University cancels talk after speaker tweets support for Ricky Gervais trans joke
nme.comRicky Gervais.Baroness Claire Fox of Buckley – who was previously a Brexit Party MEP – had been due to give a talk that included the discussion of cancel culture and free speech.However, she had previously retweeted a joke by Gervais in a Netflix special, in which he referenced “the old-fashioned women, you know, the ones with wombs” and “the new ones we’ve been seeing lately with beards and cocks”.She wrote in her original tweet: “Skewered … trans-identity ideology.
I laughed. Kudos to @rickygervais for this,” which was flagged to the Royal Holloway Students’ Union president Maia Jarvis.In an email (via Daily Telegraph), Jarvis was reported to have said: “Claire Fox re-tweets and praises this video of Ricky Gervais being overtly transphobic.
I wonder if you have thought about the impact of bringing a person who is an advocate for hate towards trans people and publicly ridicules them.”The event was scrapped by debating society president Adam Ryan-Self, who blamed the student union and accused its officials of “censoring those that do not align with their (often left) ideology”.Fox said of the talk being cancelled (via The Times): “I had been cleared to talk by the university, because, funnily enough, I am not a hate-monger.
Then six societies complained to the student union. The student union rescinded their clearance and started pestering the society and putting a lot of pressure on them.
