The Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) is supporting Cambridge student Thea Sewell and has brought her case to public attention, prompting today’s Telegraph report on the treatment of students with gender-critical views at the University of Cambridge.
CAF has now written formally to the University, raising serious concerns about how free-speech protections and harassment procedures are being applied in practice at college level — and whether students with lawful, protected beliefs that challenge prevailing orthodoxies have any meaningful route of redress.
Below is a short extract from today’s report in The Telegraph.
University of Cambridge students allegedly carved the word “Terf” into a fellow undergraduate’s door after she showed interest in gender-critical books.
Thea Sewell, 20, says she was ostracised by friends at Christ’s College and condemned as a “bigot” for possessing literature which disputed gender theory – the notion that gender is changeable.
The second-year philosophy undergraduate, who is a survivor of childhood sexual assault, says she continues to be shouted at in the street for allegedly holding “reprehensible” beliefs on gender.
Ms Sewell has now co-founded the Cambridge University Society of Women (CUSW) with other gender-critical students to fight for the right to express their views.
Ms Sewell said she had bought books by Kathleen Stock, the former University of Sussex professor, Alex Byrne, the philosopher, and Helen Joyce, the gender-critical author, at a talk by the latter in Oxford in April.
Upon returning to Cambridge for Easter term that month, Ms Sewell showed her purchases to another undergraduate and recommended she read them.
“I didn’t think it was going to turn into anything until well, then, everything sort of started falling apart,” she told The Telegraph.
On May 25, she was confronted by a different friend in a communal kitchen in the college who asked her, “Are you a Terf?”, an acronym for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”.
“I actually first said, ‘No, I’m not a Terf’,” she recalled. “And I still actually would stand by that, because I think that that term doesn’t necessarily allow for the nuance that my opinion has.
“I asked her why she thought that, and she said she knew that I owned some gender-critical books, and she knew I’d gone to the Helen Joyce talk. I said to her, ‘Okay, what’s the problem with that? I’m a philosophy student. I’m going to own philosophy books. I could also own Mein Kampf. It wouldn’t make me a Nazi.’
“Her response was that buying books from bigots is the same as being a bigot,” she said.
Ms Sewell then confronted the friend to whom she originally showed her books.
“Her tone was completely different to anything that it had ever been to my face,” she said. “She told me that I was a bigot and that everyone deserved to know my hateful views on trans people.”
The friend then ended the call and Ms Sewell had a panic attack. Over the next fortnight, she struggled to sleep and said she was “completely cut off by pretty much all of my friends, bar maybe one or two”.
Others told her they “loved” her but could not be seen with her in public because of “social optics”, while her “college wife” – a fellow student with whom she was due to help settle in some of next year’s undergraduates – “divorced” her.
Ms Sewell returned home for two weeks to escape what she called the “deeply upsetting” ostracism and moved into a different part of the college when she returned.
“I was transporting my stuff from my old room to my new room in the middle of the night,” she said. “That’s how I was doing it, because I was too afraid. And one night I went to my old room to get some stuff and “Terf” had been scratched into my door.”
Emails from Christ’s College’s master and senior tutor, seen by The Telegraph, show the college condemned her treatment and the graffiti as bullying, and the matter was investigated. But Ms Sewell said she was unaware of any disciplinary action being taken.
Ms Sewell is continuing her studies at Cambridge but now attends fewer lectures and tutorials in person because she fears how fellow undergraduates will treat her.
Her former friends continue to ignore her, while other students stare, surreptitiously take her photograph and shout abuse, she says.
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