How much more do we have to tolerate?
Every few months it crawls out of the woodwork. A new “discussion”. A “debate”. A “conversation about gender”. A student society proclaiming the “right to offend”. The framing changes, the hosts rotate, the posters get redesigned, but the premise remains the same: that our lives are open for public adjudication.
It is exhausting. Not because the arguments against us are new or especially nuanced. What’s exhausting is the message beneath it all: your dignity is conditional. Sit down and let us vote on it again.
Let’s be clear from the outset: trans dignity is not up for referendum. There is a difference between arguing policy and putting people on trial. Repeatedly dragging trans people onto a stage — metaphorically or literally — and publicly litigating whether we are dangerous, deluded, confused, or predatory is not intellectual inquiry. Framing a university event around the premise of “transgenderism” and the “right to offend” is not debate. It is degradation masquerading as discourse.
To insist that trans people materialised in the last decade requires a remarkable combination of arrogance and historical illiteracy. Human beings have resisted rigid gender roles as long as gender roles have existed; they have done so in their own language since the 1950s, the early twentieth century, the medieval period, antiquity, and long before that. The claim that ‘transgenderism’ is some modern, ideological contagion designed to corrupt today’s youth, therefore, is not bold or subversive. It is ahistorical.
And then comes the inevitable shield: free speech.
As though words exist in a vacuum, or float around in a separate plane of reality. As though rhetoric has never once in human history translated into harassment, exclusion, policy, or violence. We are told it’s just discourse. Just voicing ideas. That this is intellectual rigour, or a “legitimate academic pursuit”.
And then we are told not to take it personally.
There is something uniquely dehumanising about watching people debate whether you should exist comfortably in the world. Have any of these panellists stopped, even for a brief moment, to consider what it feels like to move through daily life knowing your basic humanity is treated as provisional? To brace yourself for the next event, the next speaker, the next op-ed dissecting whether people like you are considered ‘legitimate’? Have you all no sense of decency, at long last?
We live here. We work here. We study here. We do not experience these events as abstract exercises. We walk past the posters, see the event promotions, watch the rhetoric recycled through comment sections and group chats. And every time it happens, it lands in the same way: You are contestable. You are negotiable.
It seeps into everything. The simple act of walking into a bathroom becomes a calculation. The decision to speak in a seminar becomes a risk assessment. You start scanning rooms. You start bracing yourself. It’s exasperating in a way that burrows deep into your bones.
To be clear, no one is asking for disagreement to be illegal. This isn’t a call for ideological conformity. Universities should absolutely be places where difficult policy questions are discussed. We are simply asking not to be treated as a thought experiment, or labelled with vile caricatures about who we are and what we supposedly threaten under the guise of academic debate.
If the goal were genuinely intellectual debate, the structure would reflect that. Instead, what we get is a talk built around a speaker whose public writing repeatedly questions the legitimacy of trans identity, with no trans speakers or advocates present to respond. Attendance itself is restricted to ticket holders who must first join the society. The premise, the framing, and the promotional material have already done the editorialising. Calling this a neutral debate does not make it one.
If your commitment to freedom requires a steady supply of marginalised people to place under interrogation, then maybe it’s not freedom you’re defending. Maybe it’s hierarchy.
And the damage does not stop with us. When womanhood is reduced to mere anatomy, chromosomes, or reproductive function, every woman becomes suspect. Too tall. Too muscular. Too hairy. Too flat. Too masculine. We have already seen cis women harassed in public toilets because they did not look feminine enough. People comment on cis female athletes and claim they can “tell they were secretly always a man”. This is the inevitable logic of trans-exclusionary ideology: protection through suspicion, safety through surveillance. It disciplines women.
Most of us are not trying to win culture wars. We are just trying to finish our degrees. Get jobs. Buy groceries. Go to the pub. Have normal, unremarkable lives.
We are so fucking tired of being someone else’s “right to offend”.
E.C.