Dr Michael Foran, Associate Professor of Law and Fellow of Keble College, has cancelled the remaining lectures in a series on sex, gender identity, and the law, following protests at two of the events.

The lecture series, hosted by Keble College, examined themes from Foran’s recent book Sex, Gender Identity and the Law. Topics included the legal treatment of sex, single-sex spaces, and gender-identity beliefs, and sexual consent.

Foran is an expert in equality and anti-discrimination law, whose work has been cited by the UK Supreme Court. His lecture series was delivered alongside the publication of his book, which traces the history of how sex has changed within UK law, and its implications for ongoing controversies over single-sex spaces, freedom of expression, and sexual intimacy. Protesters said his positions on sex and gender identity, and his associations with certain campaign groups, motivated their demonstrations. They told Cherwell: “We have a moral responsibility to challenge transphobic rhetoric, even when it’s dressed up in academia.”

The protesters also argued that Foran’s associations with organisations such as Sex Matters and the Women’s Rights Network, which they described as working to “erode the rights of trans people”, made his platforming by the University a harmful rather than neutral act. They further argued that his work “weaponises the language of feminism to pit women’s rights against trans rights”.

Footage of the protests, which has circulated widely on social media, appears to show protesters standing to read statements before leaving the events. A statement shared by individuals involved in the protests, including the Oxford LGBTQ+ Society’s President, who appeared in footage circulated online, disputed characterisations of their actions as harassment or bullying. They told Cherwell they had “read out short statements, and left peacefully”, and that Foran had been able to continue delivering his lectures after they left. The statement said the decision to cancel the remaining events “was entirely his own” and not something the protesters had called for.

The protestors also told Cherwell that engaging with Foran through the lectures’ question-and-answer sessions would have required them to challenge his views within a format that he controlled. They added that the protest allowed them to “create our own space for expression”, and rejected suggestions that their actions were “anti-intellectual”.

In a statement posted on social media following the cancellations, Foran described the decision to cancel his remaining lectures as “deeply lamentable” and said that disagreement with a speaker’s views should be expressed through debate rather than disruption. 

The protests attracted significant attention online, including from former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who criticised them on social media, describing them as an attack on free speech. Protesters have argued that their actions constituted a peaceful and lawful form of political expression, and rejected media portrayals of their actions as intimidating or harassing.

The University of Oxford told Cherwell: “Freedom of speech and academic freedom are fundamental to the University of Oxford. Members of our academic community must be able to teach, research, speak and debate within the law, including on issues that are controversial or strongly contested. Equally, we support the right to lawful protest and civil disagreement.” 

The University added that despite interruptions at the start, the first two talks proceeded and continued uninterrupted, and said it was “concerned that the series will not now be completed as planned”. It confirmed it would work with Foran to explore how the remaining events might take place.

A year is a long time: enough to call a place home, enough to strip away the bright facade of newness. I’ve spent my year abroad at this university, unstuck in time. My friends at home have lived a thousand different lives in the interim, and I suppose so have I. But this place is different. It’s somewhere that’s nearly impossible to explain. My friends ask me about how it compares to Brown University, and I find myself at a loss. The differences are manifold; they’re cosmically different, worlds apart. How can I express how I feel about Oxford? How can I capture this rapturous feeling? I cannot hope to explain my world here. And yet, I must try. I love this place, I hate this place, I can’t bear to leave it behind. I don’t think it will ever truly leave me.

I write to tell you all what this place means to me. To tell you what it has been to take a year abroad. 

Michaelmas

Oxford still seemed romantic, a sort of richly brocaded city of dreaming; it was all twisting spires and ancient promises. The city was new, freshly minted in my mind. Things felt heavier: the air, the weight of age, the frantic, feverish rhythm of life. That was particularly significant, the speed at which everything seemed to go. Two months is not a long time. The rate of coursework, essays, and even social activities seemed breakneck. I found myself settling into my modules, grinding out two essays every single week. I would go to the Radcliffe Camera and bask under the elegant arches and soft incandescent light. Work felt special when it was beneath the watchful eye of some marble statue. I rowed in the mornings, and swam on Saturdays. Days were spent dutifully working, nights were consumed by revelry. 

