University speakers with gender-critical views are most likely to be banned from addressing students

University speakers accused of being critical of transgender rights are most likely to have been no-platformed at Britain’s top universities, analysis by The Telegraph has found.

There have been 21 occasions at Russell Group institutions which saw speakers banned outright or pressured into withdrawing from events in the last six years.

Eight of these incidents involved ‘gender critical’ speakers, including Dame Jenni Murray, feminist campaigner Julie Bindel, and Oxford history professor Selina Todd.

Dame Jenni pulled out of an Oxford talk in 2018 after a students’ union campaign group accused her of “transphobic comments” the previous year.

The former Woman’s Hour host wrote a newspaper column headlined: “Be trans, be proud - but don’t call yourself a ‘real woman’”. Dame Jenni has previously said she is “not transphobic, or anti-trans”.

Manchester students accused Ms Bindel of transphobia - which she denies - after her articles claimed that transgender people choosing how to self-identify was “madness”.

Prof Todd was dropped from the Oxford International Women’s Festival at Exeter College in February 2020. She says this was because organisers were pressured by transgender activists.

Prof Todd’s research has suggested women who posed as men in the past were often lesbians who sought to protect themselves.

“On the whole what I find is an absolute resistance to discussing this issue. Whenever no-platforming happens it acts as a silencer on so many other people,” she said.

“We have this culture of fear just always there beneath the surface. I took two years of academic leave to write some books, and when I came back around 2017 I was really taken aback by how much the culture had changed at Oxford.

“It’s great to debate and criticise each other and learn. But what a tragedy that none of us can do it in these universities.”

Toby Young, founder of the Free Speech Union, said: "I've been shocked by how many gender critical feminists have been no-platformed at universities. The main victims of censorious student mobs are Left-wing feminists.”

A further seven speakers have been banned from campuses since 2015 because students deemed their views excessively right-wing, including Alice Weidel, leader of Germany’s far-right AfD party.

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg’s talk was also cancelled after threats from Left-wing activists, while Amber Rudd was no-platformed by an Oxford society.

Analysis by this newspaper found 27 out of 140 universities in the UK have their own codes of conduct with limits on speakers that go beyond existing laws.