Policy documents would arrive full of empty second-hand phrases, awkwardly strung together. For instance: “The curriculum shall not rely on or reinforce stereotypical assumptions about trans people, and any materials within relevant courses and modules will positively represent trans people and trans lives.” This was one of several overbearing clauses in Sussex’s “Trans and Nonbinary Equality Policy Statement”, launched with internal fanfare in 2018. The wording came from a template provided by Advance HE, an organization supposedly concerned with improving teaching standards in the higher education sector. It was robotically copied by several universities, Sussex among them.

Last year, the Office for Students issued a large fine to Sussex on the basis of introducing this policy, and cited my adverse experiences there as evidence of its chilling effect on academic freedom. Indeed, while I was working as a philosophy lecturer, attempting to broach thorny issues of sex and gender while avoiding disciplinary investigations from management, the mere sight of a link to this particular policy in an official email would cause significant clenching of my jaw. But this Wednesday, the passive-aggressive wording sidled back into my life, to enrich my dentist further. The High Court ruled that the fine had been unlawful, and the Office for Students had misapplied its own rules.  

Central to the judgment was the finding that the trans policy did not in fact count as a “governing document” — meaning that the Office for Students was wrong to conclude it ever seriously breached their regulations. Yet on the ground at the time, the policy felt very much like a governing document. Indeed, it seemed positively Stalinesque in its effect. It combined with several other EDI policies and communications to inculcate a general feeling of menace: warnings about transphobia and hate speech; instructions about preferred pronouns and how exactly to apologize if you got them wrong; links to helplines for those affected by speech-based bigotry, and trans flags fluttering all over the shop.  

But according to this week’s ruling, “governing documents” in this context only ever means constitutional texts such as statutes and charters, not policies attempting to force change in cultural values or behavioral norms. And the judge also ruled that the OFS failed to consider other Sussex policies defending freedom of speech, supposedly more definitive of the institutional stance — though as I recall, these were squirreled away in remote corners of the website, given far less prominence in everyday life. 

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There are other points in the ruling, less easy to paraphrase. Though the overall verdict is clear enough — the OFS messed up badly, misunderstood its own regulations, and also showed bias in its determination to make an example of Sussex — much of the text is taken up with the byzantine interaction of particular OFS regulations and Sussex documents, not easy for the non-specialist to decipher. Still, other matters are made transparently clear. As pertaining to the OFS’s academic freedom director, Arif Ahmed, for instance, the judge explicitly found that there was “no vitiating apparent bias in respect of Dr Ahmed’s personal role in the decision-making”, and that Sussex’s attempts to demonstrate otherwise had failed.

But history is written by the victors, as they say; and yesterday the victorious Vice-Chancellor Sasha Roseneil was doing the media rounds, calling for Ahmed’s head nonetheless. Originally a Cambridge philosopher of language, he is well-known within free speech circles for his refreshingly unadorned critiques of emotional safetyism within universities, including an earlier successful fight to see Cambridge remove a regulation requirement to be “respectful” towards opposing points of view. It would be completely in keeping with our times to see a confident plain speaker like him ousted by someone whose warm and fuzzy aim for her organization, as of yesterday, is to “continue to focus on creating an open, inclusive and respectful campus culture”.

Though herself a sociologist, Roseneil also seemed in the mood to do a bit of historical reconstruction, waxing lyrical about the university’s “proud history of being the place where the most contentious issues of the day are aired”. During court proceedings earlier this year, Sussex’s barrister even went so far as to call the university a “bastion of free speech”. Reader, I laughed. Perhaps it was once so, and could be again; I have no idea, having relinquished my former connections. But it may not surprise you to learn that this is not my recollection of the place; and nor can it really be Roseneil’s. She arrived to run it in 2022, a year after I had left.

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I have described my Sussex experiences too often to rehearse them here again. By now, I am quite bored of remembering, so God knows how everyone else feels. But for an economical snapshot of what life was like back then, consider the tone and content of this “Dean’s update” email, sent by my line manager to all staff in the arts and humanities in April 2021, including me, and preserved on the internet for posterity. In particular, attend to the lengthy sections on “Equality, Diversity, Inclusion” and “LGBTQ+ inclusion”, bearing in mind that this deathless managerial prose was composed years after my public complaints about Stonewall’s overreach had first attracted local acts of animosity, and five months before the large scale protests against me started. And if you think this sounds like an “open” or even “respectful” environment in which to criticize the presence of males in women’s prisons or the medical transition of minors, I have an extremely scientific encyclopedia of gender identities to sell you.