There was something on every single evening. Whether it was formals (such an alien concept, even to students in the UK, I’m sure), college BOPs, club nights, socials, or debate nights, I was meeting new people at a rate which rivalled my own first year of university. Formal dinners were particularly dazzling – dressing up for a three-course meal in a vaulted hall evoked some sort of Public school fantasy – and it’s no surprise I went to as many as I could afford. I involved myself in societies which seemed novel and interesting. I made friends in student politics, and watched with mild amusement as intrigues unfolded on a scale unlike any I’d seen before. It felt very…Oxford. It was somewhat alluring, the draw of the glitz and glamour of an entirely different social world. 

But my disillusionment with student politics came early into the term. One night, sequestered in a college common room, beneath dim lights, I found myself at a hushed afters. The group was discussing one of my friends, saying terrible things. I knew then what I know now: I wanted no part of that world. I resolved to extricate myself. 

Like any new thing, Michaelmas was bright, exciting, and romantic. Underneath the shine, I found that some truths were better left buried. The journey out of darkness was not easy or linear, but it was worth it.

Hilary

Hilary began as it ended, with a sort of incorrigible grey. There was a lightness to it, at some point in the middle, when things fell into place. When the rhythms of life here began to feel as normal as breathing. I wrote so much that term: articles for a student paper, modules on Mesopotamia and Ethnobotany, and pages and pages in my journal. I also took up ice skating. There was something freeing about gliding across that glittering rink. It smiled at me, kissed my cheeks with cool breath, and pushed my feet across frozen ground. I found peace in my solo skates, joy in skating with others. Collapsing into bed, face flushed from the cold, I could not have been happier.

By this point, the glamour of student politics had thoroughly worn off. It seemed more like a tired old thing, full of fatigued people. Yet still, friends found themselves deeper entrenched in the machinery of it. I pulled further and further away as they ran elections and relayed intrigues. 

Working on the student paper was my saving grace, with the Schwarzman becoming an unlikely refuge. We spent long hours below that sun-soaked ceiling, passing the day in leisurely conversation. We discussed the paper, pitched articles, and wrote silly headlines that could never be published. Little work was done, even when dusk came and went. The watchful oculus considered us carefully, as we raced about on rolling chairs under the moonlight. We would stay into the early morning hours, dancing, singing, running around that hollowed-out space. The darkness was warm.

Nights at the Schwarzman melted into afters at one room or another. Twilight spent in fervent conversation, marked by tea or cheese and crackers. I felt so full in these liminal moments. Pink parties, game cafes, and homemade DnD campaigns made my time at college all the brighter. Although the end of Hilary was marked by a particularly nasty bout of pneumonia, I felt satisfied with all I’d done in my grey little term. 

Sometimes, in that mid-year lull, the only thing to do is to keep pressing forward. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. The articles and essays I wrote that term are still some of my favourites.

Trinity

May night was long and dark, a treacherous road twisting round the riverbend. We walked in cold twilight. Moonbeams glanced across my cheek – a quiet beacon in the near black. The neon glow of varsity faded into dawn, slowly. When the sun finally turned Magdalen Tower blushing red, the choir heralded the start of spring. May morning shone just a bit too brightly, full of clamorous noise and clatter. Dancing and merry bells followed me all the way into my belated slumber. 

Oxford was beginning to shimmer beneath the brilliant sunshine. It made everything feel just a bit more hopeful. I was determined to spend the term trying an entirely new set of activities. I shed the politics which made Hilary drag endlessly, and leaned into my renewed joy for writing. I  joined two magazines and a different student paper. These turned out to be such sources of light: full of incredible, creative people, and even more incredible work. Writing articles, performing pieces, editing work, it was all so fulfilling. I looked forward every week to our lay-ins, or planning meetings for events. 

