AGenderCriticalDad

somebody once said that punks are good people cosplaying evil people and hippies are evil people cosplaying good people and I will never stop thinking about that

🔥🚨JUST IN: Aaron Rose Philip who is hailed as the the first Black transgender woman with quadriplegic cerebral palsy to be signed to a major modeling agency was spotted at Met Gala.

new banksy artwork, a man blinded by his flag

One of my favourite sweet treats! Flapjacks! Made these ones for my lunchbox ☺️😋

STATEMENT: The High Court’s judgment in R (University of Sussex) v Office for Students has just been handed down, and it represents a serious setback for those concerned with freedom of speech and academic freedom on campus. We’re still working through the detail, but the key points are already clear. At the heart of the ruling are three findings that materially narrow the routes by which the regulator can enforce free-speech protections. First, the court adopts a restrictive interpretation of what counts as a “governing document”. In practice, that means the OfS cannot use its core regulatory condition — Condition E1, which requires universities’ governing documents to uphold free speech and academic freedom — to reach ordinary internal policy frameworks via the “governing documents” route. That matters because EDI policies, harassment codes and reporting systems are often the mechanisms through which lawful but, to some, upsetting speech is regulated on campus. The risk is that a whole layer of policies which, in practice, govern campus culture will now sit beyond the same level of regulatory scrutiny. Second, it resets the meaning of “freedom of speech within the law”. The OfS had treated one of Sussex’s contested policies as problematic because it was capable of capturing lawful speech. The court rejects that approach, holding that the OfS had not properly applied the structured analysis its own guidance requires. Although the regulator accepts that lawful speech may, in some circumstances, be restricted where there are no reasonably practicable steps to secure it and the restriction is justified and proportionate, the court found that it had effectively treated the capture of lawful speech as sufficient to establish a breach. The danger is obvious: the fight over lawful speech will now be pushed into case-by-case balancing exercises, precisely the terrain on which universities have long sought to defend restrictive internal policies. Third, the court gives “academic freedom” a hard-edged but narrow statutory meaning. The relevant legal threshold is whether an academic is placed in jeopardy of losing their job or privileges — not whether they are subjected to investigation, pressure, reputational damage, or a broader chilling effect. On this point too, the OfS’s approach was found to be legally flawed. Yet for academics, the reality is that pressure rarely operates at that level. Instead, it takes softer forms — cancellation, ostracism, exclusion from networks and opportunities, reputational damage — all of which can chill speech long before anyone is formally “in jeopardy” of losing their job. The result is that while the statutory duties to protect academic freedom and freedom of speech remain in place, a gap has opened up between the high-level documents the regulator can scrutinise and the ways speech is managed on campus in practice. We hope the OfS appeals this ruling. Having already stripped students out of the new free-speech complaints scheme, the government has turned the Office for Students into the Office for everyone but students. Now, if this ruling stands and confines the regulator to universities’ formal “governing documents”, while pushing disputes over lawful speech back into case-by-case proportionality tests, the OfS may find its most direct route to the EDI policies and reporting systems through which speech is actually policed cut off — creating the Office for no one at all.