Gender Heresy and the “Harms” of “Hate Speech”
It's March 2023. I’m walking down the stairs of the University of Melbourne’s Arts West Building, from where my office is, to the lecture theatre for the third-year philosophy class I’m teaching. In the bathrooms throughout the six-floor building, the back of the toilet stall doors are plastered in pink and blue trans flag stickers declaring “Only a fascist takes ‘Feminism’ (PHIL20046).” “Feminism” is a second-year subject I created and have been teaching as a three-week intensive since 2020. On both the outside and inside of buildings across the campus are posters blaring the headline “Are you on the side of fascists?” going on to proclaim “A/Prof Holly Lawford-Smith spoke at the ‘Let Women Speak’ rally advocating against the existence of trans people” (spoiler: I didn’t), and “Lawford-Smith teaches ‘Feminism’ (PHIL20046) in the Winter Term. There has been an indisputable history of transphobia in the subject” (by “the subject” they meant my course, and another spoiler, there hasn’t). Then the big finish: “Do not support fascists and bigots, boycott this subject.”
I pass one of the posters, strategically glued to an internal wall very near my lecture theatre. After the lecture, a student told me he spent the entire two hours anxiously wondering whether he should have told me about the posters when he came in. He didn’t want to throw me off balance before I had to teach in case I hadn’t seen them yet.
Posters and stickers on the University of Melbourne campus attacking Holly Lawford-Smith and her courses. Source: The Sydney Morning Herald.
This wasn’t the first time I’d been targeted, but it was the first time the targeting left the virtual world and leaked into the material world. Back in 2021, I’d been subject to an online mobbing with all the trimmings: tweets tagging my employer, angry emails and phone calls to the university, and an open letter with a long list of indignant signatories. In 2022, there had been a coordinated online effort to get Oxford University Press not to publish my book, Gender-Critical Feminism (2022). In fact, there were so many such incidents I created what I cheerfully call my “censorship timeline” just to keep track of them all.
Things in the real world continued to escalate further a couple of months after the poster campaign first started, with the glass front of a campus building being smashed in and graffitied in protest against my “Feminism” subject that was about to begin. That resulted in security being assigned outside the seminar rooms for the duration of the subject in 2023, as well as this enjoyably ridiculous paparazzi photo in which I am partially obscured by a man with a leaf blower.
Source: Twitter.
A heretic is a person with beliefs and opinions contrary to the established dogma, especially religious dogma. I became a heretic through my rejection of established leftist dogma, in particular, leftist feminist dogma. A colleague and I have since leaned into the word, calling our radical feminist YouTube channel Feminist Heretics.
I am a philosopher, by training and by employment. Philosophers are supposed to be heretics. Our discipline is marked by disagreement, not agreement. Showing a visiting speaker a good time means ruthless scrutiny of the arguments they’ve been carefully putting together over many months or years. They get an hour to make their case, then we get an hour to demolish it. It’s one objection or problem after the other, with the speaker offering whatever defence they can until one party concedes or the chair moves things along for reasons of time — until the session ends, then everyone goes out for a beer together. Even if the speaker finds this experience uncomfortable at the time, the process is ultimately constructive because it helps them to make their arguments stronger. All of that is to say that because I am a philosopher, I am first and foremost a person who disagrees, a person who does not just go along with things, and a person who, like an annoying two-year-old, is always asking why.
I've been asking why about a lot of things relating to sex and gender lately. The list includes the disappearance of biological sex from feminism; calling sex a spectrum, a multidimensional space, or a social construction; and the shift to gender identity as the core concept of feminism (replacing femaleness with feminine identification in the question of who feminism is for). I have asked why intersectionality is a necessary feminist commitment, whether accepting that trans women are women is good for females, and whether inclusion deserves its place at the top of the current value totem pole. I’ve asked whether sex equality can be achieved while there’s a sex industry, whether allyship requires deference, and whether feminism is necessarily a left-wing project. And I’ve questioned whether gender-critical speech — speech asserting the reality of sex and its importance to feminism — is truly hateful or harmful, as so many of its opponents allege.
In my book Sex Matters, published by Oxford University Press in 2023 (and not without a fight), I defined gender-critical speech as speech that advances a cluster of views including: “There are two sexes, male and female”, “It is impossible to change your sex”, ”sex matters politically and women’s sex-based rights should be protected”, “female-only spaces, services, and provisions are important to women and girls and should not be offered on the basis of self-identified sex/gender identity”, “gender is not gender identity”, “sex is not gender identity”, “gender is sex caste by way of gender norms, explained by or built on top of sex difference”, and “gender (as previously defined) should be abolished.” I also included views about the use of language, including that “male” and “female” refer to sex (not gender identity), and “woman”, “man”, “boy” and “girl” refer to sex and/or gender as previously defined.
