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Barriers to Research

Executive Summary

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) commissioned this independent review of data, statistics and research on sex and gender. The review presents findings in two final reports. Report one concerned data and statistics and was published in March 2025 (Sullivan, 2025). Report two (the current report) examines barriers to research.

This report sets out to investigate and describe barriers to research on sex and gender identity, and to make recommendations to assist in addressing such barriers.

Free speech, academic freedom, and scientific and scholarly rigour have all come under attack by those who believe that treating sex as an important category ‘denies the existence’ of trans people ^{[footnote 1]}. This ‘denial of existence’ is claimed to be an act of violence which in turn may be taken to justify harassment. Yet sex is a fundamental category across all of the disciplines which take human beings as their subjects, from the human sciences to the arts, humanities and social sciences.

In a climate where wider public discussion has been constrained, it is particularly important that universities provide a space where critical analysis, dialogue and the pursuit of knowledge can occur without fear. This matters for science and scholarship, for education, for public trust in universities, and for democracy. Academia must tolerate and encourage diverse viewpoints. But the university cannot fulfil its proper function if it permits behaviours which threaten the norms which are essential to the pursuit of truth and the dissemination of knowledge as a public good.

This report comes at a time of grave financial difficulty for universities. We have sought to provide recommendations which, wherever possible, would tend to reduce rather than increase costs.

We have reviewed information in the public domain and carried out an open call for evidence.

Terminology and definitions

A note on terminology. Gender-critical beliefs are defined in UK law as the belief ‘that biological sex is real, important, immutable and not to be conflated with gender identity’ (Forstater vs CGD Europe and Others, 2021)^{[footnote 2]}. We use the term gender critical in this sense in this report. Gender-critical beliefs encompass and are compatible with a wide range of views. The belief ‘that biological sex is real, important, immutable and not to be conflated with gender identity’ was taken for granted until very recently, and did not require a special label Sullivan and Todd, 2023). Neither does it imply belief in any particular theoretical or political perspective. Examples of gender-critical positions in substantive policy debates include the view that males should not be entitled to compete in the women’s category in sports and that males should not be entitled to access to women-only spaces, such as women’s prisons or women’s rape crisis centres. These are mainstream views,^{[footnote 3]} many people taking such positions may not use the term ‘gender critical’ to describe themselves and many may be unfamiliar with the term. Some may actively reject the term ‘gender critical’. Nevertheless, it has become necessary to have a term to refer to a belief in the reality of sex.

We define a belief in gender-identity theory as the negation of at least one of the four aspects of gender-critical belief: in other words, the assertion that biological sex is not real and/or not important and/or not immutable, and/or that gender identity and sex cannot be clearly distinguished. Some advocates of gender-identity theory adopt all four claims, either explicitly or implicitly. We acknowledge that belief in gender-identity theory encompasses a range of positions, some more nuanced than others, and that advocates for gender-identity views may describe themselves and their views in diverse ways and may not use the term gender-identity theory. However, for the purposes of this report, it is useful to have clear terms for those who, broadly speaking, either accept or reject gender-critical beliefs as they are defined in UK law.

Review of information in the public domain

It is clear that academics and students who have insisted that sex is a real and socially significant category have experienced barriers to research, broadly defined. This includes campaigns of harassment and intimidation. In the introduction to this report, we document cases of no-platforming and disruption of events, and discrimination at various points in the research system, including by ethics committees and academic publishers and journals^{[footnote 4]}. We refer to legal cases, notably the judgment in the employment tribunal case of Jo Phoenix vs The Open University. The tribunal found that Professor Phoenix was discriminated against, harassed, constructively unfairly dismissed and victimised by the Open University (OU), due to her belief in the reality and importance of sex^{[footnote 5]}. Employment Tribunals are matters of public record; no case equivalent to that of Professor Phoenix, and others mentioned below, brought by an academic who holds the opposing view, has been reported, and none was drawn to our attention during this review.

The introduction also discusses the growth of centralised bureaucracy and loss of academic autonomy within higher education, and the growth of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) departments and networks. These trends have provided levers for activists pursuing agendas which are not compatible with the truth-seeking mission of universities. The use of external policy schemes has exacerbated these trends, contributing to a lack of critical examination of policy and practice within institutions.

Campaigns to ‘cancel’ individuals and groups within academia often feature open letters and statements circulated via social media and/or messages sent to large groups via internal email. Sometimes they have included physical leafleting. We have compiled a selection of 58 statements and messages from the period between 2015 and 2024, which document this phenomenon in Appendix 1. These open messages typically include false, defamatory and hyperbolic smears, such as comparing people who believe that sex is binary to eugenicists, racists, colonialists, anti-Semites, fascists or ‘hate groups’, and accusations of bigotry and transphobia. In some cases, such messages have been produced and/or disseminated by university staff LGBTQ+ networks. We have also included examples of messages from university managers which promote the idea that the view that sex is real and important is hateful, or that the presence of such views on campus is distressing. There is no public record of equivalent campaigns from within the academy directed at those who contest that sex is binary, immutable and often significant, and no analogous material to that described above was shared with us during the review^{[footnote 6]}.

