Censorship timeline

[This is a timeline of censorship, banning, protest, attempted deplatforming, etc. that has occurred since I started writing about gender-critical feminism in 2018. There are more general accounts of the treatment of gender-critical academics here, here, here, and here].

March 2019 | 3AM Magazine withdraws Richard Marshall’s interview with me, after complaints about my answers to interview questions about trans issues. Details here. Richard Marshall resigned in protest. All of his interviews with philosophers, previously published to 3AM, are now available at 3-16am.co.uk, including mine.

May 2019 | Jane Clare Jones & I give a public talk at the University of Reading. Student activists attempt to have the event cancelled, and (when it goes ahead) protest the event.

June 2019 | My account @aytchellesse permanently suspended from Twitter for ‘Violating our rules against hateful conduct’. No details provided, and all appeals rejected without explanation. Details here. Reported here. My open letter here. A detailed argument against Twitter’s treatment of feminists here. November 2022 petition for reinstatement of gender-critical accounts by the Free Speech Union here.

July 2019 | Student activists attempt to have the Australasian Association of Philosophy deplatform my talk ‘Women-Only Spaces and The Right To Exclude’. They organize a protest for outside the conference. Reported here. Details of the protest (which Facebook later removed) are here, here, and here.

August 2019 | An Equality Australia petition demands that the University of Melbourne deplatform our event ‘The Future of Sex-Based Rights’, a forum to discuss the proposed Births, Deaths, and Marriages Registration Amendment Bill 2019 (which introduced sex self-identification to VIC). Reported here, here, here, and here.

September 2019 | The Institute for Art and Ideas (IAI) withdraws an article with contributions from multiple philosophers after the trans activist authors complain about being ‘non-consensually co-platformed’ with gender-critical authors. Details here, with a link to the original piece. IAI later republish the article without the trans activist authors, and publish both their retraction statement and my reply. I write about this whole debacle in more detail here.

September 2019 | Student activists at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) attempt to have the university cancel my talk, ‘Deplatforming is a feminist issue’ (with Emily Vicendese), for Feminist Forum. I’m sure the irony was lost on them.

October 2019 | Students at the University of Melbourne protest a philosophy talk by a speaker because she is invited by me and therefore assumed to be gender-critical. The Queer Political Action Collective organize the protest, speculating wildly as to the content of the talk, and Van Badham tweets this to her 80K followers. Here’s the placard that was sitting outside the building my office is in, for the duration of the protest.

November 2019 | Massey University deplatforms the ‘Feminism 2020’ event, organized by Speak Up For Women NZ and at which I am a speaker, under pressure from activists. (The event goes ahead in a new venue). Reported here, Massey’s statement here.

December 2019 | Oxford University Press USA decide not to go ahead with a collection of interviews with women philosophers (a sequel to this collection) after its curator, Richard Marshall, refuses to remove Kathleen Stock’s & my interviews from the collection.

October 2020 | Permanently suspended from Medium for ‘Hate speech’. No details provided, appeal rejected without explanation. I was on the platform from October 2018 – October 2020 and had posted 35 gender-critical essays.

November 2020 | The Women’s Human Rights Campaign (WHRC) UK group take down the video of a webinar I did with Kathleen Stock for WHRC Australia & New Zealand, where we talked about some hard questions for gender-critical feminists. (This is my first deplatforming by my own side). (The video is still available on the Feminist Heretics channel).

February-March 2021 | I launched the website www.noconflicttheysaid.org to raise awareness about women’s experiences of women-only spaces being disrupted as a result of gender identity ideology. Two of my colleagues incited a Twitter mob (here and here), and an Open Letter was created asking for “swift and decisive” (albeit unspecified) action to be taken against me by the university. In this article, one of my colleagues says the university should ‘force’ me to take down the website and remove me from having contact with students. There is a counter-letter here. In March there is a ‘snap rally against transphobia‘ which targets the tutors (lectures are not compulsory but tutorials are).

March 2021 | There is a second protest against me on the University of Melbourne campus. The issues are ‘high-profile TERFs teaching “Feminism” courses’ [apparently it’s not real feminism unless it centres men], a vague accusation of ‘hate speech’, and a demand that the university condemn noconflicttheysaid.org. The Melbourne University Branch of the NTEU used their mailing list to encourage members to attend the protest. Greens Senator Janet Rice is one of the speakers at the rally. There was coverage of the protest on Sky News, clip here. Full details of the media coverage of the backlash against the website are here.

July 2021 | Oxford University Press pulls my book Gender-Critical Feminism out of production, reclassifies it from a trade book to an academic book, sends a chapter out for re-review, and requires further revisions. Alex Byrne describes our experiences with OUP here.

December 2021 | An article I wrote for O&G Magazine’s language issue titled ‘Those Birthing People, They’re Women’ is taken down from the website because of complaints. (The article is still in the print version of the magazine, and in the full PDF of the magazine which can be downloaded here).

April 2022 | Members of the OUP USA Guild, and ‘members of the international scholarly community with a relationship… to Oxford University Press‘ have both written Open Letters / Petitions to OUP in response to them publishing my book Gender-Critical Feminism. There are posts about these letters on philosophy’s disciplinary blogs here and here, and there’s a clever satire of one of the letters here.

April 2022 | Students at the University of Reading attempt to have my talk at the School of Law (where I am a Visiting Research Fellow) cancelled by the university. (They do not succeed). They protest outside the talk venue. There’s a write-up about it here.

July 2022 | Philosophy Compass rejects a paper written by Kate Phelan & I after it has been commissioned, peer-reviewed, and revised. (The paper is about women-only spaces).

July 2022 | Oxford University Press emails me to say that they will not be publishing Sex Matters: Essays in Gender-Critical Philosophy, despite the fact the book was under contract and had been positively reviewed. (The matter was ultimately resolved and the book is due to be published in July 2023). Alex Byrne describes our experiences with OUP here.

August 2022 | YouTube channel The Dissenter decides not to post the interview we recorded about my new book.

October 2022 | Australia’s National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) passes a motion which incorporates the commitment that “NTEU will: … Condemn the use of gender critical ideology when used to promote or defend transphobia”. They do not give their definitions of ‘gender critical ideology’ or ‘transphobia’, and they do not say how they will determine when gender-critical views are or aren’t used to ‘promote or defend transphobia’. Reported here. (I include this on my censorship timeline given that I am one of the very few ‘out’ gender-critical academics in Australia).

December 2022 | My account @aytchellesse is reinstated to Twitter (as a result of a policy change introduced after Elon Musk bought Twitter). Total Twitter-ban length: 3.5 years.

March-April 2023 | In the aftermath of my speaking at Let Women Speak Melbourne, there is a poster & sticker campaign against me, my teaching of feminism, and students taking my feminism subject, on the University of Melbourne campus. There’s an article about it here. I talk to MP David Limbrick about it here, and Rita Panahi talks about it for Sky News here.

June-July 2023 | A few days before my winter intensive ‘Feminism’ begins, activists vandalize a public-facing building at the University of Melbourne, and as a result the university assigns security to my course. There are articles about it here, here, and here; and I talked about the situation on Sky News’s Outsiders programme in July.