Senior managers at UK universities have ‘lost the plot’ when it comes to talking about sex and gender and they need to start acting like grown-ups to encourage healthy academic cultures with diversity of views.
That was the verdict given at a recent CAN-SG webinar entitled: ‘Are academics allowed to talk about sex?’ (28 October 2025).
Experts in medicine, sociology, psychology, and philosophy warned that many academic institutions operated under ‘Stalinist’ regimes that imposed obstacles and, worse — career threatening penalties — on sex and gender researchers. This not only undermined academic freedom but the credibility of institutions concerned.
People should be allowed to talk in straightforward terms.
“What’s really pernicious is that the hypothesis that women are adult human females and the similar hypothesis that men are adult human males is, by normal scientific standards, the default hypothesis,” said Dr Daniel Kodsi, a visiting scholar at New York University and past lecturer in philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford.
“People should be allowed to talk in straightforward accepted terms. Yet academics are not able, in any prominent philosophy journal that I know of, to pen a very straightforward defence of what is this very straightforward hypothesis – that to be a man is to be an adult human male, to be a boy is to be a young human male. To be a girl is to be a young human female, and to be a woman is to be an adult human female.”
Dr Kodsi, who is also Editor-in-chief at The Philosophers’ Magazine, said: “What we have is a dramatic inversion of any natural default.
“The fact that we need to have kind of a panel like this to prop up the idea that it should be permissible to assert sex realist ideas is an illustration of how damaging the situation really is.”
Younger academics too afraid to speak
Dr David Pilgrim, a clinical psychologist, medical sociologist and author as well as Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Southampton, told the webinar it was frightening to see the impact of gender ideology on university culture.
“Younger academics, particularly mid-career academics, are just too scared to speak. But younger academics should have the freedom to speak without fear,” he said.
Universities had a duty of care to find and protect a way to allow people to “disagree civilly”, he said. But instead, they had been distracted into adopting a gender ideology approach by equality diversity and inclusion (EDI) departments or a drive to appeal to young customers through virtue signalling — factors which had “distorted their priorities”.
Stalinist mentality
Dr Alice Sullivan, Professor of Sociology at the UCL Social Research Institute, and author of the government-commissioned review of data, statistics and research on sex and gender, said universities were strangle held by policies that worked counter to academic freedom.
“I think for universities in particular, we need to restore a degree of autonomy to academics,” she said. “We’ve really tied people up in all of this bureaucracy. And it’s not just EDI committees, it’s the massive growth of ethics committees, for example, the kind of hoops that people have to jump through in order to organise a debate. And it’s this kind of sort of Stalinist mentality that we have in universities now, where senior leadership teams want to control everything.”
Such arrangements provided activists with levers to “cause a lot of damage”, she added.
Cancellation for challenging activist agenda
Dr Lisa Littman, a US physician researcher who conducts research about gender dysphoria, desistance, and detransition, described how she was cancelled and lost her employment after publishing research findings that activists labelled as ‘transphobic’.
Her research findings, which supported a hypothesis that gender dysphoria may be a new presentation linked to maladaptive coping mechanisms and social influences, prompted social media protests and further post-publication review (despite having already gone through peer review). One employer chose not to renew her yearly contract, citing that it needed to remain neutral on gender. A second employer asked her to stop attending faculty meetings due to the risk it would upset colleagues, before also ending her employment contract.
Littman said she believed her research challenged the activist narrative and that the consequences she faced were designed to discourage other gender critical research.
Sullivan Review
The review conducted by Dr Sullivan not only recommended that public bodies should collect distinct data on both sex and gender identity to ensure accuracy of nationally held data but, in a second strand of research, it examined the barriers that academics have faced when conducting and reporting research on sex and gender.
This revealed that gender critical academics had faced extreme abuse and harassment that had had taken a real toll on their careers and on their mental health. After observing the abuse and harassment dealt to fellow academics Kathleen stock and Joe Phoenix, others have kept quiet, not wanting to expose themselves to similar treatment. In contrast, her research found no examples of trans affirmative events facing even peaceful protests.
Ironically, when recently presenting her review findings at the University of Bristol recently, Dr Sullivan said it was heavily disrupted by protests. “Activists were scaling the walls and banging on the windows. They let off fire alarms, and we had to go to a higher floor of the building so that they couldn’t actually climb up and get to a higher level lecture theatre. I was told by security that there was a substantial police presence outside and that during the course of my lecture, mounted police were called.”
“We have many, many concrete examples of for gender critical speakers [requiring] extra security but there were no concrete examples given of actual events that had to have extra security from the anti-gender critical side,” she said.
Solutions
Experts offered some solutions for how to reverse the damaging culture within universities.
Dr Sullivan said: “There needs to be consequences, both from the university and if appropriate, from the police. Whether students are being disruptive or staff mounting campaigns of harassment against colleagues, there should be consequences.
“Institutional neutrality must be restored in order to regain public trust. We’ve all seen what’s been going on in the US with Trump and the kind of backlash universities have, to some degree, brought on themselves by not maintaining their impartiality and their integrity. I think it’s vital that they do a bit of soul searching.”
Dr Pilgrim agreed:
“Managers of universities must start acting like grown-ups. People who run universities need to be reflective about the fix they’ve got themselves into. One thing they need to do is to move away from diversity of people to diversity of viewpoint. It’s so fundamental…you should focus on people’s capacity to have diverse viewpoints in a protected way, with rules that govern it, so that people are not frightened to speak.”
Dr Littman suggested modelling good behaviour would be key. “Communicating with compassion and clarity” would be important in winning the argument, she said, as well as targeting the “vast middle ground of individuals that have not been exposed to radical extremes”.
There is also a need to resist the sentimental framing of the debate by those on the gender affirming side, suggested Dr Kodsi. “There’s a kind of rhetorical mode into which transactivists often slip, which seems to do a lot of the heavy lifting, which is sort of kitschy, sentimental, maudlin, along the lines of ‘you don’t you care about this poor, vulnerable community’. And I think that, in general, on a number of these cultural war issues, we need to have a bit more resistance to the rhetorical appeal of those sentimentalist modes of rhetoric – a recognitional capacity for what’s really just sort of kitsch, rather than argument.”
But fundamentally, universities need to restore autonomy to academics, said Sullivan:
“Universities must prioritise the pursuit of truth, and then, more specifically, they really need to acknowledge the problem. They spent a long time pretending there is no problem. They need to learn from past mistakes, tackle freedom, restrict harassment, and review the EDI structures, policy and networks, which have actually organised harassment and discrimination within academia, contrary to what we might think EDI is for. They need to reconsider some of the external policy schemes they’re signed up to, like Stonewall and Athena SWAN, cut down bureaucracy and restore academic autonomy.”
Prof. Alice Sullivan
Panel’s recommendations for universities:
- Prioritise the pursuit of truth
- Acknowledge cultural problems
- Restore academic autonomy and neutrality
- Review the EDI structures, policy and networks
- Reconsider some external policy schemes such as Stonewall and Athena SWAN
- Introduce consequences for disruptive activism and harassment
Listen her to webinar podcast.