Helen Joyce has been invited to talk at Gonville & Caius College next week. This has provoked the usual outbreak of virtue signalling and the following response from "college LGBTQI+ officers". It is pretty much the full bingo card. Warning: contains complex mental gymnastics.
Dear all,
It has come to our attention that Gonville and Caius college, and the Divinity faculty, are hosting a speaker event on the 25th of October platforming Helen Joyce. This event has also been promoted by the Fac Bio to natural sciences, medic and vet med students. The title of the event is ‘Criticising gender-identity ideology: what happens when speech is silenced.’
Helen Joyce is a ‘gender critical’ activist, whose work largely focuses around anti-trans rhetoric and trans-exclusionary radical feminism. “Gender identity ideology” is frequently used as a dog-whistle for transphobic sentiment, cloaked in the language of free speech and scientific inquiry. It goes without saying that this kind of rhetoric is fundamentally against what we as LGBT officers stand for, and we are unanimously disgusted by the platforming of such views by Caius and the promotion of the event by the various faculties. Transgender identities should not be put forward as a subject for debate, and their existence is not an “ideology.”
Colleges, and the wider university, have a duty of care to their students, no matter their gender identity. By inviting speakers with inflammatory and bigoted views to speak, the staff involved are allowing transphobia to proliferate within the university, lending it a level of credibility, and crucially, potentially putting transgender students in harms’ way. Transgender people are an at-risk minority group – according to the Stonewall School Report 2017:
92% of trans young people have thought about taking their own life;
84% of trans young people have self-harmed; and
45% of trans young people have tried to take their own life.
Further to this, just days before the event was announced, the Home Office published the past years’ statistics on hate crimes in the UK, which revealed that transphobic hate crime has increased by 56% from last year, with 4,355 reports being made in England and Wales. In light of these statistics, the platforming of a speaker with these transphobic views takes on a particularly alarming salience.
Freedom of speech, of course, is protected in law; Helen Joyce has the right to speak as she pleases. The core of the issue we take is with the senior staff and fellows who have chosen to platform this speaker, which we consider a violation of their duty of care. To invite a speaker whose publicly expressed views include advocating “reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition” both legitimises active transphobia and also alienates and hurts transgender individuals on a personal and emotional level. Furthermore, the fact that this has been promoted to medical students, who will inevitably treat transgender patients in their future careers, presents a further risk to trans individuals not just in the university, but in the wider community, with the potential for wide-reaching and long-lasting harm.
This is not an attempt to silence free speech, but rather, us exercising our own right to that speech in the face of an event which is, in our view, not only irresponsible but actively harmful and cruel to the transgender students at Cambridge. Trans people deserve a university experience as comfortable, safe, and joyful as everyone else, and the University should take an active role in ensuring that – a role that they have, on this occasion, failed to fulfil. It is for these reasons that we implore Gonville and Caius to reconsider their decision to platform Joyce.
If any individual feels unsafe, upset or troubled by this event, please talk to someone – your college LGBT officer, an SU representative, a college or university counsellor, or a charity helpline. We have attached some resources at the end of this letter.
With love and solidarity,
The college LGBT officers