism, sexuality and male violence. I speak regularly at universities and other educational institutions in various countries around the world.

Such warnings contravene the University‘s freedom of speech policy and statutory commitment to uphold academic debate. Such warnings perpetuate the notion that not only is debate not welcome at Oxford university, but that those feminists critical of gender ideology are somehow dangerous and controversial. In fact, my understanding of sex and gender is enshrined in UK law.

I have lost count of the number of universities that have de-platformed me. For example, in 2019 I received an email from the president of the Durham University Union, inviting me to take part in a debate about prostitution laws. The date was fixed as 31 January 2020. I then, despite me chasing them for details, I was repeatedly blanked. I then heard that a colleague of mine was speaking in my place at the event. I had been disinvited, but no one had bothered to tell me.

In the hope that I would go quietly away the organisers then decided I was required to sign up to the ‘Durham University Respect and Inclusivity Agreement’ in order to be allowed on campus. I also was told that extra security measures would be in place; that the Union Society President would make contact with the student union Trans Society in advance of the meeting to listen to any ‘concerns’; and that a senior member of the EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) team would attend the event as an impartial observer on behalf of the University. I told the organisers where to shove their invitation.

Treating invited feminist speakers as though we are dangerous – in particular those who give their time to encourage critical thinking amongst the student population – results in graduates with narrow, closed minds and no ability to form opinions of their own.

However, I also have concerns about the motivations of the free speech absolutists. As a campaigner against male violence, I’ve always argued that the support for blanket free speech assumes a level playing field and ignores structural inequalities. In the US the majority of First Amendment (which right to freedom of speech without government interference or regulation) debates about pornography concern sexual violence against women. US universities often use examples of pornography in classes about the First Amendment, and whenever I have attended debates about whether or not porn is harmful and degrading to women, the counter arguments are always about how feminists curb free speech by speaking out against it.

But sexual violence and pornography violate free speech because it is based on a libertarian view of all players being equal, autonomous and free. This approach to free speech ignores the fact that for marginalised and disenfranchised communities, speech is already curtailed.

In the UK, organisations such as the Free Speech Union (FSU) are also caving in to pressure to defend pornographers. The American Civil Liberties Union, on which the FSU was modelled, has already done so when it fought the implementation of legislation intended to protect children from accessing porn online.

The vast majority of victims of so-called ‘cancel culture’ today are left wing feminists concerned with protecting our sex-based rights. Take Helen Steel who has campaigned publicly over an undercover policing scandal after it was discovered that police officers had infiltrated social and environmental justice campaigns and had deceived activist women into relationships.

But her track record mattered nothing to the activists that hounded her from an Anarchist Bookfair in 2017 because she was known to be against the proposed changed to the Gender Recognition Act that would allow men to self-identify as women.

Free speech exists, but only for certain people holding ‘acceptable’ ideas. Feminists speaking out against male violence, gender ideology and the harms of pornography are routinely silenced. What underpins the censoring of women like me is nothing short of misogyny.