For those who are big fans of such things, I’m sure the High Court result will be triumphantly received as proof that stories about my tumultuous time at Sussex were always overdone. The judge stated in her ruling that she was not adjudicating on the substance of those events, about which the then-Vice-Chancellor expressed profound regret at the time. Roseneil also stressed the separateness of the two matters in her own statement. But in my experience, you can’t expect people who believe in magical gender essences to care much about finer details. In any case, whatever they are saying I’m not reading it, having blissfully given up monitoring my public image in the eyes of such people a long time ago.

For related reasons, I am not clued up on exactly what this means for the sector as a whole; and nor do I really wish to remedy the deficit. But from the outside, it seems that one astonishing thing to have emerged from the ruling is that existing free speech statutes have literally nothing meaningful to say about the hundreds of politicized documents that have proliferated like weeds in British universities in the last decade, praising some forms of expression as desirable and proscribing others as suspicious or outright hateful; fueling a culture of student complaints, disciplinary investigations, and fear.

Perfectly rationally in the circumstances, thousands of academics are still self-censoring, having taken note of the finger-wagging policies appearing on the website, the sententious managerial sermons flowing into their inbox, the politicized commemorations and flags, the aggressivity of activist staff networks, and the extremely selective forms of “lived experience” highlighted by the institution as morally instructive. The High Court judgment is based on the Higher Education and Research Act (HERA), and implies it is not the regulator’s concern whether a university’s culture produces intimidating obstacles to freedom of expression like these, or avoids them. If this is true, it can only emphasize the total irrelevancy of HERA to freedom of expression in the modern context, and the urgent need for a different approach. The new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act has yet to be enacted, and one can only hope it will do much better.

For ultimately it is the moral crazes rippling periodically through universities that constitute the biggest threat to freedom of expression there, and the regulator needs to catch up. These are fueled partly by innate staff susceptibility, and partly by more hard-headed desires of managers to hop onto whatever bandwagon students are currently riding, hoping to benefit from larger application numbers and better student scores. They don’t tend to result in changes to foundational constitutions, but they do produce large numbers of suffocating bureaucratic tendrils, along with a lot of busywork: new policies and guidelines to keep people in line; marketing messages to tweak, and social media campaigns to launch; workshops for staff re-education, and fresh positions of power for true believer staff to occupy.  

In this stifling environment, better regulations would of course be welcome; but the country also needs to decide what universities are actually for. Are they just an expensive means of teaching middle-class kids to mouth certain attractive words and phrases, with which they can then drive forward progress, take deep dives into inequality, circle back to kindness, and drill down into the oppressive status quo? Or might they be better championed as places where such heartwarming, mind-numbing platitudes can be challenged and even mocked, without personal or professional cost? Having left the university sector behind me, I’ve now got full freedom to think for myself. It’s a glorious gift; one that all the clever, inquisitive, contrarian people still stuck in ivory towers and redbrick towerblocks can only dream of.

But the pioneer in this field is Claudia McLean, who has always regretted undergoing sex change surgery — though by the time it became possible to voice such regrets in the public arena, she felt she had no choice but to remain living as a woman. McLean’s recent memoir, Rejected, lays bare the violence, abuse and cruelty she faced growing up as a “quite effeminate, gay boy” in one of Glasgow’s roughest neighborhoods.

Born in the late Fifties, that boy was abused both at home, by a sadistic father, and at school, “because I was always different”. In the book, McLean describes one particularly horrific assault by his drunken father on his mother when he was eight years old. McLean managed to escape the house and called the police from a phone box. Charged with attempted murder and cruelty to a child, his father was sent to prison in 1966. The memoir lays it out in bleak terms:

“There was no police station, they kept trying to build one and it kept being burned down. My testimony was crucial in getting my father convicted, but when I was about 13 years old, he was released, and putting it around town that he would track me down and shoot me. Then he would shoot my mother. He was capable of this. We lived in fear, and then one day having asked my mother to meet him, and getting drunker and drunker, he hung himself in the school I went to. And I have to live with that for the rest of my life. I never had a chance to know what he was like, and I deeply regret that. There must’ve been more to him.”

