How to have debate

One of our trustees, Professor Jo Phoenix of The Open University, speaking yesterday on talkRADIO.

Jo was talking about the unacceptable threats of violence and death faced by Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex. Professor Stock has been advised by the police to teach classes online, install CCTV outside her home, and to stay away from the university campus.

She has been targeted by activists because she argues that the rights and interests of women, and the rights and interests of males who identify as women (so-called trans women), might not necessarily coincide.

In the case of women's prisons, for instance, it is important to ask whether it is right to expect female prisoners – themselves often the survivors of grotesque male violence – to share their spaces with male prisoners who believe themselves to be, or claim to be, women. Or whether male prison officers who identify as women should be allowed to strip-search female prisoners.

For too many of those who mouth the 'trans woman are women' mantra, even to consider such questions is tantamount to transphobia. The result can be an absolutist mindset that brooks no dissent. For some at least, it can justify threats and violence.

But as Jo Phoenix argued in her interview, all those involved in education have a duty to teach the next generation "how to have debate... how to encounter different ideas", and to do so in a way that does not degenerate into anger, shouting and threats. She went on to say that in the 1980s she was "a firebrand young feminist". But:

When I encountered highly sexist ideas, about why women get raped, I didn't sit there and try and cancel those people. We took those ideas to pieces, because the point was to challenge the idea, not to harass the people.

Jo is one of several speakers at our joint event with the feminist movement, Woman's Place UK, on London 27 October: a Woman's Place is not in prison. The Labour MP Rosie Duffield, our Chair of Trustees Charlie Weinberg, and Frances Crook, in her last speech before standing down as Chief Executive of the Howard League, are among the other speakers.

As a charity working in the field of public education, we take seriously the importance of holding the space for dialogue, debate, reflection and the exploration of difficult and challenging ideas. Without it, ideas tend to ossify, knowledge stagnates.

In keeping with this, next week, in the latest of our "Lunch with..." series, Pragna Patel from Southall Black Sisters and Suresh Grover from The Monitoring Group will be discussing the long struggle for racial justice and what the future might hold.

I can't wait. Hope to see you there.