The best way to win people over to your beliefs is by silencing your critics, right?

Of course not. For ages that suggestion has proved too ridiculous to take seriously. Even Aristotle identified it as a telltale sign of tyranny.

Hence the whopping ?585,000 fine imposed on the University of Sussex – reportedly reduced from an even higher sum – for failing to “to uphold freedom of speech and academic freedom”. The Office for Students objected to university guidelines requiring course materials to “positively represent trans people”, adding that transphobic “propaganda” would “not be tolerated”.

Clearly, the trans debate offers a vital case study for our ongoing disputes about free speech versus no platforming. Trans people remain among the most vulnerable in society, and British and European lawmakers have rightly won praise for punishing violence and discrimination against them. Violence against trans people is as much verbal as it is physical, with baiting and taunting more than sufficient to inflict a living hell. University administrators have laudably adopted policies aimed at fighting anti-trans prejudice and supporting trans staff and students.

成人VR视频

But while the emotional and societal struggles experienced by trans people daily form an essential pillar of the current controversies, this does not mean theories of trans identity are done and dusted. Even theories highly sympathetic to trans people still entail theoretical complexities.

Moreover, most mainstream scholars who question psychological or cultural theories of trans identity are neither “transphobic” nor pushers of “propaganda”. Overwhelmingly, they support states’ and universities’ duties to prevent and punish anti-trans violence or discrimination. While they might doubt the ethics of some clinical practices that have been offered to young people questioning their identities, they accept informed adult transition under prudent professional supervision.

成人VR视频

Culturally “essentialist” models, whereby biology fundamentally dictates gender, are widely dismissed. Instead, social constructionist views of gender are widely endorsed, drawing on the observation that there are endless variations in familial and social gender roles across societies and throughout history.

Being an LGBTQ+ person, I endorse this view, too. Yet any academic who claims to have adopted it without studying at least some of the more perspicuous challenges brought against it – whether biological, essentialist or merely questioning – is either flatly lying or embarrassingly superficial. And, theoretical squabbles aside, it is the height of ethical supremacism to dismiss as sheer ignorance everyday concerns about, say, changing rooms or lavatories.

Indeed, far from overcoming anti-trans attitudes, that kind of condescension ultimately entrenches them. This is perhaps the most salient lesson that higher education still struggles to learn.

In 2017, the far-right pundit Milo Yiannopoloulos suddenly shot to fame, spreading his ideas far and wide, not because of any electrifying philosophical depth but thanks to staff and student efforts at Berkeley to stop him spreading his ideas far and wide. This triggered a no platforming crusade obviously designed to attract media attention (and, incidentally, attracted rookie president to withhold funding from a university over free speech issues). In a piece I wrote for the at that time, I quoted one spectator of the campus protests, who revelled about Milo: “Sounds like someone I should get to know.” Turning your opponents into free speech martyrs is rarely wise or effective.

成人VR视频

Another pillar of social constructionism is that discourses of gender do not roll out in a scholarly space of ideological objectivity or neutrality. Heteronormative culture issues from age-old hierarchies of power, meaning that trans activists inevitably enter an arena stacked against them. On that view, universities become duty-bound to level the playing field.

The problem is that all major social controversies arise within contexts of uneven power, whether they involve poverty, racism, militarism, xenophobia, neo-colonialism, environmentalism, animal rights, or anything else. To strategically exclude the more powerful voices, even for the best of motives, would cast doubt on whether we need social sciences at all. For any given problem, we would only need to identify the disempowered view and adopt it as truth, while banning the rest.

Yes, I know I am caricaturing no platforming here as a slippery slope. However, the appeal to “power dynamics” offers no obvious stopping point, aside from the sheer whim of whatever one portion of the academic community decides that some other portion should or should not be hearing. Of course we should rigorously scrutinise ideas backed by powerful interests, but it hardly follows that they are so manifestly false that any scrutiny of the alternatives would violate scholarly standards.

If we look to other civil rights struggles around race, colonialism, women’s rights or lesbian and gay rights, there is no denying that gains were made in higher education through engagement, not censorship. Defenders of the Sussex policy will ask whether even the grossest transphobia should enjoy access to campus forums; similar questions arise about racists, homophobes, neo-Nazis and the like. But while we certainly need a closer look at the justifiable limits of speech, the problem is not so complex for present purposes.

成人VR视频

Most Western democracies punish certain forms of extreme speech, and universities must adhere to the law. The bigger problem is that in too many universities we find instances of no platforming entirely legal speech. And if we care about social injustice, such anti-intellectualism offers a dubious remedy.

When the next flashpoint comes around, my recommendation to universities would be to avoid the hefty fine and spend the money instead on staging debates on some of the serious issues of our era – which our universities have become prominent, above all, for avoiding.

成人VR视频

?is professor of law and humanities at?Queen Mary University of London. His book Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left (The MIT Press) will appear in April.