The biggest British Parliamentary debate competition in the world run by the Oxford Union pressures hundreds of children as young as 14 to declare their gender pronouns every year. The Mail has the story.
Competitors at Oxfords Schools, aged 14-18, are instructed by organisers to specify whether they are “he/she/they etc” at the start of each round.
Anyone who fails to comply with the equity policy may be disqualified from the contest “with immediate effect”.
Oxford Schools – whose 2025 competition is currently ongoing – is the largest British Parliamentary school-level debate competition in the world, and the largest debating contest in the UK.
It states thousands of students are invited to participate every year and that last year, over 350 schools competed.
A statement unearthed by MailOnline reads: “We operate a gender pronoun policy at Oxford Schools. At the start of each debate, the judge will ask each speaker to introduce themselves with their name and their gender pronoun (such as he/she/they etc), or they may declare no preference.
“This is intended to stop people being misgendered, and prepares students for other competitions and university debating, where such policy is standard.
“Just as people like to be called by their correct name, so they should be called by the pronoun they feel most comfortable with.”
Student testimonies suggest that in practice, participants are not given the option to declare “no preference” when they are each asked in turn to stand up and make their pronoun declaration.
The policy, which has been in force over the last seven years, has been branded “unacceptable” by free speech advocates and “indoctrination pure and simple” by gender critical activists.
Lord Young, the General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, told MailOnline: “This is unacceptable.
“What if the schoolchildren are debating whether sex is an immutable biological characteristic or a social construct that’s merely ‘assigned at birth’?
“By forcing the participants to declare their pronouns, which is a tacit acknowledgement that someone can become a member of the opposite sex, the organisers of the competition are siding with those who believe that sex is a social construct.
“This is particularly egregious given that the organiser of this debating contest is the Oxford Union, which is supposed to be a bastion of free speech.
“The conflict between sex-based women’s rights and trans rights is the subject of an ongoing public debate and not an issue on which the Oxford Union should take a side.
“The Free Speech Union will be writing to the Oxford Union, which is a registered charity, asking it to intervene and instruct the organisers of this competition to uphold the Union’s storied tradition of upholding free speech.”
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