In Sheffield this week, the National Union of Students’ LGBT+ Campaign passed a motion which resolved to encourage university LGBT+ societies with a gay men’s representative to drop the role as as “gay men do not face oppression as gay men within the LGBT+ community and do not need a reserved place on society committees.”
This was even as resolutions at the same conference highlighted that men who have sex with men are “disproportionately” at risk of violence and HIV, reports Pink News.
Motion 408 of the NUS Conference sought to strengthen ‘No Platforming’ and ‘safe spaces’, both of which are policies in which radical left wing students of the National Union of Students (NUS) decide what should and should not be censored for the wellbeing of students in Britain.
Slamming a ‘Free Speech University Ranking’ list assembled by spiked magazine, the NUS document names spiked and this list as “the epitome of this challenge to safe(r) spaces, and they are misleading and wrongheaded.”
Vowing for “safe(r) spaces” by defining them as “including zero tolerance for discriminatory behaviour, being aware of the impact of one’s language, having autonomous spaces for marginalised groups and being respectful of marginalised people’s subjective experiences” the Conference argued that “misogyny, transphobia, racism and biphobia are often present in LGBT+ societies. This is unfortunately more likely to occur when the society is dominated by white cis gay men.”
“Cis” is a term used by some transgender rights activists, from the Latin for “on this side of”, to denote difference from its antonym, “trans-”, meaning “across from” or “on the other side of”, when discussing gender. It basically means that people self-identify themselves as the gender with which they were born — men identifying as men and women identifying as women.
Another motion which passed in Sheffield alongside Motion 408 was Motion 505: “Dear cis straight academics, stop erasing my identity”, which asserts that “Many teaching academics use heteronormative language when talking about relationships”, worrying that this “alienates” and “dehumanises” “LGBT+ students”.
Outlining that “NUS UK is in full recognition of non-binary genders, which many academics fail to include”, the Conference resolved to encourage teaching academics to “exclude offensive language” and to encourage unions to provide “LGBT+ awareness training” to academics.
At the Conference, Motion 306 also passed which was for PrEP — a medical treatment which costs more than $1,000 a month and can prevent HIV infection even during condomless sexual encounters — to “be made available on the NHS for free”.
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