Cambridge pupil units up free-speech society after being focused for studying ‘Terf’ gender-critical books

A Cambridge student has set up a free speech society after being targeted for reading ‘Terf’ gender-critical books.

Thea Sewell, 20, is running a female-only group to ‘encourage women to speak freely’ after she was ostracised for believing that biological sex is real. 

The philosophy student said she has been shouted at in the street, with one bully even making a carving on her door reading ‘Terf’ – a derogatory term for gender-critical women.

The abuse started when one of Miss Sewell’s friends discovered she owned books which question transgender ideology.

These included writings by Kathleen Stock, the former University of Sussex professor, who was hounded out of her job by trans activists.

‘She told me that I was a bigot and that everyone deserved to know my hateful views on trans people,’ Miss Sewell said of the friend.

‘It seemed like she was going to make it her mission to turn everyone against me. I had a panic attack.’

Word got around, and she was swiftly ‘cancelled’ by the college community.

‘Pretty much all of my friends, bar one or two, completely cut me off,’ she added.

‘I would walk into college, and everyone was staring and giving me horrible looks.

‘I had a few friends come to me and say, “I love you but for social optics, can’t be seen with you in public.”

‘How am I supposed to go to dinner and sit in the dining hall completely by myself?’

Miss Sewell, a second-year at Christ’s College, said her views had been partly formed from being a victim of abduction and serious sexual assault when she was 14.

The incident resulted in a prison sentence for her attacker, who is in his 50s.

She said: ‘It absolutely has informed my beliefs because I know just how important single-sex spaces are for women.’

Terf – short for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’ – has become an insult used to put down women who argue for female-only spaces, for example in prisons and hospitals.

Miss Sewell has now co-founded the Cambridge University Society of Women (CUSW) with other gender-critical students to fight for the right to express their views.

Cambridge has recently come under fire after Newnham, its oldest women-only college, said it would welcome trans women as students despite April’s Supreme Court ruling that the definition of a woman under the Equality Act means someone who was born female.

The wider university, however, has banned transgender women from women’s college boat races following the court’s clarification on the legal definition.

Miss Sewell said she had bought the books during a talk by Helen Joyce, the gender-critical author, in April.

She said she would not consider herself a ‘Terf’ because it does not capture the ‘nuance’ of her view. 

She told The Telegraph she had responded to criticism from another fellow student by saying: ‘I’m a philosophy student. I’m going to own philosophy books. I could also own Mein Kampf. It wouldn’t make me a Nazi.’

She added: ‘Her response was that buying books from bigots is the same as being a bigot.’

Miss Sewell reported the bullying to college authorities and moved rooms to escape being targeted.

‘I was transporting my stuff from my old room to my new room in the middle of the night,’ she said.

‘That’s how I was doing it, because I was too afraid. And one night, I went to my old room to get some stuff and “Terf” had been scratched into my door.’

She said she was ‘outraged’ at her treatment by fellow students, especially since many knew she was a survivor of abuse. 

The college condemned her treatment and launched an investigation, but she believes there is ‘not much they can do’ to stop the ostracism.

She added: ‘We need a real culture change because people are really, really scared to speak their minds, academics and students alike.’

The Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF), which campaigns for free speech at universities, has now written to the university highlighting Miss Sewell’s case and accusing it of not taking free speech protections for gender-critical students seriously.

They said the Christ’s freedom of speech policy is hard for students to find online – in contrast to its LGBT+ guidance.

A CAF spokesman said: ‘Thea’s treatment by her fellow students shows that the bigotry and cowardice characteristic of the woke movement are deeply entrenched in our universities.

‘It will take more than a change in the law to uproot them.’

Cambridge University was approached for comment.