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The bullying McLean was exposed to at school was relentless, and the only good male role model available was a grandfather who was not violent. Nevertheless, he made it to adulthood, albeit traumatized and vulnerable. “I became a hairdresser, loved singing in the choir, got away from the violent bullies, and then I met Richard, the love of my life.”

McLean soon moved in with Richard, who looked like a “a cross between Jesus Christ and George Best”. However, Richard, who would have intermittent affairs with women, insisted he was heterosexual — and therefore, that McLean must be a woman. “I was pressurized into transitioning, and it was so easy to do so, once I ended up at the psychiatrist.” That psychiatrist asked, “if I liked playing with dolls as a child, and then told me because I passed very well as a woman, I was suitable for the surgery”.

“I was diagnosed in 45 minutes, I’ve already been taking hormones, and I was fast tracked into surgery which I paid for myself, all my own money, because I thought it was wrong to get it done on the NHS.” McLean was prescribed irreversible cross-sex hormones at the age of 26, and underwent full genital reconstruction surgery two years later in 1986.

Her regret about transitioning came instantly. She describes waking up after the genital surgery and sobbing. “I was in a rush to get it done before he left me, and met somebody before I had the surgery, but a year later he left me anyway.”

As a rule, I do not use she/her pronouns when referring to trans-identified men, but I make an exception for McLean. We have been friends since the moment we met — and I had no reason, back in those pre-gender-war days, not to accord her this courtesy. I always knew her story, and she always accepted that she was not in fact a “real” woman. Pronouns just didn’t seem as important as they do today.

On the push for self-identification in the UK, McLean tells me in an interview: “Those men desperately wish to access women’s spaces, which makes it dangerous for those women and girls. That’s a fact.”

McLean is also aware of how the “overreach” of extreme trans activism has ended up doing “regular trans people” a disservice. “Men who do not pass and have not had the surgery or hormones are demanding access to women-only spaces; we are all under scrutiny and our rights are in danger of disappearing.”

I first met McLean shortly after she had sought legal advice on making a formal complaint about how police officers had handled her report of a serious sexual assault in September 1995. She had been the victim of an attempted rape, but when she reported it, police undermined and ridiculed her because she was transgender. I had not expected her to also reveal that she regretted her sex change.

When McLean publicly expressed regret about her transition in 2003, she faced terrible consequences from the so-called “trans community”. The “leaders” despised her in particular for having revealed this regret to a sworn enemy — me. Weeks after my interview with her was published, I wrote a column in the Guardian that resulted in a major outcry from the newly-established trans rights movement. This was in the year the Gender Recognition Act became law, allowing trans-identified people to apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate.

Although individuals had spoken out against botched and ineffective surgery prior to 2003, there had been no public discussion about regret. McLean was the first to go public.

In 2007, McLean then took a courageous step in supporting complaints against Russell Reid, the psychiatrist who had first diagnosed her as suffering from “gender dysphoria”. At that time, the publicity around the case meant that regrets were firmly on the agenda — but the backlash against them was fierce.

That same year, during a Radio 4 debate show, Hecklers, recorded in front of a live audience, McLean spoke up:

“My name is Claudia McLean. I am the person who was recommended for surgery after 45 minutes. That happened in 1986, and I have lived a long time to regret it. I have lived a life apart, honestly, since this had happened, and I think that that woman over there, called Julie Bindel, is a valuable, wonderful voice in the wilderness.”

“At no time did I say to that psychiatrist, ‘I feel like a woman’. How would I know what a woman feels like? How would I know that?”

“For everyone here who is trans and happy, I say bravo. God bless you all. And I’m glad that that’s how it is for you. Alas, it was not for me.”

Most of those in the audience were trans activists; some were gender clinicians. But that event sealed McLean’s fate; from then on, she was fully ostracized.

A couple of years later, I invited her to a screening of Regretters, a film about two Swedish men who regretted transitioning. The panel discussion after the screening was led by trans activists, but McLean spoke out again, saying she wished she had been encouraged and supported to live as a gay man. She was dismissed, patronized and belittled. “It was suggested I was mentally ill.”

