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When graduate student Lindsay Shepherd stood up to her professors at Wilfrid Laurier University last fall, she didn’t know she would become the focus of the fiery debate over free speech on campus.

She never expected she would end up being ostracized by her peers or that when she travelled to another university for a conference, the student union there would feel compelled to open a “healing space” for those upset by her presence.

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“On the one hand, you had the general public who were completely supportive of my position and its implications, and then there were my fellow grad students … who all of a sudden thought I was a transphobic, white supremacist Nazi and completely flipped,” Shepherd told a gathering in Ottawa on Saturday as she accepted the 2018 Harry Weldon Canadian Values Award from the public policy group POGG Canada.

Shepherd was hauled before a discipline committee at Laurier last October after she chose for a seminar on grammar to use a video of controversial University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson being interviewed on TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin. Shepherd, who recorded the discipline hearing and later shared it with the media, won an apology from the university for her treatment.