It is an odd thing, as committed trade unionists, to find yourself taking your own union to a tribunal — but that is what we are doing. As members of the Universities and College Union (UCU), we are taking our union to tribunal under The Equality Act 2010, Part 5, Section 57 which declares that “trade organisations” (including trade unions) “must not discriminate against a member” by subjecting them to any form of “detriment” or harass its members.

Judging by the support we have received from many former and current members of UCU, this action is long overdue.

We made Adult Human Female: a documentary in defence of women’s rights in part because the eminently reasonable concerns that women were raising about the erosion of their sex-based rights were being ignored at best. At worst, the women themselves were being vilified, harassed online and off, in some cases driven out of employment. We asked health care practitioners, journalists, women’s rights activists and academics what happens when we replace sex as a biological material reality entirely with a conception of gender. Unlike an older feminist notion of gender as a social construct, this new notion of gender is more like an individual wish-fulfilment. Their answer was that apparently good intentions are massively negatively consequential for women.

We discovered many other profile harassments going on within academia

We were particularly interested in talking to academics because we are only occasional filmmakers. Academia is our day job. We were aware of what had already happened to Kathleen Stock at Sussex and Jo Phoenix at the Open University, but we discovered there were many other lower profile examples of harassment going on within academia by staff and students. Not only was UCU not helping these academics — they were, as branch officers, often leading the charge against them. A core function of any trade union is to provide the organised collective capacity to get decent pay and conditions for its members. UCU also has a special additional function, which is to help safeguard the academic freedom of its members. Without freedom to discuss, to scrutinise, to challenge, to research (which requires amongst other things, the gathering of an evidence base) and to encourage these capacities in students (the next generation of professionals), a crucial and precious democratic space is lost to wider society.

After an under-the-radar London premiere of the film in November 2022 went off without a single protestor turning up, things took a different turn. In Nottingham, a town with two universities in it, a crowd of 80 plus protesters arrived outside the Methodist church where we were scheduled to show the film. The minister shut the screening down twenty minutes before it was scheduled to start. Then Academics for Academic Freedom at Edinburgh University arranged to show the film in December last year. We were shocked to find that the local branch of the UCU was denouncing the film as “transphobic” and had called on the University to cancel the screening. It did so not on the basis of having watched the film, but from reading the description of it on Eventbrite. This is rather like an English student submitting their essay on a work of literature having only read the blurb on the back of the book. It was incomprehensible to us that academics thought this was a good model of behaviour to set to their student body.

That is the culture we are now in. Disagreement is seen as hateful. As such, disagreement (now hate) destroys “safe spaces” and psychological and physical well-being. UCU Edinburgh was telling staff and students that our film was a threat to them. It lent its esteem and authority as a trade union to reinforce cancel culture amongst both staff (such as the Staff Pride Network) and students (such as the student newspaper which made “the editorial decision not to cover the event as we do not believe in platforming harmful rhetoric”).

That evening, with over 150 people from the broader public — mostly middle-aged women — waiting to watch the film, the event was shut down by protestors blocking the entrance to the venue. One of the protesters that night, Dylan Hamilton, was later interviewed by trans activist Katie Montgomerie on YouTube. This is how Dylan justified the action:

The free speech thing is interesting. People really underestimate the role of media in like every kind of hateful thing in history … I try not to compare it to the racial rights movement or anything but the main resurgence of the KKK in the early 1900s was because of a film, it was even played in the White House, called Birth of a Nation. So films can spread hate and so it is completely naïve to say that they can’t and so some films need not to be shown because they are going to give people specific ideas that are dangerous. So that was kind of our logic behind it. You are not sharing this dangerous thing in a place of learning.

This is the kind of dangerous nonsense that UCU has subordinated itself to intellectually and in policy terms. Its transformation into the trade union wing of a social movement is evidently well under way, as seen in a November 2019 policy paper called “UCU position on trans inclusion”. We are almost embarrassed to bring this incoherent document to public attention lest it reflect badly on academia in general. Alas, we must.

“Some feminists argue that gender is an oppressive social construct formed by means of societal stereotyping,” the paper notes. Well, it has been pretty much central to any feminism worthy of the name, not just “some” feminists, that oppressive social roles have indeed been rationalised by stereotyping. So, this is a worrying start.

Once again, the film screening was cancelled on the day by protestors

“The process of stereotyping, it is argued, begins when someone has their sex assigned at birth.” This is a very significant choice of language slipped in as if it were nothing. It immediately accepts the gender identity position that sex is “assigned” at birth, as opposed to being observed as an empirical fact. “Being assigned as female has attached to it societal stereotypes about what it means to be female, and what it means to be a woman.” Is it hateful to just proffer an alternative view here — one that would have been widely accepted until very recently? Gender stereotypes are made on the basis of sex, and “what it means to be a woman” will only have meaning if we keep the category “sex” in play as distinct from gender.

“Trans people however use gender identity positively as a tool to confirm that their sex was assigned incorrectly at birth. Trans people who transition from one gender to another want to be known in their ‘confirmed’ gender. This is an important and central part of being able to be identified in the correct gender.” It is quite an interesting admission — especially for those who have convinced themselves about how progressive this movement is — that this trans philosophy rests on confirming gender stereotypes rather than challenging them.

The real challenge that gender identity theory (or ideology) wants to make is to sex as a material category. In its place, there are identity and feelings. At the very least, these are contentious and controversial propositions. What on earth was UCU doing in picking a side in this debate? Would it have been possible for UCU to defend the pay and conditions of trans members without picking a side? Of course. Could it have defended members from discrimination and harassment without abandoning logic, reason, evidence and science? Most certainly. Does picking a side in this dispute allow UCU to continue to defend academic freedom? Back comes the answer: “Saying or implying that trans women are really men denies trans women their right to be women.” Quite when or how men won that right is of no concern to a trade union that has abandoned the virtues of logical consistency. Logic has its limits, but at least it helps us not to confuse an elephant with a fly.

So we come to April 26th this year: another attempt to screen the film at Edinburgh University. You would have thought UCU Edinburgh branch might have stepped back a little and reflected in the intervening period. Yet the fact that one of the protestors at the December event was later arrested for aggressive behaviour at the event did not change its approach. The fact that questions were raised in the Scottish Parliament about the importance of academic freedom did not change its approach. In the meantime, in January 2023, UCU and Staff Pride Network did invite trans activist Katy Montgomerie to speak at Edinburgh University. It did not, of course, protest that event. Nor did anyone else call for it to be cancelled — or block the entrance to the venue. Dr Shereen Benjamin, who appears in our film, did turn up to make a comment and ask a question. That, however, is not the sort of approach UCU Edinburgh encourages. Once again came the denunciations on social media as UCU Edinburgh fulminated against “hate” speech. Once again, the film screening was cancelled on the day by protestors.

Unfortunately, UCU is not an outlier in the trade union movement. The fundamental core claims, which trans activists make using gender identity theory, are widely accepted across a sector that still has six million plus members. UCU is the leading force within the labour movement, however, influencing the other unions on this issue. This policy orientation was hardly the result of democratic consultation and debate. When you make it very clear that anything less than “unequivocal” support, as the UCU likes to say, is at the very least hateful, if not actually equivalent to the KKK, then it is hard to vote with your conscience in a public show of hands. We tried discussion and debate, and our own union made it clear that the views articulated in the film are beyond the pale. Now we must try to defend our democratic rights in the courts.

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The authors’ crowdfund can be found here.