Consider a couple of examples from recent years of such views being considered hateful. A 2021 article in the quarterly magazine Index on Censorship said of the British gender-critical feminist Maya Forstater, who tweeted that people cannot change their biological sex, “Forstater’s speech is hate speech because of its contributions to the prevailing culture.” In May 2024, an association of elite universities in the UK known as the Russell Group apologised for listing gender-critical speech alongside anti-Semitic and Islamophobic speech in asking the Office for Students to give “examples of unlawful speech which universities would be expected to take steps to restrict.”
Which of these is closer to getting things right? Why might speech advocating for gender-critical views be thought hateful or harmful? The accusation tends to come from trans activists and trans allies as though made on behalf of all trans people. Sometimes it takes the form that gender-critical speech denies trans people’s existence. For example, in her latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024) Judith Butler writes, “TERFs [trans-exclusionary radical feminists] are denying the existence of people who have had quite a hard time gaining social recognition, legal protection from discrimination, and adequate and affirming health care.” But this is to use the word “existence” where what is meant is “identity” — a hyperbolic substitution that sneaks in the implication that there’s something genocidal in the gender-critical project. After all, it’s a short step from denying their existence to wanting them to not exist. On other occasions, gender-critical speech is merely asserted to be hate speech or harmful speech, often as a self-evident truth without any real explanation as to why.
There are lots of different ways to make the case that some specific type of speech or expression is hate speech. A range of different thinkers across philosophy, politics, and law have suggested that hate speech harms its targets in a particular way, offends its targets, or undermines human dignity, or violates the equality of citizens. Making the case in terms of harm tends to be the gold standard because so many people accept the general principle that harms to others are acceptable grounds on which to interfere with a person’s freedom. If the police can prevent you from physically assaulting another person, and verbal assault harms a person just as much or more than being physically assaulted, it starts to seem reasonable that verbal assault should be prevented.
Suppose a trans activist asserts that gender-critical speech is hate speech because it harms trans people by being psychologically or emotionally distressing. Or maybe it offends trans people by seeming to presume a greater authority than them as to who they are, or it undermines trans people’s dignity by refusing to affirm and celebrate their identities, or it violates trans people’s equality with other citizens by treating them differently.
None of these assertions are straightforwardly compelling. A biological male who desperately wishes to be female, or who feels himself to be a woman, or who has undergone painful and expensive surgeries in the assurance by medical professionals that this will change his sex, may indeed find it distressing to have other people disagree. But whether speech that causes such distress is permissible surely depends on a range of further considerations, including the interests of the speaker and whether the speaker intends to cause distress. Perhaps many people would agree to a general moral principle that it is wrong to intentionally inflict distress on another person for no good reason. But gender-critical feminists will say they have a good reason, namely the feminist defence of biological sex and women’s sex-based rights.
Gender-critical feminists do not presume greater authority than trans people as to who they are. Gender-critical feminists and trans-inclusive feminists (and others) talk past each other by using the same words to mean different things. When a biological male asserts that he is “female” or a “woman”, he means that he identifies as a woman, or that he believes in some content to “woman” that makes sense of his identifying as one and gives him something in common with biological females. Gender-critical feminists do not deny that he has these identifications or beliefs — they simply don’t care about his identifications and beliefs, or his private meaning of “woman”, or what he thinks gender is. They care about his sex, and how he has been socialised on its basis — that is, they care about their meaning of “gender.”
We’re a long way from any general moral principle that we must affirm and celebrate everyone’s identities. This is most obvious in the comparison to racial self-identification, the right to which is still vehemently denied. Human dignity surely requires non-discrimination, but it is hard to see how it requires active affirmation and celebration of each person’s choices. And indeed, how could it require that, given what an infringement that would be on everyone else’s freedom, a part of which is surely freedom to approve and disapprove what they wish.
Finally, there's an issue with thinking about what it means to treat trans people differently. The question is: who should be used as the comparison group when deciding if someone is being treated differently/unequally? Gender-critical feminists say people of their sex, meaning a biological male who claims to be a woman would be considered discriminated against for being trans when he is treated differently to other biological males. Trans activists say the comparison group should be people of the opposite sex, meaning a biological male who claims to be a woman would be considered discriminated against for being trans when he is treated differently to other women, meaning biological females (who, for the trans activist, are “women who are not trans”).
This disagreement has been at the heart of several recent legal cases in Australia. One is about whether lesbians have a right to exclude all biological males, including trans women, from their events, and the other concerns whether a female-only social media app can exclude all biological males, including trans women, from its platform.
All that being said, there might yet be some compelling way of filling in the details of what counts as hate speech that vindicates the claim that gender-critical speech is hate speech. But for now, I am inclined to agree with the American legal and literary scholar Stanley Fish when he says that “Hate speech is what your enemy says loudly.” Gender-critical feminism is the philosophical and political enemy of trans-inclusive feminism, and so what its enemy says loudly. But all that shows is that there is disagreement, not which side’s loud proclamations are right. And in a free society, both should be allowed to have their say.
Published June 15, 2025
Published in Issue XIII: Heretic
