A new LGBTQ+ guide circulated to staff at University College London’s Institute of Education has drawn criticism for promoting contested views on gender identity, amid growing concern that gender-critical academics are still being discouraged from speaking freely despite new statutory duties on universities to protect academic freedom.
Following a tip-off, the Committee for Academic Freedom obtained a copy of the document, titled Best Practice for Working with LGBTQ+ Students, distributed by the Institute’s LGBTQ+ Advisory Group to all teaching staff.
It speaks in the register of “we, the victims”, gently scolding “you, the staff” for the harm their everyday language supposedly inflicts. “Some of our common experiences can help you understand what it is like to live in our shoes and how you can help make the IOE a more welcoming place for us,” it states at one point.
Elsewhere, “[t]o make us feel welcome and to make your classroom a place where we are truly included”, the guide proffers the type of mnemonic that wouldn’t look out of place in a primary school: ABC – A(sk yourself), B(e deliberately inclusive), C(heck constantly).
Under “Ask yourself”, lecturers are told to have students make name badges with their pronouns and to rehearse explanations of “why these matter”. This, they are reminded, is particularly important “to those who may be unfamiliar”.
The next step, “Be deliberately inclusive”, exhorts UCL’s community of scholars to add pronouns to email signatures and to learn by rote conversational scripts such as “What are your pronouns?”, or “I use XXXXX pronouns, how about you?”
Few critically-minded academics are likely to welcome this approach, since pronoun declaration amounts to a public endorsement of gender-identity theory, and the essentially contested claim that inner identity takes precedence over biological sex in policy and law. True, the guide stops just short of compulsion – which would be unlawful under the Office for Students’ (OfS’) new regulatory framework – noting that sharing pronouns should be “encouraged, but always optional”. Yet the rationale offered is not that gender-critical objections are lawful and reasonable, but that “some students may not be comfortable coming out”. Acquiescence is always optional, in other words, but with approval only for those withholding out of concern for students still questioning their gender identity, not for those questioning gender ideology itself.
From etiquette the guide drifts into epistemology, directing staff to “question” any study in which sex is recorded as male or female:
“This binary category does not acknowledge the existence of gender nonconforming, gender queer and agender students, as well as others who do not identify as either male or female. Such situations, if left unquestioned, contribute to the nonbinary community’s sense of identity erasure, and can harm trans students by not acknowledging their lived experiences and identities beyond a biological category.”
“Questioning” academic work is, of course, central to the spirit of the academy. But having spoken throughout in the confessional register of “we, the victims”, the guide treats harm as established fact. Against that backdrop, the injunction merely to “question” looks curiously weak – as if calm inquiry itself were a moral failing. Here “questioning” reads less as an invitation to investigation than as a demand for repudiation, with silence construed as complicity in harm.
The dynamic is not unfamiliar. Self-censorship was the single most common theme in the government-commissioned Sullivan Review of 2025, which gathered evidence from gender-critical academics who described facing vexatious complaints, protracted investigations and informal pressure to sanitise research on sex and gender.
Even where no sanction was imposed, the process itself became the punishment. Others reported pressure from colleagues to sanitise reading lists or add trigger warnings, with one noting: “Trying to teach students about sex-differences is difficult when you cannot define sex accurately without complaint.” Research proposals were blocked by ethics panels for using the concept of sex at all. Beyond formal processes, there were accounts of bullying and ostracism: one academic was denounced on social media by an EDI officer, another frozen out of doctoral supervision, others targeted by student networks seeking their dismissal.
What recourse, then, is available to lecturers who “opt” not to display their pronouns or whose work is “questioned” and who subsequently suffer detriment? According to OfS guidance on its forthcoming complaints scheme, staff must first exhaust their university’s internal procedures before escalating to the regulator. That framework may address some of the clearer incidents noted in the Sullivan Review – cancelled seminars, vexatious complaints, blocked research projects – but the deeper enabler of harassment, bullying and self-censorship is the steady drip of documents like UCL’s.
This article forms part of the Committee for Academic Freedom’s monitoring of developments in UK higher education. To receive monthly updates and analysis on cases affecting academic freedom, subscribe to our newsletter click the link.