Cambridge students launch women’s society in fight against university’s ‘trans obsession’

The new society launched with the message: “As the only openly and proudly single-sex society for women at the university, our mission is to facilitate women speaking freely in an all-female environment.

“We will be campaigning and fundraising to help women’s sex-based causes,” they declared in a social media post announcing their formation.

It is often the perception that larger parts of student discourse are dominated by transgender issues, and Ms Halligan argued that “university culture is obsessed with gender ideology”.

“All you can see are pronoun badges, rainbow flags, literature about transgender issues,” she recounted, listing off the various exhaustive affirmations and slogans often repeated on campus", she said.

“They don’t see enough dissent from trans ideology to realise that it represents the majority view outside the university environment,” the Master's student observed.

“Universities are totally doubling down. In Bristol, it was everywhere. I thought going to Cambridge, maybe it’d be less woke, and there’d be a difference after the Supreme Court ruling. Again, I was wrong.

“What we’re trying to do is take the insane identity politics out of biological sex,” she explained.

All three women attend Newnham College, founded in 1871 as one of the first institutions to admit women, and remained women-only until 2017, when trans identifying individuals began to be admitted.

They also all have their own reasons for banding together to found the CUSW, per The Telegraph.

Before Cambridge, Serena Worley studied journalism at the University of Oregon, where she shared a room with a trans-identified man who she described as “not a very nice person”.

The experience made her rethink her previous support of trans politics and led to her forming a women-only lesbian group. However, the proposal saw her ostracised by her friends and “quite suddenly utterly alone”.

After dropping out and joining Cambridge, she soon discovered: “Trans activism was everywhere. I thought I was just going to be able to avoid talking about it, keep my head down and focus on my degree.”

During her third year at Cambridge, Thea Sewell showed a friend her book collection, which included Material Girls by Kathleen Stock - the academic declared anathema by trans activists.

Her friend then “went out of her way to contact the biggest trans rights activists in my college because she thought they deserved to know what my views were”.

Ms Sewell explained this led to “complete ostracism, pointedly hostile receptions in public spaces, TERF [trans-exclusionary radical feminist] being scratched into my door".

“The few friends who did continue speaking to me refused to meet in public and said they were too scared to be seen with me,” she explained.

Their experiences led Ms Halligan to propose the idea of the CUSW, energetically declaring “let’s stick it to them” for their “war room”.

Ms Worley admitted she was “scared” when they began, owing to the pain experienced in Oregon.

The trio has already faced backlash within the student body, with Ms Sewell explaining: “Every other feminist society is denouncing us and mobilising against us. The undergraduate population of Cambridge has turned against us, as we were expecting.”

“They band together in group chats, parroting the usual slurs against us,” added Halligan.

Despite the abuse, all three are committed to the task that lies ahead.

“Once we’ve paid this horrible price of having to deal with trans rights activists’ flak – because I do believe it will be temporary – we’ll generate support and be able to do what we actually want to do, which is get young women back on track in this country,” Ms Halligan said.

She explained this will then allow them to “do some actual work that’s beneficial instead of having to fight the fire of the trans stuff”.

The CUSW has already received support from various organisations, including The Free Speech Union, and even a follow on X from JK Rowling.

“It means such a lot,” Ms Halligan expressed.

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