We document materials from the ‘Stock Out’ campaign against Kathleen Stock during her tenure as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex separately in Appendix 3. We are not aware of any equivalent campaign against an academic who disagrees with the gender-critical perspective.

Call for evidence

A call for evidence to the review was hosted on a University College London (UCL) project page^{[footnote 7]} and publicised through a piece in Times Higher Education^{[footnote 8]}, the leading periodical aimed at higher education professionals in the UK, through the X/Twitter account set up for the Review, and via the lead researcher's X/Twitter account. The call made clear that responses were welcome from any perspective.

The call for evidence presented an opportunity to gain insights from the experiences of researchers from any perspective on sex and gender, including those who have not gone public with their stories. The evidence gathered is largely qualitative and not intended to quantify the extent of the problems raised, but rather to provide an understanding of the processes involved with a view to informing potential solutions.

We are not interested only in the sorts of cases that generate headlines in the press, but also in examples that might seem mundane, but which have nevertheless affected the researcher and their research. Respondents were asked to provide evidence under the following headings: 1. Research ethics processes; 2. Barriers to research funding; 3. Barriers to data collection; 4. Barriers to publication; 5. Self-censorship and chilling effects; 6. No-platforming; 7. Barriers to holding events; 8. Disinvitations from projects or collaborations; 9. Discrimination by university administrators or services; 10. Bullying, harassment and ostracism; 11. Complaints, including coordinated complaints; 12. Management behaviour; 13. Compelled speech; 14. Barriers to career progression; 15. Institutional policies and training; 16. Barriers affecting students; 17. Other.

As noted further below, the call was also shared by the Feminist Gender Equality Network (FGEN), which describes itself as ‘a major new global movement, dedicated to countering anti-trans propaganda at home and abroad, and spear-headed by academics in UK universities.’ FGEN emailed its membership providing a ‘Guide to completing the survey’ including template responses. The email and guide are provided in Appendix 2. The template responses express hostility to gender-critical views, for example likening these views to fascism.

Overview of submissions

We received 130 completed submissions to the review via an online portal. We also received a further ten responses directly via email. All of the email responses were from gender-critical academics. 73 (56%) of the online respondents expressed agreement with gender-critical views, 52 (40%) expressed disagreement, and in the remaining six cases no view was expressed or could be inferred.

Gender-critical respondents testified in detail to a range of barriers that they had faced across the research system. Some of these respondents had faced repeated discrimination and abuse. Others had their research blocked or delayed by ethics committees imposing criteria which in our view go beyond their proper remit. Some had faced severe personal consequences to their careers, mental health and wellbeing. Others had self-censored in order to avoid such consequences. This ‘chilling effect’ is strongly evidenced in the responses. Management responses to the problems respondents faced were typically perceived as inadequate.

Responses from individuals who disagreed with gender-critical views were typically less detailed. A strong theme that emerged from these responses was general fearfulness, fragility and a sense of threat at the idea of exposure to gender-critical views, or simply at the presence of people with such views within universities. Illustrative of this, a number of respondents raised fears about holding ‘trans inclusive’ events, but did not provide any examples of a specific event that had faced an attempt to prevent it from taking place, or physical protest or disruption. We are also not aware of any such incident ever being reported.

Respondents who agreed with gender-critical views were all concerned with hostility based on their research standpoint; those who disagreed with gender-critical views were as likely to use their response to express concern about hostility to transgender people as to relate responses to their research standpoint. A few asserted that problems such as securing funding or getting published must have been due to prejudice. All the gender-critical responses concerned behaviour within their professional community. Those who disagreed with the gender-critical position more often identified the main location of a hostile environment for their work as being outside the academy, for example in the media or on social media. A few respondents in this group emphasised the supportiveness of their working environment and contested the premiss of this review, namely that barriers to research on sex and gender are a problem.

Summary

The evidence we have reviewed does not support a narrative of a ‘polarised’ ‘toxic debate’ where ‘both sides’ have behaved badly. Rather, there is evidence of some university staff who disagree with gender-critical views behaving in ways that are outside the norms of the scientific and scholarly community, and which challenge these norms. The toxicity is generated by behaviours rather than by conflicting viewpoints as such. The staff involved in such behaviours constitute a small minority of university staff, yet the effects of tolerating and encouraging these behaviours are serious.

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