It’s 2023 and a lesbian requires security guards to speak at the Oxford Union.

That image of Kathleen Stock arriving in Oxford yesterday, looking badass in shades and a baseball cap, surrounded by burly blokes who were tasked with protecting her from assault, shames Oxford university.

This is meant to be one of the highest seats of learning on earth. It’s the university whose name is synonymous with knowledge. And yet here was a thoughtful, moderate woman, a philosopher of repute, having to be spirited on to campus by bodyguards lest some hysteric attack her.

What has gone wrong, Oxford?

How did our universities become so hostile to reason?

Ms Stock’s thoughtcrime is well known. She thinks men are not women. Worse, she thinks a man never becomes a woman, regardless of what he does to his body. This is blasphemy in the eyes of trans activists and their allies in the political class. Stock, to them, is a sinner deserving of censure, or worse.

Her lesbianism is central to their persecutions. Stock speaks up for lesbian rights. She has written movingly about how the redefinition of the category of woman to include men who think they are women threatens to empty lesbianism of all meaning.

‘Lesbians are traditionally understood as females with a sexual orientation towards other females’, she says. And she is concerned that if someone with a penis can claim to be a lesbian – yes, this is happening – then lesbianism will be all but erased. The right of women who love women to have their own spaces, to have their own name, is existentially undermined, Stock believes, if any Tom, Dick or Harry can be recognised as a ‘gay woman’.

She’s right, of course. Every sensible person knows she is. Yet to a new cadre of ‘queer’ agitators, who believe subjective feelings of gender count for more than the truth of biological sex, all talk of same-sex attraction is ‘transphobic’.

Some even refer to lesbians who refuse to sleep with trans women as ‘genital fetishists’. Stock herself has heard that homophobic phrase; that poisonous idea that lesbians who refuse to have relations with bepenised people – what we used to call ‘men’ – are bigots.

It is almost 130 years since Lord Alfred Douglas was censored at Oxford university for writing about homosexuality. His poem Two Loves contained one of the best-known lines in modern British poetry – ‘The love that dare not speak its name’. That is, gayness.

It was published in the Chameleon, an openly homosexual journal for Oxford intellectuals. The literary elites were disgusted. Jerome K Jerome denounced the Chameleon as ‘an insult to the animal creation’. It was banned – or cancelled, to use modern parlance.

Fast forward to the 2020s, our supposedly more tolerant era, and once again a gay person is hounded at Oxford in part for her sin of defending same-sex attraction. We’ve gone from the love that dare not speak its name to the love that must not speak its name lest some bloke who delusionally thinks he’s a lesbian should feel offended.

Every member of that rainbow mob that turned up to shout at Stock should engage in some serious self-reflection. They need to ask themselves how they got to a position where they are fuming against a lesbian who thinks lesbians – and women more broadly – should have rights. How they became the modern equivalent of the moralistic boors who harangued Bosie.

In fact, all of us should reflect. How did our universities become so hostile to reason? Sex is real, men are men, only a woman can be a lesbian – people who left school at 16 understand these truths, yet the lucky young of Oxford apparently do not.

The Stockphobia we saw last night is a testament to the grip censorship has over our institutions. And this dictatorship of the easily offended was made possible, I’m afraid, by the silence of the liberals.

Virtually every right-thinking person is speaking up for Kathleen Stock and her liberty of self-expression. Rishi Sunak, the Times, much of the commentariat – all can see the barbarism of trying to prevent a reasoned woman from expressing her views.

But where were these defenders of free speech when less appetising people were being banned or harassed on campus? Everyone from hard-right types to perfectly normal people who support the state of Israel to critics of Islamist theocracy have been no-platformed in recent years. And, often, there’s just been shoe staring from supposed liberals.

To defend liberty, it is not enough to challenge instances of censorship – we must confront the entire logic of censorship. We must reject the idea that it is ever acceptable to crush speech in the name of protecting feelings. It was the elite’s failures on that front that paved the way for the demonisation of Stock as a moral transgressor whose hurtful views should be silenced.

Consider the student efforts to block David Irving from speaking at the Oxford Union in 2007. Irving and Stock could not be more different. He denies reality – specifically the Holocaust – where she defends reality. He is irrational, she’s brimming with common sense.

Yet the logic of the attempted silencing of Irving is indistinguishable from the ideology that underpins the witch-hunting of Stock. In both cases the cry goes out that words hurt, that the audience’s self-esteem matters more than the speaker’s freedom, that the peace of censorship is preferable to the tempestuous consequences of freedom.

No way. These regressive claims must always be opposed, whether they are being made in relation to an intellectual fraud or an intellectual truth-teller. As the American essayist HL Mencken said, we must defend liberty for the vile as well as the nice, because ‘it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all’.

So here’s your uncomfortable truth – it was the failure to defend liberty for the objectionable David Irving that gave some people the idea that they could crush the liberty of the decent Kathleen Stock. For freedom of speech to have real meaning, it must apply to all, regardless of character, regardless of belief, regardless of how it makes other people feel.