What is academic freedom and does it clash with trans rights and/or so-called "gender critical" feminism? Professor Grace Lavery (Berkeley) delivered the qUCL annual lecture on this difficult topic and received an overwhelming number of questions and comments that could not be addressed during the event. In this podcast, qUCL co-directors share with Grace all of the comments and questions so she can respond to them, even those that might be considered offensive. Content warning for potentially offensive content including anti-trans remarks and the legal definition of rape.

Link to Professor Lavery's qUCL lecture: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lgbtq-research/events/2022/mar/qucl-online-gender-critical-movement-biggest-threat-academic-freedom-generation

Lecture description: The so-called “gender critical” movement has made the most significant attacks on academic freedom, and has normalized a set of political tools: GC academic activists have normalized threats of private legal action against students critical of their work, while senior administrators use institutional procedures to protect them, and threaten retaliatory action against student critics. Yet these sorts of actions, and the victory laps taken across the liberal UK media, are only the most spectacular facet of a wide campaign of intimidation against trans students and workers, and our allies, that is being played out in universities across the UK: abuse of institutional procedures, legal intimidation of students, media whitewashing, and social media swarming.

Grace Lavery is an Associate Professor of English, Critical Theory, and Gender & Women’s Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores the history and theory of aesthetics and interpretation, with particular interests in psychoanalysis, literary realism, and queer and trans cultures. Her forthcoming speculative memoir, Please Miss, will be published by Seal Press in 2022. www.academicfreedomforall.com/