Staff at Edinburgh University are being “subjected to anti-trans rhetoric in the workplace”, academics have claimed.
As reported by the Times, lecturers and researchers have claimed that some staff who identify as trans and their allies are likely to be more marginalised on campus and their complaints to senior management “denied or ignored”. The report continues:
At least two trans employees have recently left the university, the Staff Pride Network claims. Scholars whose work relates to transgenderism in both science and social studies are said to be openly talking about quitting.
Katie Nicoll Baines, a geneticist who co-chairs Edinburgh’s Staff Pride Network, blamed gender-critical colleagues for what she called a “growing culture of hostility”.
She said: “I have worked at the University of Edinburgh since 2017 and in the past seven years have witnessed a growing culture of hostility towards trans and non-binary staff and students at this institution. Much of this hostility has been stoked by those who want to spread their ‘gender-critical’ ideology that is largely based on the premise that sex is binary and immutable, a premise I know to be incorrect, both scientifically [and] based on my academic expertise.
It comes amid a freedom of speech row that has embroiled the university in controversy for more than a year after protesters repeatedly sought to prevent the screening on campus of the gender-critical documentary Adult Human Female. The film was eventually shown last year.
In October, noisy and aggressive pickets appeared again, attempting to halt the launch of an academic essay collection entitled Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader, accusing its authors of reducing “trans people to an abstract anomaly”.
Among the contributors to the book was Kathleen Stock, the Scottish academic forced to quit her post at Sussex University after she was targeted by trans activists.
Vicious personal attacks have occurred on both sides of the debate. Rosie Russell, a transgender woman who formerly chaired the university Staff Pride Network, claimed to have been driven to quit by the tensions at Edinburgh in 2019. A former rector, Ann Henderson, is one of many figures to claim she had been hounded by claims of “transphobia”.
The controversy shows little sign of dampening down with the election to Henderson’s former post of Simon Fanshawe, a writer and broadcaster who helped to found Stonewall. Fanshawe has renounced the LGBT charity, labelling it a “propaganda machine”, and cut ties with it over its “extreme” position on trans rights.
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