Universities are entitled to cancel events involving gender critical speakers because such talks could “contaminate student life for hundreds if not thousands of people” – even if they do not attend the talk, a controversial new report by UK legal scholars argues.
Calling for UK universities to balance their duties between protecting free speech and preventing discrimination, a study by Daragh Murray and Emily Jones, both senior lecturers at the University of Essex’s School of Law and Human Rights, and barrister David Renton, from Garden Court Chambers, states that neither duty “overrides the other”, but institutions should be wary of “distress” caused to trans students by events on campus.
Painting a hypothetical situation in which a “module or degree course in trans issues was housed in a particular department, and the university then insisted on using the same premises to host a ‘gender critical’ event,” the report states that “distress would be felt in the contamination of a part of the university which holds a particular emotional value to certain staff and students.”