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Events such as the very first conference on detransitioning, in 2019, and the Keira Bell case against the Tavistock the following year, introduced the term to the public conversation, bringing the notion of “transgender regret” into the mainstream. McLean falls into the gap between two camps: those who have detransitioned (and are celebrated by those of us appalled by the very notion of sex change) and trans activists who insist that only a tiny — and therefore insignificant — minority ever regret transitioning. For McLean, detransitioning has never been an option. “The surgery was too radical, and I have lived as Claudia, as a woman, for 40 years now. How could I possibly go back?”

Michael Kerr is a detransitioner who understands McLean’s position. He is a 33-year-old gay man who has just announced the launch of the UK’s first support service for those detransitioning. He lived as Caitlin for seven years — though he removed himself from the waiting list for surgery and stopped taking his medication in time to save his male genitalia. He says he was caught up in a social contagion following the trauma of being raped as a young man. As a gender-nonconforming gay man, he was told that because he liked “stereotypically female things” he should transition — an uncannily similar rationale to that of McLean’s psychiatrist all those years ago.

No wonder Kerr sees the similarity between his own experiences and those of McLean. “There’s a mirror image of a lot of the things that I experienced,” he says. “It is similar to how I got my diagnosis. I was what we would know as a genderbender, as gender nonconforming. I experimented with high heels and makeup and certain types of clothing, that was then seen as part of the diagnosis. That was then seen as me exhibiting signs that I wanted to become a woman, because this ideology is rooted within homophobia.”

Kerr says he would love to hear from McLean, despite her not having detransitioned, because McLean regrets the surgery and rejects the ideology. “It comes to a point where you’ve gone so far into the treatment that there’s no coming back from it. But I would still like to offer support and show understanding.” He adds: “If the medics had a comprehensive history of Claudia’s life, they would have seen the childhood trauma. They should never have been prescribed any form of medication. The only treatment that they should have offered is therapy.”

***

Betrayed: A Memoir by Claudia McLean is published by Oxfordfolio Press.

While not keen on any of the above, Jenni was a classical liberal, and wondered whether, after decades of feminism, women could now be sexually liberated. She was thinking of writing a book on the theme. “After all,” she said, “there’s even a lap dance club solely for women these days.” She meant a place called Caesars, which was a dive on Streatham High Road that gave over one night a month to a women’s night: “Lap-Attack”.

We agreed to visit Lap-Attack together. It was horrific. The male performers appeared exploited and unhappy, while the female punters were mostly blind drunk and trying their best to pretend they were having fun. In the toilets, I encountered a group of lively black women in their twenties. One of them asked me, “Is that Jenni Murray out there? She’s my heroine”. I told Jenni, who was thrilled at the idea that a working-class woman in a lap-dance club would love what she was doing.

Jenni and I, both working-class feminists, remained friends for the rest of her life. She was a titan, presenting Woman’s Hour until she was 70. She would have done it longer, I believe, had she not been dogged by critics who believed her to be “transphobic”. Her beloved BBC let her down, leading to her resignation. Now that Jenni has died, aged 75, the corporation is giving her the recognition she deserved as a broadcaster — but I remember her bravery, too.

On 20 January 2017, years after our trip to Caesars, I was walking from the Tube to march against Donald Trump’s presidency when my phone rang. It was Jenni. My first thought was that she was at the demonstration and wanted to meet up. But what she actually wanted was my advice. We had spoken only a few weeks earlier, after her interview with the trans activist India Willoughby. During the interview, Jenni had faced a barrage of hostile sexism from this man who claims to be female. It goes without saying that Jenni had handled the conversation extremely professionally — but she was aghast at some of the things Willoughby had said.

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“What would have been your reaction,” Jenni asked Willoughby, “to being required to shave your legs when you lived as a man?” she asked.

“What a bizarre question, Jenni. Why would I shave my legs when I was living as a man?” replied Willoughby.

Jenni then asked how Willoughby — as a newcomer to such trials of “womanhood” — felt about women being held to a higher standard than men. Willoughby snapped. “I’m not really sure what your stance is on trans. But it seems quite hostile, quite honestly.”

