TWIBS: English Academics Whine About Free Speech
Controversial though it may be, private citizens telling you they don’t like what you’re saying and don’t want to hear it isn’t an infringement of your right to free speech.
by Aly Gibbs
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Hey! I published something really heavy the other day, and if you haven’t read it, I’d really love it if you did. That said… does anybody else need something downright silly to temper the end of the week? I know I do. Enter: Annoying English professors, lots of bleating about free speech, and unending frivolous litigation!
Let me start by introducing our first annoying professor, Alice Sullivan.
Sullivan, a British sociologist and Professor of Sociology at University College London, is most infamous for leading a very long “independent [government] review of data, statistics and research on sex and gender” in March of 2025 that takes over 200 pages to say, in essence and among other things, transgender people should be listed separately from cisgender people in the UK’s census data for…reasons.
The same day, TransActual UK published a statement that thoroughly rebuts Sullivan’s conclusions by pointing out that this change would make the census data less reliable and invade the privacy of trans Britons, making them less safe. They also point out Sullivan’s inherent biases as a prominent anti-trans activist, and her patron Michelle Donelan’s refusal to “answer any basic questions about the review’s ethics application.”
In comes our second annoying professor, David Gordon at the University of Bristol.
In November of 2024, Gordon invited Sullivan to speak at the University of Bristol. This idea met immediate resistance from the Russell Group’s LGBTQ+ Staff Network, who said Sullivan could cause “real and enduring harm” if she was allowed to speak to students, which… you know, seems like a fair assessment. Gordon was instructed by his superior not to speak out against the LGBTQ+ Staff Network, immediately did so anyway, and was consequently suspended. An investigation into Gordon’s conduct concluded in March of 2025, deciding that he had failed to “follow reasonable management instructions,” and so suspended he remains!
Gordon told anti-trans rag The Telegraph that he’s considering legal action against the university and would like them to “apologise for violating my right to freedom of speech and academic freedom, and not protecting me from discrimination,” which is absolutely laughable. The reason Gordon was suspended was because he violated a reasonable order from his manager at work, which would also happen if your shift leader at McDonald’s told you to mop the bathrooms and you instead dropped trou and went #2 in the lobby.
“I think you should obey reasonable management instructions, such as marking. But being told to not discuss academic issues is just not reasonable,” he added, but frankly, this obviously wasn’t an academic issue. It was an issue of student safety, and the kind of harmful drek the University of Bristol shouldn’t promote.
Anyway, unsurprisingly, the University of Bristol decided to promote that kind of harmful drek last October. Fortunately, it went horrible for Sullivan, who said a “zombie apocalypse” of protesting students disrupted her seminar. She told the BBC that students held up signs saying “Trans Lives Matter,” pulled the fire alarm, and then shouted “shame on you” as she exited the venue.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. There was an uncontrolled demonstration. People literally climbed the walls of the building in order to bang on the windows and howl through megaphones to disrupt the talk,” Sullivan said. “They set off fire alarms several times. In the end we had to decamp to a higher floor of the building. I wasn’t allowed to hang around and talk to people afterwards because that was deemed unsafe, and I discovered afterwards that people had been intimidated and obstructed from coming into the building by protesters.”
As a result of this heinous violation of her free speech (supposedly), Sullivan’s lawyers have informed the university that she will be taking legal action. Perhaps that’s why Gordon, her biggest fan and enabler, is considering suing. Suffice it to say, I don’t believe that demonstrating against a bigoted activist is in any way legally actionable. Certainly not on the part of the university, who are the ones who invited this dweeb to speak in the first place!
My advice to Sullivan and Gordon is simply to take it on the chin. Soldier on and go regurgitate your hateful beliefs somewhere that people actually give a shit.
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
