Inside the Lecture Theatre

AFAF member, Jessica Evans, gives her personal account of what happened at the Lecture by Michael Foran at Keble College, Oxford, on 5 June 2026

I attended Lecture 2 in Michael’s series of lectures based on themes from his new book . Arriving at Keble College building, I immediately noticed a pair of persons easily identified by the trained eye as ‘trans activists’ waiting outside.  I’d only heard that there’d been some kind of disruption at the first lecture but I didn’t know the details. As I was going in, security said to the man and the green-haired young woman, ‘you were highly inappropriate last week so you can’t come in’. I heard later that they had promised security they wouldn’t do it again. After being admitted by reception, I joined the queue of people waiting to be admitted into the lecture theatre. There was obviously something going on as there were furtive and nervous discussions amongst various college officials wearing smart suits and white shirts. Some wore the Pride lanyard.

We all filed in and sat in the raked lecture theatre rows including the activist pair. At 5pm, Foran didn’t appear. Then the pair walked to the front and each delivered their monologues which included words to the effect of ‘transphobic bigots’. They were drowned out by some of the older audience members asking them to listen to the lecture and then join in the discussion with Foran, who then started banging on the desks to drown them out. Younger attendees looked alarmed and confused. The protesters left the theatre and then another pair of activists who had been sitting in the audience got up and give their monologue, after which they too left. During this whole period the Proctor and/or university official who was in the room, was being entreated to remove them, but they leaned back and just listened. Then Michael Foran emerged from the back of the room where he’d obviously been waiting until the protesters were gone. He started with:

‘I’m sorry for the delay, it is a shame that protesters don’t want to engage with the exact kind of work a university is supposed to engage in, which is to challenge ideas in a manner that displays virtues of academic charity. That doesn’t mean you don’t challenge academic ideas, it just means you challenge them in a university context. Anyway, if there is anybody in the room who has views about this critical topic, please I encourage you to stay listen to the lecture and ask challenging questions afterwards.’

This lecture was thus delayed by 10 minutes leaving less time at the end for Q&A and discussion.

It was only afterwards that I found out about what had happened at the first lecture, from watching a video recording. The same pair of activists who’d disrupted the second lecture had interrupted him, standing in front of his lectern and gave their monologue. They told the audience that he was a ‘bigot’ who ‘masks his transphobia behind a thin veneer of academia.’ In the video we see Foran trying to engage with them, asking them to stop and join the audience and listen to his lecture. He leaves the room in frustration because (I would guess) he cannot stand there being humiliated and turned into an onlooker during an occasion that is about his research. Then he returns and the pair continue to harangue him and the audience, telling them to join them in walking out and refusing to ‘platform this bigot’. This is likely to be harassment of the lecturer by Oxford University’s standard definition: ‘Vigorous academic debate will not amount to harassment when it is conducted respectfully and without violating the dignity of others or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for them’. Harassment Policy | Equality and Diversity Unit.

After the second lecture, protesters who are apparently linked together in a group called Oxford4TransRights tweeted threats targeting attendees and specifically students.

I have established now that the Proctors knew that these protesters had reappeared at the second lecture and let them into the second one anyway. According to one commentator, Foran had already told the Proctors he would not continue the series if disruption occurred and, indeed, he was reassured no further protest would be permitted. Therefore, this was not protected protest but conduct that interfered with the talks themselves. As over one hundred academics subsequently claimed in an open letter, the Proctors were enabling the ‘Heckler’s Veto.

Moreover, it was not, in my view, an exercise of academic speech defined in Oxford University’s own policy as ‘serving legitimate academic purpose’. The protesters – they are in my view disruptors – have no interest in debate, evidence, or even improving your own arguments by considering the strongest argument against it, let alone fine-tuned discussions of legal technicalities of equality law with which Foran is concerned.  It is often said that ‘different points of view’ must be allowed to be aired in academic environments but this belies the fact that scholars such as Foran aim to be objective, careful, and painstakingly detailed in their examination of the meaning and consequences of equality law as it is, for all the protected characteristics, not what anyone wants it to be, to adapt barrister Akua Reindorf’s words events-review-report-university-of-essex-september-2021.pdf 243.11. The disruptors, in just labelling him a transphobic bigot, are about as far from scholarly behaviour that it’s possible to be.

Photo Credit: James Brahm (2019) The centre courtyard of the H B Allen Centre, Keble College, Oxford. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license