This week it became clear that almost none of the adults whose job it is to teach students the truth are much inclined to do it. Even the doziest vice-chancellor must by now have twigged that gender ideology is dangerous bunk and that it lures in the most vulnerable – yet still they can’t bring themselves to speak out. This goes not just for academics, but for politicians in the education business too.

For anyone minded to understand how poisonous the atmosphere in universities is, the story of poor Professor David Gordon is horribly instructive. His ordeal began more than a year ago when he invited another professor, Alice Sullivan, to give a talk to his students at the University of Bristol. Sullivan is a professor of sociology and a quantitative data scientist at University College London, and the author of an excellent review, commissioned by the last government, into the damage done when official bodies misreport data and conflate gender with biological sex. Sullivan’s just the sort of woman you’d want your daft teens to learn from, to dent their certainties, to make them think.

Research is being skewed, students are being misled, staff are self-censoring and scared

This is not how Bristol University’s LGBTQI staff network saw it, though. It reacted to the news of Sullivan’s talk in very much the same way Shelley Duvall reacted to the sight of Jack Nicholson with an axe in The Shining. Allowing Sullivan to speak to students about gender would, it said, cause........

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