ROBERT HARDMAN recounts how cancel culture was cancelled in Oxford

They have a new bicentenary slogan on the Oxford Union Society’s literature this year: ‘Celebrating 200 years of free speech’. 

Last night, a vociferous alliance from across the ‘trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming and intersex’ community was doing its best to draw a line under that long and noble tradition by attempting to silence a middle-aged woman who has had the temerity to argue that a person with a penis is not a biological woman.

Yet despite repeated attempts to curtail the appearance of Professor Kathleen Stock in the society’s famous debating chamber – including a sit-down protester with a tube of glue – it was cancel culture which was ultimately cancelled.

Despite a 20-minute delay, the weary but unflappable 51-year-old academic, author, lesbian feminist and mother-of-two finished her talk as planned, above a chorus of abusive chanting in the street outside.

Amid so much heat and noise, Professor Stock’s central thesis could be summed as follows: sorry, folks but biological reality trumps one’s inner feelings.

As she explained to a packed house – many of whom gave her a standing ovation at the beginning and the end: ‘You can go about your life pretending for a while but ultimately reality will hit you in the face.’

Turning to the (male) president of the Oxford Union, she added: ‘I can think of myself as a man all I like but ultimately I’m not going to arm wrestle you very successfully’

It was a rare note of levity during an evening in which Professor Stock repeatedly emphasised that her battle has always been with the idea of gender self-identification, not with transgender people themselves. ‘We can disagree reasonably and still be friends,’ she urged them.

Naïve, perhaps, but hardly the words of a war criminal.

The society’s invitation to Professor Stock had been billed as some sort of Waterloo of the zeitgeist. 

Over-excited voices on both sides of the transgender divide had even likened this to the Oxford Union’s ‘King and Country’ debate of 1933 (when a majority vote not to go to war was credited with emboldening Nazi Germany).

This was nothing of the sort. It was, though, very much a litmus test of the current strength of ‘cancel culture’ in British academe.

It was also a good, old-fashioned campus rumpus, enlivened by the protester with the glue and a lot of gulping, self-righteous fury.

Warnings that a thousand demonstrators would besiege one of the world’s best-known debating societies, gladly risking arrest, did not come to pass. 

A few hundred protesters played music, shouted esoteric chants – ‘Cut your system, f*** your hate, we’re not open for debate’ – and then dispersed. This is, after all, a university town in the middle of exam season.

The event was not a debate and there was no vote. It was a talk by an author whose straight-talking (some might say old-fashioned) views on what really constitutes a woman saw Professor Stock drummed out of her last academic post at the University of Sussex.

She has since found herself in the frontline of the ‘culture wars’, demonised alongside Harry Potter author JK Rowling as a ‘transphobe’ for challenging the right of a biological male to enter women-only spaces on their own say-so.

It has done no harm to book sales, however. When I dropped in at the Oxford branch of Waterstone’s yesterday, I was told that Professor Stock had sold out ahead of the meeting

The Oxford Union’s invitation had certainly galvanised plenty of opposition across the university. 

A number of colleges had joined the chorus of disapproval, their student bodies formally voting to denounce Professor Stock as a ‘notorious… dangerous… unreliable transphobe’ (those were the words of the Junior Common Room of Christ Church College, alma mater of Gladstone and Peel).

Above all, they wanted the Oxford Union to rescind its invitation.

However, a number of academics – 44 in total – had penned an open letter to the Daily Telegraph saying that the Union should stick to its guns. In the current climate, that in itself was newsworthy.

Police teams surrounded the narrow streets around the Union long before the arrival of the star turn.

Professor Stock arrived through a side entrance, flanked by minders, in a trademark dark blue trouser suit and T-shirt – she has said that she ‘got rid of every single skirt and dress’ she ever owned after coming out as a lesbian (following years of marriage to the father of her teenage sons, with whom she is still on ‘excellent’ terms).

A tall (six foot), slim woman, she exuded a battle-hardened confidence and a certain wariness, along with the aura of one who had already done the rounds of several television and radio studios earlier in the day and was really rather keen to get home.

The event opened with some fairly genial jousting between the president, Matthew Dick of Magdalen College, and his guest. 

Just ten minutes in, a couple of hecklers marched down the aisles and then out of the chamber, a pre-planned distraction while a third protester glued their hand to the floor in front of the stage.

A very genteel flap ensued before a police quartet armed with rubber gloves, solvent and a video camera removed the sedentary obstacle, who duly received a hero’s welcome out in the street.

Looking bored rather than perturbed, Professor Stock smiled a thin smile and sat tight.

As she reflected afterwards, almost fondly: ‘It wasn’t traumatic. It was a bit ‘student’.’

She was soon taking questions from all-comers. Not all were entirely complimentary.

As ever with this debate, there was much impenetrable jargon to contend with. We heard a lot of dense stuff about ‘natal subsets’, ‘genetic drift’, ‘pathways’, ‘normative identities’ and detailed analysis of the infrastructural challenges of putting ‘third space’ toilet arrangements into public places.

It will certainly not go down as one of the oratorical high points in Oxford Union history. Nor will it win many points for entertainment value.

However, it established an important point in an important seat of learning: Free speech – for now, at least – is not to be silenced.