Victory over bigotry as High Court overturns transphobic university fine

Demanding equality for trans people in 2023 (Picture: alisdare1 on Flickr)

Transphobes at the Office for Students (OfS) have suffered a humiliation in the High Court.

Judges overturned a £585,000 fine on Wednesday imposed on Sussex University by the higher education watchdog. The High Court rejected its claims that the university had breached free speech regulations involving transphobic professor Kathleen Stock—who has recently added opposing decriminalising abortion to her CV.

The OfS pursued a lengthy investigation into the university’s policies, the protests by students and workers against Stock and her resignation in 2021.

Stock sparked outrage when she claimed, “Many trans women are still males with male genitalia.” And right wingers and university bosses rushed to her defence.

The watchdog took three and a half-years to dig up and present “evidence” that claimed the university’s policies on trans+ rights might stifle or restrict free speech.

In March 2025 the OfS finally ruled that the university had breached the right to free speech through its trans+ and non-binary equality policy statement.

The OfS slapped the record fine on the university to send a chilling message across campuses. 

But their findings were thrown out by the High Court. The ruling is a blow for Arif Ahmed, a former Cambridge University philosopher who led the investigation into Sussex University.

Ahmed was appointed by the last Tory government as the OfS’s first “free speech tsar” in 2023.

In an interview last year, Ahmed said that freedom of speech is “the most important thing for Western civilisation.”

“It’s the greatest thing we’ve had since the 17th century, and it is really important that we preserve it,” he said.

The OfS and Ahmed’s post were designed to be a battering ram to break down policies which aim to protect students from racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

And it was an attack on the democratic right of students to protest against transphobia.

The right only demand the right of the powerful to offend the oppressed.

But in a judgment on Wednesday, Mrs Justice Lieven slammed the OfS which had “misdirected itself”.

She said the regulator’s decision was “vitiated by bias” as it approached it “with a closed mind and had therefore unlawfully predetermined the decision”.

Stock finally left Sussex after big protests against her bigoted views. The local UCU union branch called for an investigation into institutional transphobia.

Everyone who protested against Stock and her harmful, hate-filled views should feel proud. Free speech cannot be used as an excuse for prejudice and bigotry.