It was another event in a series of recent no-platforming incidents a conservative former-minister was banned from speaking just half-an-hour before she was due to begin, after objections from an international gender organization.
This is why Todd’s planned visit was cancelled the students branded her ‘transphobic’. The main worry is that men may take advantage of the situation to gain access to women-only domains, such as women's toilets.
The latest speaker to be rejected was Selina Todd, Professor of Modern History and involved in the feminist organization Woman’s Place UK, which is opposing proposed legislation to allow people to identify as men or women without medical substantiation. This leading university is regularly discredited on account of students refusing to allow ‘controversial’ speakers, a practice known as no-platforming. It was just a small article in the newspaper on 9 March 2020: the British Minister for Education warned the University of Oxford that it must protect freedom of speech. How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. New York, Penguin Press, 2018 “What is new today is the premise that students are fragile,” write Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in “The Coddling of the American Mind.” “Even those who are not fragile themselves often believe that others are in danger and therefore need protection.” The debate narrows as everyone censors others as well as themselves.Book Review: Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. The Coddling of the American Mind. Members of what psychologist Jean Twenge calls “iGen” (born after 1995) moved from challenging controversial speakers to hounding even very liberal members of their own communities who wrote or said something that was deemed offensive. They lobbied for “safe spaces” where they could avoid being exposed to uncomfortable ideas. Some demanded that anything “triggering” be removed entirely from the curriculum so that no one might feel traumatized.
Students began demanding “trigger warnings” for certain material in their classes. But something changed about five years ago. For most of the past few decades, college students have been proponents of free speech, despite occasional bouts of protest and indignation.
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