Trinity was a time of great celebration. I attended countless birthdays, including my own. My friends made me such thoughtful cakes; I was laughing long into the night. It was so nice to be with the people who made Oxford special. I turned 21 under the multicoloured lights at the Brasenose Ball. It felt magical, to be able to mark the occasion in such a fairytale manner. I will always remember the purple glow and the soft music in the background as I checked my watch, and hugged my friend tight when the hour hand slid to midnight. 

Ultimately, it was the small moments that made Trinity particularly special: whether it was simply studying with finalists, or watching Eurovision for the first time on my friend’s bed (we ate too many of her snacks and took our bets entirely too seriously). 

I must have done absolutely no revision the second the sun came out. Maybe it was the warmth of the afternoon light on my face at Port Meadow, or the cool depths of Hinksey Lake, but those days passed in such a calm haze. The picture of idyllic summertime. 

Sometimes, letting go is just a chance for a new beginning. 

__

Oxford has been so many things. I’ve sought out every hidden place and tried every new activity that I could reasonably fit around my coursework. I’ve met so many important people who have impacted my life in countless ways. It took time to find my place here. There was a significant period of trial and error, but I’ve somehow made it to where I am happiest. I do not regret the experiences I tried which were not quite right for me. I learned from them, they were meaningful, and made for fantastic stories. 

When I return to Brown in the autumn, I will carry all of these experiences with me. I will hold them close to my heart, and I will try, and fail, and try again to explain how much they mean to me. If you are embarking on a year abroad, whether for your third year of Modern Languages, or to Oxford just like me, prepare to try everything. Prepare to change, to experience as many new things as you possibly can. You will return different, but you will be better for it. 

A year is a long time to be away from home. 

It’s impossible to not be romantic about football, and by that I mean Romantic with a capital R. Turns out the literary canon of the Romantics and the sporting world share an unexpected similarity: they’re both home to a unanimously agreed-upon Big Six. 

In this day and age being able to discuss both versions with an elementary level of proficiency grants you similar amounts of cultural capital (albeit in very different circles). Think football is the domain of the intellectually challenged? Could you recite the entire Premier League standings but not a single poem? Doesn’t matter – these parallels go either way, and hopefully at least one side of the equation will be recognisable. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Manchester City

Coleridge’s most famous work – ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ – works best when read as a summary of City’s journey:

The titular mariner’s ship (Manchester City) gets stuck in the icy waters of the Antarctic (relegated in 2001). An albatross (the United Arab Emirates) appears and leads the ship out of the ice jam (provides an injection of money), into clearer waters and better winds (breaking the British transfer record and spending over £100 million pounds in a summer). Despite things going splendidly as the albatross is fed and loved by the crew (that Aguero goal), the mariner shoots the bird (for cohesion’s sake, read “With my cross-bow / I shot the Albatross” as “With my Abu Dhabi money / I breached the FFP rules” instead). 

To no one’s surprise, this brings down the wrath of spirits and supernatural forces, and the mariner is forced by his crew to wear the albatross’s dead body around his neck as a sign of the burden he must bear. The rest of his crew perish one by one, but the mariner is consigned to eternal life: though the albatross eventually falls from his neck, he’s still doomed to wander the earth, telling his story to those he meets. 

Like the mariner, a shadow the size of 115 charges hangs over City’s unprecedented success – the continental treble and four consecutive Premier League titles. An elephant in the room might as well be an albatross around the neck. One must imagine Pep Guardiola a mariner aboard the golden ship of his club’s crest. 

Percy Shelley – Manchester United 

This is the easiest comparison of all to make. Incredibly divisive among their peers, but indisputably influential in determining the landscape of the era: the man or the football club? Both have famously swung between extremes of ecstasy or despair and experienced prolonged periods of personal crisis: put being expelled from Oxford and eloping with 16-year-old Mary Shelley as a married man up there with paying Ruben Amorim 10 million Great British pounds to leave. 

But the thing that seals the deal is that they both share the same defining narrative: a tale of the ruins of a man who thought himself and his legacy eternal. It’s so fitting you could be forgiven for thinking Shelley predicted the trajectory of Manchester United with ‘Ozymandias’, written a solid 60 years before the club was even founded. I met a traveller from an antique land (apparently Manchester received city-status in March 1853, which places it quite firmly in the realm of antiquity) who told me about a statue with frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command (Ferguson was already rather old when they immortalised him in bronze, and his visage has a real degree of condescension to it.) 

