Hundreds of children as young as 14 are being pressured to declare their gender pronouns at the start of every round of the Oxford Schools’ Debating Competition, run by the Oxford Union.
This is the biggest school-level competition in the world for what’s known as ‘British Parliamentary debating’ – which uses the format of the UK House of Commons, but is now globally popular. It involves more than 350 schools and thousands of students aged 14-18. All are told on the competition’s website:
We operate a gender pronoun policy at Oxford Schools’. At the start of each debate, the judge will ask each speaker to introduce themselves with their name and their gender pronoun (such as he/she/they etc), or they may declare no preference.
This is intended to stop people being misgendered, and prepares students for other competitions and university debating, where such policy is standard. Just as people like to be called by their correct name, so they should be called by the pronoun they feel most comfortable with.
However, student testimonies suggest that in practice, participants are not given the choice to “declare no preference”. Instead, each speaker is asked in turn to stand and announce their pronouns – turning a supposedly optional declaration into a performative ritual, and the debating chamber into a place where, ironically enough, open disagreement is not permitted.
In fact, the policy has been in place for seven years, but free speech advocates say its chilling effect is increasingly unmistakable now that it risks pre-empting the very debates students may be about to have.
As FSU Director Lord Young says: “What if the children are debating whether sex is an immutable biological reality or a social construct assigned at birth? By forcing them to declare their pronouns – a tacit endorsement of the view that people can change sex – the organisers are aligning the competition with one side of a live and deeply contested public debate.
“This is particularly egregious given that the organiser is the Oxford Union, a society founded to promote free and open inquiry. The FSU will be writing to the Oxford Union, which is a registered charity, asking them to uphold their own traditions and instruct the organisers to stop enforcing ideological conformity.”
According to Helen Joyce, Director of Advocacy at the human rights group Sex Matters, the policy is “indoctrination, pure and simple”.
“It’s outrageous that schoolchildren are being made to pay lip service to gender identity beliefs in order to participate in a debate,” she says. “It’s deeply concerning that such a requirement is being used to teach children the fringe idea that everyone has a gender identity, before they’ve even been taught to think critically.”
Although the Oxford Union is a private society, its Schools’ Competition falls under the Equality Act 2010, which protects individuals from discrimination on the grounds of philosophical belief. The fact that this includes the belief that sex is binary and immutable was established by Forstater v CGD Europe (2021). In other words, the competition’s pronoun policy may be falling foul of the Act by indirectly discriminating against gender-critical young people.
Founded in 1823, the Oxford Union is run by students independently of the university and over the years has hosted such prominent figures as Winston Churchill, Queen Elizabeth II, Albert Einstein and the Dalai Lama. It describes itself as “the most prestigious debating society in the world”, and one whose “roots lie in free speech”. For more than two centuries, it has been renowned for its commitment to open inquiry and the robust exchange of ideas.
On this particular exchange of ideas, however, it declined to comment.