Dealing with such a response was well within Jenni’s everyday repertoire. I had been a guest on Woman’s Hour many times, almost always with Jenni at the helm, and she had rigorously challenged some of my opinions, as her job required. And of course, if it was a debate-type format, she did the same to my opponent.

Jenni had called because she felt she needed to speak out about the misogyny of trans ideology. Years ago, Jenni had been infuriated by the Rev Peter Stone, who had undergone surgery, was now known as Carol, and seemed concerned about little other than clothing. This was a caricature of womanhood from a man who was ignorant of centuries of feminist struggle. Willoughby had induced similar fury in Jenni — so much so that she felt she had to act. She said that while she had always instinctively known that trans culture was bad for women, she had been worried about stirring the hornets’ nest. She told me that she had decided to write a big piece for The Sunday Times Magazine, in which she would set out her stall.

“How bad is it going to be if I do that?” she asked. I told her that she should be prepared for the worst. The mother of all hostility would be coming down on her. There would be calls for her cancellation. But despite the warnings I’d given her, Jenni didn’t waver.

Her piece, “Be trans, be proud – but don’t call yourself a ‘real woman’” was published in March 2017. In it, she made it clear that her concern was to hold on to women’s hard-won rights, and not anti-trans prejudice. She wrote:

“I’m appalled at the repulsive misogyny evident in the response of trans activists who have accused Nimko Ali, a Somali and a courageous campaigner against female genital mutilation, of ‘practising white feminism’ or who have demanded the ‘no platforming’ (banning from speaking in public) of women, such as the lesbian feminist Julie Bindel, who have questioned the claims of trans women to be real women.”

As I feared, Jenni was subjected to endless abuse: not just scathing commentary in the press, but insults, calls for her sacking, and worse. She later recalled being issued “endless promises that I would be raped or murdered, leaving me genuinely worried for my safety. I had no assistance from the police — not that I asked for it, as I knew they would do nothing.”

What about the BBC, the institution to which Jenni had devoted decades? Rather than offer its unequivocal support, the corporation gave Jenni a warning, she said, and banned her from leading any Woman’s Hour discussion on the topic of transgenderism.

Throughout, Jenni remained an exceptional journalist. Her long-time producer, Innes Bowen, worked with Jenni between 1998 and 2002 and describes Jenni as “incredibly impressive with her open-mindedness about issues, and her genuine desire to explore all sides of any debate.

“She didn’t want the same old issues being presented time and time again, and if that’s what the producers came up with, she would say: ‘Sorry, we can’t do that. This is not balanced, or it’s not fair.’ She only threw her toys out of her pram about twice a year. Mainly, she was protecting us from our own stupidity.”

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Jenni would rail against a certain type of middle-class feminist who adopts whichever position they feel is going to give them the greatest social acceptability. She was not one of those women herself.

“She was genuinely a national treasure,” Bowen says. “Many ex-BBC people believe that they are, but really, they fade into obscurity once they leave their role. For Jenni, the phone never stopped ringing. She was in demand. The country did love her.”

I realized quite how traumatic the Willoughby episode had been for Jenni in 2021, at FiLiA, a grassroots feminist conference. Jenni had been invited to speak on the main stage. When asked about what happened after she wrote the piece for The Sunday Times, she gave a response that left many of us in tears.

She had presented Woman’s Hour for 33 years, she said. “I’d never been perceived as someone who couldn’t be trusted. And suddenly, I had a manager coming into my office saying, ‘Oh, God, Jenni. Have you seen all the shouting on Twitter? I don’t think we can let you discuss this question anymore’.

“Three years later, I decided to quit. I can’t do what I love if I am not being trusted. But I made that excuse: ‘I’ve done it for 33 years, I’m coming up to my 70th birthday, I need to do something different.’ That was bullshit. I did not want to leave Woman’s Hour; I absolutely loved it. But I couldn’t stay in that atmosphere.”

It seems that little has changed. Just this week, the BBC rejected all initial complaints about the decision by Woman’s Hour to interview Raewyn Connell, a man who says he’s a woman, about misogyny. Woman’s Hour barely lives up to its name these days.

In 2006, shortly after Jenni’s breast cancer diagnosis, I was asked by a newspaper how important a voice she was. My answer was that Jenni was irreplaceable. “I honestly think the show will die with her. She is an era — along with the program — and it can’t be reproduced.” It would appear I was right.