My name is Sir Alex Ferguson, manager of managers. Look upon what my prodigal players have gone on to be, ye mighty, and despair. The Theatre of Dreams isn’t exactly a “colossal wreck” yet, but what with the well-known reports of rat infestations and waterfalls pouring down through the roof, they don’t seem to be too far off. 

Lord Byron – Arsenal

Cosmopolitan, rebellious, countercultural: Byron gained this reputation from scandals that ranged from bisexuality to a rumoured incestuous affair with his half-sister, Arsenal from being the first English top-flight team to field an all-foreign starting XI and becoming synonymous with a space for black cultural expression. 

It’s probably bold to compare a nobleman playboy who drank wine out of his ancestor’s skull to a white-haired bespectacled Frenchman who dressed like a stern professor, but Byron influenced European Romanticism in much the same way Wenger revolutionised the landscape of English football. Their lasting legacy has come to define them to the layman: Byron with the literary archetype of the Byronic hero – brooding, torn, romantic – and Arsenal with their Invincibles. 

Byron was a connoisseur of leaving and the difficulty and complexity of goodbyes recur again and again in his poetry; of Don Juan, leaving Spain, he wrote: “First partings form a lesson hard to learn […] there is a shock that sets one’s heart ajar”. What he would’ve written about Wenger’s departure. 

John Keats – Tottenham Hotspur

A questionable inclusion in the Big Six for some: during his lifetime Keats wouldn’t have been placed in the company of the others mentioned above. He had a relationship of mutual distaste with Byron in particular, who thought Keats an annoyance beneath his social and literary standing; in turn, Keats simultaneously envied and disliked Byron’s fame and aristocracy, and thought his literary prowess overrated (convinced yet?) Both have had a few distinctly memorable hits: Kane, Son, Ode on a Grecian Urn. 

Most fittingly, Keats coined the concept of “negative capability” – the ability to “be in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any reaching after fact and reason”. Such a phrase has never captured Spurs better. While Keats originally envisioned it as a poet’s ability to sink into the objects or characters he was writing about without fitting them into rigid structures of logic, the absolute incomprehensibility of being Spursy is perhaps the prime example of modern negative capability. 

To be Spurs is to be negatively capable, to be negatively capable Spurs – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 

William Wordsworth – Chelsea

A clarity to the earlier years that has become compromised in later life. Wordsworth had a “Great Decade” of life in which he produced some era-defining works, chief among them the poem ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ (probably the bane of most GCSE students’ existence) and The Prelude, his great autobiographical work. There was something undeniably beautiful about Chelsea’s older days – their own Great Decade, if you will: Lampard, Terry, Mourinho’s 04-05 side whose record of 15 goals conceded in a season still stands unmatched. 

Every rise also has to have a fall. Later in his life Wordsworth’s decline is mostly attributed to his excessive self-editing; he transformed his lines, once famed for their simplicity, into something more affected, losing the core of his work. Todd Boehly’s Chelsea have spent ludicrous sums of money on squad-building to no avail and fired ten managers in the last ten years (interims generously excluded). Hopefully they can find a force to follow that might provide the same stability Christianity brought Wordsworth in his middle age. 

William Blake – Liverpool

Best known for ‘Tyger, Tyger’, Blake’s work carries a distinct feeling of mystical intensity, of seeing remarkable things in very ordinary places. A creative visionary who crafted a mythology of his own in his prophetic books, you can’t help but think he would have loved Anfield, the domain of a fervent working-class that has become imbued with a fervent mysticism all its own. (Blake should have spoken to Bill Shankly, who once reflected: “It’s a religion to them. The thousands who come here come to worship… it’s a sort of shrine.”) 

That aside, the experience of truly understanding Blake and of being a player under Jurgen Klopp’s gegenpressing system are about as similar as it gets: notoriously difficult to grapple with and incredibly tiring.